So you don your satin cone-bra Gaultier overalls, scoop your hair in a Wolff and Descourtis for Liberty’s scarf, and then, um, dig a hole?

You’re right. Not that kind of foundation. Although the architectural and the cosmetic varieties do share common dangers – slippage, subsidence, cracks – and teenaged girls across the world do tend to approach the application of their daily slap with the zeal, and accuracy, of a concrete mixer. However, beyond age sixteen, most of us – excepting American news anchors, air hostesses and beauty counter reps, who favour glossy, sandstone-hued, impermeably statuesque façades – live in terror of painting an inch thick, and highlighting our wattle with overenthusiastic daub. We want barely-legal-bare-faced-skipping-through-a-golden-cloud-of-dew, and we’ll pay top dollar to get it.

But it’s difficult to be rational about foundation. It’s the smell of your mother’s face. The feel of your best friend’s cheek. The soft, fragrant waft of powder at the bottom of your grandmother’s handbag. We get seduced by names – warm glow, summer sand – and textures. Once it evolved past its arsenic and Pan Cake roots, foundation got seriously sensual. It can be as unctuously creamy as a dollop of Jersey double, as waxily sliding as the crust on a honeycomb, as ethereally filmy as the caster sugar on a macaroon. You know that irritating woman, blocking the Selfridges aisle, methodically smearing little smudges of D&G’s overpriced finest on the back of her hand just for the joy of the smear? That’s me.

So when I went for a trial of Bare Minerals, loose powder mineral make-up “so pure you can sleep in it”, I got excited as soon as I watched the girl lay out her priestly cornucopia of implements and pots. The brand injunction to “swirl, tap and buff” was repeated like some sacred mantra throughout the multi-step ritual (fingers – vitamin primer, big brush – foundation as concealer, big brush – foundation as foundation, medium brush -highlighter, medium brush – blusher, virgin sacrifice, very big brush – mineral veil). Ease and speed and one-blob-does-alls are touted as the foundation holy grails, but I’m an old-fashioned broad. I like enamel crucibles and silver lids and goat hair brushes and anything that makes my morning face-time akin to a tea ceremony. In that still, sweet post-waking limbo, I like to evoke the feminine pleasures of a well-stocked armoire, not the brusque efficiency of an armoury.

Oh, and Oprah-esque testimonials and shrieking straplines aside, Bare Minerals actually works. It is the only foundation that can reliably make me barely-legal-bare-faced-skipping-through-a-golden-cloud-of-dew-alike, even if the hidden truth is a mess of morning-after-the-martinis-before-purple-eyes, yellow weals and red nose.

Perfect. Now where’s my spade?

- Molly Flatt runs the Hitchcock Blonde website

Tags: Make-up, Perfect

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 6:52 pm and is filed under The Perfectionist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Bread has always been a symbol of transformation. The simple yet seemingly magical chemical process of yeast to feast represents the evolutionary metamorphosis from beast to man, the religious metamorphosis of man to God and the social metamorphosis of stranger to friend. It is the humble, satisfying stuff of life.

So how has it become a shunned dough-bomb of death?

Talk to a woman in January and more likely than not she’ll be off the loaf. Carbs are killers, of course, and after the shockingly unrestrained sensuality of Christmas it’s time to impose some rules, and circumscribe our lives to a pot of miso soup.

So you must be sure not to think of The Bread Shop’s warm granary cleat, which smells of new hay, tastes of Thomas Hardy novels, and is so dense with tiny sweet seeds that it peppers your teeth with post-lunch surprises.

Don’t think of Princi’s soft focaccia chunk, sopping in balsamic and dissolving on the tongue, topped with a golden salted rosemary crust and quilted with pinpricks to soak up the oil.

Don’t think of Daylesford’s dark fruity rye, squat and rich and stuffed with walnuts and dates like a Tudor king, demanding that a smooth slice of best continental Comte submit sweetly to its solid crumb.

Above all, don’t think of sourdough, not for a second. Don’t let the memory of that shrewdest of breads, that tough, tangy, lactobactillic favourite of gold prospectors and pioneers, disturb your pious peace. You can keep your floppy rapiers of French stick; my perfect bread is a golden shield, a sturdy trencher with a chew factor that can bruise your jaw. As capable of cradling a heavy slop of chowder as supporting a smear of lightest goat’s cheese, sourdough nevertheless refuses to become a flavourless foil like most modern sliced.

It’s no coincidence that this is the loaf Lionel Poilâne has devoted his life to making the ultimate everyday eat, or that some people are willing to pay £50 a pop. Sourdough is a triumph of flavour over function, history over homogeneity, and a basic human right.

OK, sorry, sorry. Not helping? Let’s think about wine instead.

Tell me you’re joking.

-Molly Flatt runs the Hitchcock Blonde website.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 5:17 pm and is filed under The Perfectionist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.