So, I’ve finally done it. I’ve bought a bottle of L’Oréal Elvive conditioner because it said “age-defying” on the front. My excuse? I thought it was a bottle of L’Oréal Elvive shampoo with “age-defying” on the front. I’m always doing this: mistaking conditioner for shampoo. The bottles, you see, are similar in design. And once you’ve squirted some conditioner on to your hair and discovered that it’s not lathering, it’s too late for you to go back to the chemist and exchange the conditioner – one of the great cons of the age, in my experience – for something that actually cleans your hair. Even if your chemist is the wonderful Meacher, Higgins and Thomas, which has been around for 198 years so far.

Round the corner from me, along a small stretch of Gloucester Place, are plaques advertising the fact that at various addresses lived Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins. Did they all live there at the same time, I wonder? And did they pop in to Meacher, Higgins and Thomas for their laudanum, or maybe to try and exchange a bottle of conditioner for a bottle of the shampoo they’d wanted to buy in the first place? We shall never know. But I like to think they did.

Day of the products

All of which rather obscures, intentionally, from the initial admission: that what I’d wanted was something “age-defying”. One of the things men used to do when they saw a beauty product for women advertised on the telly, with lots of sleekly animated ping-pong balls wheeling and clustering to the rescue of a magnified human hair, or skin pore, suffering the ravages of neglect or time, was to laugh it and those gullible enough to believe in such nonsense, to scorn. The implicit suggestion is that men would never fall for it. Oh no. We just want something manly to clean our hair with. We’d do it with bars of soap, or Fairy liquid, or our own urine, if it worked.

And then, as we all know, something happened to men. No one knows why, although I favour some kind of alien invasion, in the manner imagined by John Wyndham in his excellent sci-fi novels, but with only risible consequences. (So far.) Men started “grooming”. They started putting “products”on their hair and skin. As it happens, I do not groom myself in this way. Women, who already groom themselves like crazy because the patriarchy demands it, had only one place to go when affected by this alien menace: they stopped buying soap in bars and started buying it in dispensers, even though they contribute to landfill and are umpteen times the price. What the hell is that about?

But something, in my case, had to give and what gave was my robust indifference to shampoo. True, a significant part of my decision about which shampoo to buy still resides in how much it looks like it will stand up on its end without leaking so that you don’t have to wait five minutes before the last bits come out of the nozzle; but I have also started looking a bit more carefully at what claims are being made for each bottle.

As it happens, in the Hovel, where two men and two women regularly shower, though not together, there are about 12 bottles of hair things ranged around the bathtub. I shall, for purposes of space, restrict myself to the L’Oréal Elvive products. The Nutri-Gloss shine shampoo contains, we are told, “the secret to glossy shine”. Full Restore, although now mostly full of water, is for “weak, limp, damaged hair”. (I bought this one and I think my hair got a bit offended, and then depressed, by the description.) Then there is Colour Protect “caring conditioner”, but that rather suggests that other conditioners are uncaring, does it not? They give your hair a rushed, distracted condition and then piss off, leaving it feeling cheap and used.

What’s the damage?

Then there’s the age-defying conditioner, already mentioned, which buys your hair a sports car and gets it a younger girlfriend. Finally, the Damage Care shampoo, which was the only one on the rack at the chemist’s that looked like it had any common ground at all with the age-defying conditioner. It’s got to this point: that I’ve now started worrying whether my conditioner and my shampoo will get on with each other. (My daughter, marvelling at the array of different kinds of shampoo for different hair types in Waitrose the other day, asked, “don’t they make any shampoo for dirty hair?”)

And is my hair any better? No – but I suspect that’s because, paralysed by choice, I haven’t washed it for two days now. I suppose what
I should be doing is thanking my lucky stars that I’ve still got any hair – damaged, weak, old, limp and grey though it is – to put shampoo
on in the first place.