I find myself confronted, yet again, by summer grooming dilemmas, even though I don’t believe in either summer, or grooming. My approach to personal maintenance all year round is to intone “I had a beauty blog once” while gazing into the middle distance like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. As if writing about snail goo in the past absolves me of responsibility to do anything about how I look now.
Then summer, oof! I cried for 20 minutes yesterday just because the birds looked too hot. I don’t really have the mental bandwidth for anything other than letting the heat do its worst with my keratin and whatever skin is (I just googled “What is skin?” for a snapshot of how deep into summer madness I have sunk). But is it rude to go out without making some cursory effort? In summer, you’re dealing with the dread re-emergence of feet into the public sphere, plus the way your whole face slides greasily southwards, making you look, as the writer Sarah Dempster said memorably, “Like Noddy Holder screaming in a kiln”.
I’m not budging on my “feminist” (lazy) decision to give up makeup: when I found myself saying crossly, “A man wouldn’t be doing this”, I decided I wouldn’t either, mostly. So I’m only making concessions to social norms that don’t compromise my slatternly principles: concealing my feet and seeking out a seasonal fragrance that isn’t Dove Original gone crusty. This has been made vastly more entertaining by a friend discovering surely the most over-the-top fragrance site ever. “I’ve found three that have notes of goat hair,” she told me and I was instantly seized by acquisitive fervour and ordered some testers. First, a hedge-witch-inspired goat, mushroom and seaweed perfume: perfect for the hot crone summer I have in mind. The others are Squid (“Feel the caress of the huge tentacles”) and “Rasputin”, which was apparently dropped into the “dark, glacial” Øresund strait for 90 days (“referencing the final part of Rasputin’s story”) to get the blend right. So soon I’ll be as shambolic as ever, but smell fascinating.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
