No madeleines for me, thanks
Feb. 8th, 2007 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferI'm doing a lot of cleaning in preparation for an allergy treatment in a bit more than a week. The treatment requires me to spend a few days before and after in allergy purdah, as completely segregated from everything to which I'm allergic as possible. The vigorous house-cleaning now is to get the level of dust down to as low a level as I can.
Going through the linen closet and getting rid of old stuff in the back of the cupboard is not really a necessary part of this process, but it's very satisfying to throw out old crap (vitamins that expired a decade ago? Trash! Trash! Trash!).
Tucked in a box of old stuff was a sample size bottle of Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo. I don't use it any more because it's scented, but when I was in my teens and twenties, it was my shampoo. It was what I smelled like. It was my youth.
Herbal Essence was a youthful shampoo in the sixties and seventies. It was a new shampoo then, marketed to appeal to the flowers and herbs and back-to-nature vibes of mass-market youth culture, right there next to the hippies making their own lavender-scented soap but without all that hard work. Now it's an old product; I have no idea if it's sold to young women still, or if its demographic has just aged along with it and the only people who still buy it are women my age. Estee Lauder has an old scent called "Beautiful" that has always been marketed with images of brides, but now it mostly appeals to very old women, or so the cosmetic counter clerk told me some years back when I bought some for my grandmother. It must appeal to somebody else as well, or they'd have to stop making it as that age group dies off.
I don't use anything scented any more, because I'm allergic to most of it. I was about to throw the bottle out, when suddenly I wanted to know: what did I smell like in my youth? Just one sniff, to find out.
One sniff and one benadryl later, I can report that whatever I smelled like in my youth, I'm allergic to it now. Nostalgia: not just sloppy thinking, but bad for your health as well.
Going through the linen closet and getting rid of old stuff in the back of the cupboard is not really a necessary part of this process, but it's very satisfying to throw out old crap (vitamins that expired a decade ago? Trash! Trash! Trash!).
Tucked in a box of old stuff was a sample size bottle of Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo. I don't use it any more because it's scented, but when I was in my teens and twenties, it was my shampoo. It was what I smelled like. It was my youth.
Herbal Essence was a youthful shampoo in the sixties and seventies. It was a new shampoo then, marketed to appeal to the flowers and herbs and back-to-nature vibes of mass-market youth culture, right there next to the hippies making their own lavender-scented soap but without all that hard work. Now it's an old product; I have no idea if it's sold to young women still, or if its demographic has just aged along with it and the only people who still buy it are women my age. Estee Lauder has an old scent called "Beautiful" that has always been marketed with images of brides, but now it mostly appeals to very old women, or so the cosmetic counter clerk told me some years back when I bought some for my grandmother. It must appeal to somebody else as well, or they'd have to stop making it as that age group dies off.
I don't use anything scented any more, because I'm allergic to most of it. I was about to throw the bottle out, when suddenly I wanted to know: what did I smell like in my youth? Just one sniff, to find out.
One sniff and one benadryl later, I can report that whatever I smelled like in my youth, I'm allergic to it now. Nostalgia: not just sloppy thinking, but bad for your health as well.
