Explosive Choices

The following is the text of this month's Deeply Superficial column in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

I travel outside Australia four or five times a year and a couple of years ago I bought myself a beauty case that would keep all my toiletries neat. It proved a masterstroke – the hard case was also big enough to hold a couple of books and a change of teeshirt and upon arrival at my hotel room, I could just open the case and access everything easily, without having to unpack it. Better still, it meant heavy and fragile bottles of moisturisers, sun creams and fragrance need not be packed in the checked-in suitcase, leaving more room (and weight) for those exotic artefacts, like Chinese parrots and sacks of frankincense, that I am always compelled to bring home.

Unfortunately, about a year ago, a group of wannabe terrorists were sitting around in a London apartment dreaming up crazy ways of taking down a jet airliner – including the almost impossible trick of mixing unstable fluids in an airplane toilet to make a bomb - and they were dobbed in. Predictable international hysteria followed. The upshot of all this, as we know, is the banning of fluids over 100 ml on international flights and the restriction of those permitted to a plastic ziplock sandwich bag, lest any of us intend the precarious task of locking ourselves in the loo and making explosives out of the mini products in our leather Molton Brown travel kits. (If those same products were squeezed into a plastic bag, we’d have carte blanche, of course.) Goodbye beauty case.

I’ve just returned from New York and LA, and the new restrictions meant I had to rethink my whole travel plan. I could not believe how small that sandwich bag was! For instance, Clarins’ E3p Screen Mist, which supposedly reduces the effect of electromagnetic waves, would seem to be the perfect product to spritz on yourself throughout the flight – however, the 100 ml bottle is also elegantly elongated and only fits into the bag if you choose to include little else. Thwarted. In the end, I called in travel-size products from all the brands and played around with them. Certainly, these small sizes are readily available – from Leaf & Rusher’s Mini Essentials pack, Aesop’s Jet Set Kit to Trilogy’s Travelers – and savvy travellers know to ask for samples of their favourite products whenever they’re making a purchase at the beauty counter. Some companies, such as Kiehl’s, make fantastically handy plastic bottles of most of their products in 30ml and 65 ml sizes. In my meagre plastic bag I managed to fit Tali Shine’s Evolution O2 face spray (30 ml), Jo Malone’s Rosemary & Lavender skin tonic (30 ml) Ginseng Day Moisture Cream (15ml) and Vintage Gardenia fragrance (9 ml), Colgate toothpaste (25 g) and a Bobbi Brown Lip Tint gloss (15ml).

But here’s the thing. While the plastic bag only has to contain what you might need for the flight on board, and you can check the rest, the sheer weight you could add to your suitcase if you brought your regular jars of skin care products, self-tanning lotions, hair gels, whatever, means possibly some expensive overweight charges on your return trip, unless you jettison those costly jars of Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv night and day creams before you fly back. Now, short trips mean that you can do the juggling trick and exist on small sizes of everything if you have to, but what happens if – and this is usually my situation – you’re off for three or four weeks? When I went to Romania in 2005 I brought the whole pharmacy with me. The choice is a heavy suitcase, restricting what you bring to one or two key items or buying everything when you get there and tossing it when you leave.

Yes, I know. It’s annoying but hardly Sophie’s Choice. Still, I’d feel less annoyed if someone proved to me it were necessary. When I went through security in New York no one seemed to care whether I had a plastic bag or not. And my lip gloss was a pretty explosive colour.