In September, I had a meltdown in Mecca, the cosmetics store. I was looking at a slim tube of Summer Fridays lip butter for $40. Outwardly, I showed no signs of my inner turmoil, which felt like the beginnings of a panic attack.
I was suddenly overwhelmed: the warm lights, the sweet smells, the promises everywhere of flawless skin and glowy lips. The saleswoman, herself flawless and glowy, asked if I needed help. No, I said, returning to the product in question.
My 10-year-old daughter, standing expectantly next to me, was carrying a blue wallet in which she’d squirrelled a surprisingly large wad of cash: a few $50 notes from grandparents for Christmas and birthdays, money for chores. I’d told her she could spend it on whatever she wanted. This, I reasoned, would give her some independence and if she wasted it, that in itself would be a valuable lesson.
This was a mistake, I now realised. At $40, this 15 millilitres of lip balm she coveted was a bridge too far. I was flooded with thoughts.
When I was 10, I would never have spent $40 on a lip balm, even if I’d had the money. I thought, too, about the profit margins on beauty products, something I’d recently researched (in the first half of this year, for example, 75 per cent of L’Oreal’s $36 billion global sales was gross profit). Also: how does my daughter even know about this lip balm? She’s not on social media.
And were the boys in her class spending obscene amounts on their lips and worrying about glowy ski.
