How The Body Shop made the concept of beauty more delectable
Anita Roddick died in 2007; the company was sold to the kind of giant cosmetics corporation she had launched in opposition to. When Roddick started her chain, she defiantly used ultra-simple containers (urine-sample bottles bought from a local hospital, refillable packs) and was in opposition to the animal testing common with cosmetics companies.
But what I found most striking was how the products seemed edible. Not that you were encouraged to swig shampoo or munch moisturiser, but they touted natural, often edible ingredients: Satsuma hand cream, almond milk face mask, mango bath blend, ginger anti-dandruff shampoo, peppermint foot scrub. They had categories like body butters and body yoghurt.
A friend with luxuriantly curly hair asked me to buy their Brazil nut conditioner from abroad. It made sense to learn that loofah scrubs, which Body Shop popularised abroad, were the dried mature fruits of turai, ridge gourd which we cooked when it was tender. It was smart marketing. If it sounded good enough to put inside you, then it must be good enough to put on yourself as well.
It also recalled how, a few centuries ago, food, cosmetics and even medicine were conflated. The natural world was the source for all three. What you ate connected with how you looked and felt. Some products didn’t cross over, like the absorbent clay called fuller’s earth (multani mitti), but some did in startling ways — like eyedrops of belladonna, a poisonous plant, used to give the ‘beautiful women’ of its name seductively dilated pupils.
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