There’s a particular kind of dread I have at airports. Not the usual rigmarole of delays, queues and frantic panic about lost passports, but something that limbers up on my approach to the security gates.
I stand there – like everyone else – half-dressed, amid the ritual of trays and belts and laptops, watching the products I’ve crammed into an insufficient plastic bag being inspected. And in that moment, your mind does what it always does when fear creeps in – it spirals mercilessly. All because of something that happened over a decade ago – and not even to me.
I was on a trip to Las Vegas with friends. One had made a few purchases at La Mer in duty-free. She’d saved up, waited diligently for this trip and made a beeline for the counter. She joyfully used the products on the flight, then, as we arrived in the US, her liquids bag was pulled aside and handled with just a little too much interest. The entire kit was dismantled, product labels were inspected and her new purchases were held up as suspect. “You know these are over 100ml, right?” They were binned without ceremony. Her tears and protestations didn’t impact the outcome; her new La Mer products were gone. It genuinely took her days to get over it.
So now, in an attempt to counter the panic I always feel rising as I approach security, I’ve become quite pragmatic about it. I ask myself: if I lost everything at security, what’s the one product I’d go out and buy before boarding? What is the one product that I hold dearest above all else?
The answer is simple. It’s the product that is cheap, effective and has multiple purposes – Weleda Skin Food.
Not because it’s the most luxurious thing in my wash bag – it isn’t. But because it’s the most useful. And travel beauty packing, at its best, rewards usefulness over novelty or luxury.
Once we’re in the air, cabin humidity drops dramatically; in fact, cabin air is drier than many deserts. Our skin responds accordingly, by getting tight, dull and unfeasibly dry. That’s not just dehydration, it’s the steady loss of water from the skin into the surrounding environment, a process dermatologists call transepidermal water loss (TEWL).
Skin Food addresses this in the least showy way possible. The dense formula sits on the skin and quietly does its job, sealing in whatever hydration you’ve managed to apply beneath it. Meanwhile, lanolin and beeswax form a protective veil; calendula and chamomile help mitigate any irritation.
