Читать книгу Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World - Sali Hughes - Страница 57

Some time around my seventh or eighth birthday, my mother returned home from Cardiff with a bottle of Cocoa Butter Hand & Body Lotion from one of the very first branches of Body Shop. She’d engaged the sales consultant in conversation, told her about my dry, scaly, inherited skin condition, and been promised that cocoa butter would help. The lotion was nothing short of revelatory and marked a huge turning point in my life. I’d previously used only horrible, NHS-prescribed bath oils and emollient creams that sat thickly on the surface of my skin, smelling like hospitals and never sinking into anything other than my school tights. Conversely, the Body Shop lotion sank a little better into my skin, soothing, softening and making it smell of Milky Bar chocolate. That one bottle of lotion set me down a path of skincare obsession. I began tweaking the cocoa butter – adding olive oil from the kitchen, pouring it into baths, mixing it with Tate & Lyle to slough off the flakes before a soak. The only problem with the Body Shop lotion was that it did leave an oleaginous film on my skin, and didn’t improve its overall tone and evenness (I looked a bit pink and veiny) and so I began searching for an alternative.

I found Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Formula Lotion on an Afro-Caribbean beauty stall while skiving off school in an indoor market and soon found my prayers answered. This – the world’s bestselling cocoa butter product – sinks in more rapidly and thoroughly than any other I’ve found, smooths skin, banishes the occasional ashiness of brown and black skins and leaves all legs with an even, healthier-looking tone. It softens limbs, cuticles, elbows, feet, scalp and babies’ bums, and smells of holidays, warm beaches and of ice-cream sundaes melting in hot chocolate sauce. Its cheerfully cheap price tag means it can be treated like an essential family household item and slathered on with abandon whenever dryness strikes. There are now dozens of products in the Palmer’s range, but the true icon here is the waxy formulation sold in tubs (don’t be put off by its solidity: the secret to cocoa butter’s success is that it’s the only known natural moisturiser that melts at body temperature).