I have the worst luggage luck in the whole world. About 18 years of my life have been wasted standing at luggage carousels, staring into the plastic-flapped Hole of Doom, praying for my suitcase to be spat out and always, always, always being disappointed.
The number of times I’ve stood in an eerily empty baggage hall, dodging the tumbleweed, while every other passenger from the plane has long since smugly wheeled their piled-high trolley away, is too many to mention.
I'm on first-name terms with the staff at all the lost-luggage counters in Dublin Airport and here are some of the more exotic countries where I've found myself with only the clothes I stood up in: Ethiopia, South Africa, Greece, Poland and Thailand.
Ever the slow learner, it eventually dawned on me that the universe was giving a message: Bring your essentials with you on the plane, you gom!
The essentials I adjudged to be my giant sack of anti-mads and my equally giant sack of skincare. But the 100ml limit on liquids in hand luggage put a stop to my skincare gallop. So I bought a selection of attractive little vials and jars, efficiently decanted the contents of my full-size products into them, then labelled them neatly and clearly.
Sorry, I’m afraid that that last sentence was a complete lie. Would that I were so organised. The other version of me, the perfect one who lives a perfect life, does that. But my real-life iteration makes do with a ragged, ramshackle, mismatched assortment of those small tubes and jars that you get in Free Gifts. And while it’s only a small part of a life that’s messy in every area, it offends me. I would love to feel matchy-matchy and curated.
And now I've found something! Alpha-H do a great little skin kit with products in 30ml bottles (available on Cloud10Beauty). There's a handy, zippy bag, containing five products, four of them useful. I'm afraid it's the law that in every pre-assembled kit, there will be at least one thing that you will never touch.
So the kit contains a cleaner, like a proper one, that even removes eye make-up. (There are few things more disappointing than those dread words “Avoid the sensitive eye area”.) There’s a day cream with an SFP of 50 (applause!), another cream that would do at night, a smoothing and perfecting mask and finally the crap product, a Super Scrub.
But shur lookit, four out of five ain’t bad. And at least now, when I arrive in Lapland and my bag doesn’t, I may freeze to death but my skin will be lovely.
