Flights

TRAVEL SIZES

These days, any self-respecting pharmacy offers its customers a special range of travel-sized toiletries. Some places even set aside whole aisles. Here, one can obtain anything and everything one might want on a trip: shampoo, a tube of liquid soap to wash your underwear in the sink at the hotel, toothbrushes you can fold in half, sunscreen, insect repellant, shoe polish wipes (the whole gamut of colours is available), sets of feminine hygiene products, foot cream, hand cream. The defining characteristic of all of these items is their size – they are miniatures, tiny tubes and jarlets, itsy-bitsy bottles the size of one’s thumb: the smallest sewing kit fits three needles, five mini-skeins of different-coloured thread, each three metres in length, and two white emergency buttons and a safety pin. Of particular usefulness is the travel-sized hairspray, whose miniature container measures no more than a woman’s palm.

It is as if the cosmetics industry sees the phenomenon of travel as mirroring sedentary life, but in miniature, a cute little baby version of the same.