‘This is a bit rubbish,” my 16-year-old said as he handed me a Christmas present. I love it when that happens. It gives me the chance to be the cool maternal care-giver who doesn’t sweat the small stuff, as opposed to the critical and unforgiving mother you read about in novels. It was a coconut body spray from The Body Shop, and when I say “coconut”, I mean it smelled of nothing except coconut, and when I say “body spray”, I mean it was plainly labelled as a thing you were supposed to spray on yourself.
“That’s lovely, darling,” I said. “Now if I just find my peanut lip balm, I’ll smell like a delicious pad thai.”
“I told you it was rubbish,” he said in his defence, and I said: “This is so much worse than rubbish.” It turned out to be the gift that kept on giving. It lives by the front door, and everyone who comes round squirts it in the air, going: “Who would ever want to smell like that?” It’s such a great, odorous ice-breaker that I’ll refill it when it runs out – if I can. The Body Shop is likely to call in administrators, amid predictions of shop closures and job losses.
When Anita Roddick opened the first shop in 1976, I guess the fundamental inquiry was: what if you wanted to be a hippy but also spend money? What if you wanted to be a feminist but also smell nice? What if you wanted to be a proto-environmentalist but also consume things? Plainly, you’d do exactly what Anita and Gordon Roddick did, to the extent that it often felt, later, as if they embodied those questions. You’d start in Brighton, put the accent on all-natural ingredients, emphasise that all customers were innately beautiful but here was some concealer just in case, trade fairly, reduce waste and wham, you’ve pretty much invented ethical consumerism.
It started off as gateway politics, but that was much less about the recycling and fair trade than it was about the fact that products weren’t tested on animals. It is impossible to overstate how obsessed schoolgirls like me were with animal vivisection. We’d write letters to big pharma in school lunchtimes and, theoretically at least, volunteer on stalls at weekends, handing out leaflets showing bunnies with gunk in their eyes. Obviously, we never had time to do the stalls because we were too busy going round The Body Shop.
The cause was attractive for its moral clarity – do you, or do you not, want to see a little baby rabbit tortured? – yet, for the same reason, lacked texture and complexity. It was a kind of discursive pabulum; it slipped down without chewing and left you hungry for more causes five minutes later. Foxhunting had more going for it as an animal rights issue, having a highly visible enemy.