Olive Oyl

Okay, so the tagging project took a little longer than anticipated, but apparently my inner indexer came out, and I am still not satisfied that it's the most perfectly representative, enticing, readership-broadening tag cloud it can be, but it's pretty good. There are some new tags (check out "Death and Sex": I wanted to include taxes, but I don't really have anything to say about those) and more stuff in old underused ones. It's a miracle of modern technology.

Speaking of: in my first "real" publishing company job (as in, not a summer job, but a pay-you-under-the-table temporary deal after I'd graduated), I once spent a week moving all the numbers in a book index nine pages to the left. And then we moved the photo section around again and I had to rejig everything before page 135 to fourteen pages later and everything after page 147 it twenty-eight pages earlier. (Or whatever. Numbers have been obfuscated to protect the innocent.) This was before the days of Word linking your index terms to the page numbers and generating everything itself: I had to do the math, mark it up on a hard copy, and input it to the computer. I started dreaming indexing, so I'd come to work in the morning having been up all night doing it in my mind. Not relaxing. And I'd be very surprised if the finished item was anywhere near accurate.

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As I may have said before, if you show me a bandwagon, I will consider it carefully for a year or three and finally jump on, just as it's leaving town forever. I am a sheep. (My sixth-class teacher used to talk about separating the sheep from the goats, but I was never quite clear which of those two I should aim to be. I mean, do I really want to be a goat?)

So when no fewer than two of my favourite bloggers, Linda at All and Sundry and Jessica at Balancing Everything, mentioned that they were washing their faces with oil these days, I decided that clearly I should do the same. (I can't find Linda's specific entry now, but here's Jessica's.)

Remember when you were 14 and you and your best friend would pester your mum to buy avocadoes, or purloin all the porrige oats, so that you could make your own homemade face masks as advised in the latest edition of Jackie, and you liked to think it was because you were all natural but really it was because you had no money to spend on fancy stuff? Well, I feel like I've come full circle. I'm so sick of perusing all the unguents on the CVS shelves and judging what to buy based on some spurious claims and pretty packaging, only to bring it home and discover that it smells like old lady and I can't possibly put that on my face every day; or else just buying the same old same old because even if it doesn't appear to do anything, at least I know it smells nice.

So now I have a jar of olive oil in the bathroom. (I need to find a prettier container, but for the moment it's a ex-peanut-butter jar.) Every morning I pour a little into my cupped hand, rub my hands together, and rub it all over my face, especially into the pores around my nose. Then I step into the shower to give my skin some time to marinate. (This might not work so well if I washed my hair every day, but I don't.) After towelling off, carefully avoiding my face, I wet a washcloth with hot water and put it over my face, steaming off the oil and the blackheads and the leftover makeup, and then wiping it all clean.

Then I moisturise with just a drop or two of oil, as Jessica advises. (The first day I overdid this and my glasses kept falling off my nose. I am more reticent with it now.)

I would prefer to do the routine at night, to take full advantage of its makeup-removal properties and avoid the moisturiser/sunscreen conundrum I've left myself with as the weather gets summerier, but for now mornings are better, given Mabel's appalling unpredictability any time after 9pm. Even if this morning she managed to come into the bathroom, wave at me through the blurry glass (thrice blurry, if you count its natural effect, the steam, and my myopia), pull some big and small bottles out of the cupboard to play mummies and daddies with, and then dump all the q-tips on the floor.

I have dry skin, and since I've finally got to that part of my life where the wrinkles are taking over from the zits (weren't we led to believe that there'd be a space in between? what happened there?), I haven't had any breakouts since I was last pregnant (or maybe post-partum, I can't remember), but the tiny blackheads around my nose had lately caused me to think enviously of Charlotte from Sex and the City admiring her perfect pores in her magnifying mirror. You'd have to pay me good money to get me in front of a magnifying mirror in daylight these days. And extra to open my eyes.

So I've been using extra-virgin olive oil, as Jessica suggested, since she too has dry skin, and because that's what's in my kitchen. The original web site she links to talks about using castor oil and other oils, and mixing up your own custom oil. Which is probably great, but the lure of this for me was that I could grab something from the cupboard and go do it.

I've been doing it for about two weeks now, every day, and I think my blackheads are less black, and my skin feels really soft. It certainly hasn't made my skin oilier in any bad way, so for now I'm going to keep it up and see what happens. And if it makes me feel 14 again, maybe that's a fun side-effect.

You'll tell me if I start smelling like a salad, won't you?