My wife recently asked me to buy her some face cream and a shampoo with the weekly shop.  Simple. Despite being married 46 years I had not realised how huge and complicated is the world of women’s products.

 

The face cream led me to an entire wall of women’s  skin preparations, body care items,  hair products, something called  feminine hygiene and separate  walls of cosmetics; thank God she did not ask for a lipstick, nail varnish or eye shadow of which there seem to be hundreds. 

 

I stood before the vast racks of colourful, often exotically packaged items many of which had their own pods within sections. The faces of beautiful young women with incredibly sensuous lips and eyes stared at me.

 

Their flowing hair tresses of hair must have taken hours to prepare. I returned to the ‘creams’ section. No such thing as a face cream.

 

There are creams for putting on and others for taking off. There are day creams and night creams. There are moisturising creams, creams for dry skin and alternatives I had never considered. There are hosts of creams for necks, bodies and of course legs; entire ranges of products for women’s legs - again shown sensuously – both putting on stuff and taking it off.

 

Having told women hair was the thing to have the products here were (slightly unsettling for an older man) about removing it. And not only on legs but face, places unmentionable and ...virtually anywhere. 

 

I never did find out what the newer sections of so called pamper products was about.