Small pleasures

Quite a number of years ago, my mother returned from a trip with a present for me that I’d never heard of – a bath bomb. Over the subsequent years, I have had two or three of these, that fizz up when they hit water, releasing aromatic oils and sometimes petals, and a very pleasant experience they were.

In the aftermath of Christmas, the January sales, my hard-working husband turned up late one evening with a large bag of loot from Lush, which he’d passed on the way to catch his train; it was full of all sorts of goodies with yummy ingredients and has scented the bathroom for the last 3 months in a sweet cloud of pretty fragrances, rather stronger than those I customarily use but certainly not overpowering.

Bogged down by a humdinger of a cold and feeling utterly congested, I decided to have a nice warm bath to help clear the cobwebs and hopefully, make me feel better. Finding I had no bubble bath left, I chose a bath bomb out of the loot bag and chucked it in the bathwater, climbing in after it. It fizzed away, as they do, and then I noticed it was spinning all the while, madly ploughing through the water, spreading it’s foamy scent, and I watched it for a while in its craziness, amused.

Once its main white coating had bubbled away, I noticed that the bath ball had red flecks and within a few minutes, to my surprise, the little planet stopped spinning and sat there quietly, one rounded surface above the water slowly drying and darkening, the softest, finest white foam surrounding it for a few centimetres. As the crackle and pop went on, a fine ring of raspberry formed around the ball and slowly began to spread out in soft pink rays on its white bed, along with small streams of bubbles, in an infinitely slow vortex out to the water, which meanwhile was colouring to a gentle and attractive pink glow. Intrigued by the properties that made this thing behave so and impressed by the beauty of the “flower” that formed and reformed as I pushed and blew it across the surface to see what happened, I spent a happy and distracted half-hour (!) watching this performance, which continued on to the very last little ooze…

I did not have a camera in the bath with me – in future, I might put the bath bomb in first and watch it from the outside instead of shrivelling up in a bath of hot water (though that was pleasant, too!) – and take some pictures. If I remember!

This is not an ad, nor am I being paid for it; the bath bomb was from a chain of stores called Lush and as far as I can make out from the faded label, was called “So White” and contains rose and bergamotte scent…!