1) Last month in a fit of crackly-dry-East-Coast-winter-skin desperation I bought a tube of Aveda hand lotion. I’ve used it maybe a dozen times, and I’ve only just identified its vaguely cinnamon-y and what I now recognize as starchy scent. Sweet potato pie. The lotion smells like sweet potato pie. I didn’t notice it at the time of purchase, my olfactory receptors having been overloaded by the rosemary peppermint thyme after thyme organic herbal botanical hooha that is the Aveda product line.
2) Whenever I put on hand lotion I have a minor, mostly ignorable flashback to presenting Lady Macbeth’s Out, damned spot! monologue in eighth grade.*
3) While at work yesterday I dispensed a large dollop of Aveno (featuring Natural Colloidal Oatmeal -- apparently food makes you beautiful, as long as you use it on the outside). Since I applied it without ready access to my elbows (where the excess normally goes) I just had to keep rubbing it into my hands. That created rolly bits of oatmeal and skin, which had the same texture -- and, I suspect, the same nutritional composition -- as the Cliff Bars I keep in my desk drawer with the Aveno.
*See, look, off the top of my head:
Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One, two. Why then, 'tis time to do it. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! What, a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?
I didn’t even have to Google it.**
**Which you can tell is true because I got it wrong in like, five places.***
***Unless I’m being really diabolical and I Googled it and then flubbed it in a few places on purpose to make it look like I was working from memory.****
****Which I wasn’t. Being diabolical, I mean.