There’s something deeply satisfying about finishing a bottle, a tube or a vial of a product. To put its plastic into the recycling collection, or to wash a glass jar out for another use. It’s more than the satisfaction of knowing that one has gotten one’s money’s worth out of a purchase. It’s not dissimilar, I think, from the dopamine spike that comes from ticking an item off a checklist. Done, done, done.

Like many people with a little disposable income, I have small shelves full of anointments for the skin, for the hair, and mostly for the sense of connection I inculcate with myself and my desire to feel a certain way. I use these every day, and night. If I had but a few, they would be emptied out quickly. But because I have more than a few, each emptying offers a strange accomplishment.

            To their credit, beauty influencers have done their part to provide language around the particular sensation that finishing a product evokes. The messaging around this has mostly to do with avoiding wastage, but attention is still drawn to the fact of doing it at all. Utilizing to the fullest, that is. “Empties” is the word for the containers that remain, which are shown on long videos with brief commentaries about the user experience. “Hit pan” is the trend that encourages people to apply make-up products such as eyeshadows and blushes at least until the tin base of the packaging, beneath the pigment, can be seen. These are acknowledgments of how much is squandered – not just in the life of an influencer, who is inundated with free products, but in the life of anyone who has given in to an impulse buy, to a persuasive advertisement, to a sale, or said Yes to self-care as a revolutionary practice, or been made to feel like less than all they are because of the body or the face they were born in. The reasons are myriad, the evidence prolific.

            Fifteen years ago, a friend launched a brand that grew to success, and gifted me body scrubs and bath salts from the range. At that time, I had not yet understood that indulgence is better than delayed gratification when it comes to the fleeting (like ingredients, like youth). I believed in saving things “for later”. The later I believed in never came, and so those lovingly-crafted essentials were left in a bathroom in a country I could not return to. When my friend enquired if I’d enjoyed his products, I’d said honestly that I hadn’t tried them yet. It’s obvious to me now that not only had I made a courtesy faux pas, but I’d also deprived myself of an experience – the experience that I was worthy, even in a time of flux.

            It’s a simple experience after all, and a quotidian one: water, touch, scent, unguent. Nowadays, I understand: all ablution is ritual, all carework sacred.

            We seek the intangible in these rituals, even as it appears that we accrue the material. Now, a finished package says to me: praise be, look: how good you let yourself feel in your own skin.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express in October 2023. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.