Washing equations...

Reader, washing is a very exact science. Obviously, washing every day is a must (unless you're in Eastbourne on a gung ho girls weekend with a broken shower, in which case a midnight dip in the sea will do just fine), but things have to be considered. For example, I can't wash my hair every day, because it gets too dry. But if I leave it too long, it gets greasy. But I also have to consider events like birthday celebrations (birthday weekend starts Friday if you want to get me an enormous pressie, just so you know) and date nights. Then there's exfoliating. Which, let's face it, can only be done in the shower, because otherwise you'll be in a bath with loads of bits of broken apricot shell or sea salt, and no one wants that. You have to do that three times a week. Preferably when you're washing your hair so you don't end up with bits of exfoliant in your hairline looking like dandruff. Shaving is pretty important. More so if someone is regularly going to see you in your pants, less so if it's winter and your only form of insulation other than clothes and blubbery blubbery Terry's chocolate orange fat. If you forget and it's summer, it's far worse, because then you end up fully dressed in a summer mini, trying not to cut yourself as you shave into a cold sink. Which is fine for men, given that it's their chin, less so for underarms and legs. In this kind of instance, you usually end up with Saw-esque legs, like some kind of Damien Hirst piece on femininity. But at least there's no stubble.

If you're really hardcore, you might also like to do a face and hair pack once a week. Which involves getting out of the shower, sitting on the bog (lid down) with a copy of heat for 2 and a half minutes (no one ever does the full ten, surely?) before you get cold and bored and jump back in.

Even showers and baths where you don't do any of that crap are lessons in gymnastics, as to have a shower without washing your hair, you have to pile it up in a bun like something dreadful that crawled out of the eighties and do a mad head-back-breasts-forward-staring-at-the-shower-head-so-it-doesn't-super-soak-you kind of a thing, and in the bath, you have to do the hair/nipple challenge where your boobs have to be just over halfway submerged but not one strand of hair can touch the bath's surface (especially if, like me, you fill your bath with oils and unctions and things which will be sure to make your skin gorgeously silky, but your hair look like a meth addict who washes in the deep fat fryers of a wood green chicken shop).

Is this why teenagers stop washing? I remember a few months when I was 15 where I didn't wash my hair because I wanted to pay homage to Kurt Cobain, but that was less out of laziness and more out of a wish to look as pretty as him (it didn't work, in case you wondered). I don't think I'll be doing it again any time soon, especially since I have to be in a play in which I stand very close to people. I don't think the rest of the cast would approve. Also, I slightly want to see in my 24th birthday smelling like a rose!

And on that note, I'm off to have a shower, make sure you wash behind your ears reader!
Ash
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