Mushi ad: I'm not proud of what I took from Casita 12

I stole a bottle of foundation from a £6,000 retreat in Spain last spring. I'm not proud of it. The retreat director wrote to me three weeks later. ⠀ It was the eighth morning. My sister and I had been at the retreat for a full week, with another week to go, and in the bathroom of my casita, mounted in a little metal collar on the stone beside the mirror, there was a slim frosted pump bottle. "Foundation." No brand. The kind of bottle that belongs to the room. Housekeeping kept it topped up, but the collar made it clear: this stays. ⠀ The first morning, it came out of the pump white. White! I very nearly put it back. Then I thought, this place charges six thousand pounds, they must know what they're doing, and I rubbed it in, and my own colour came up underneath my fingers. Not sitting on top. Not in a single line. Just my face. After that, every morning after the shower, I'd put two pumps on my face and down my neck, slowly, like a woman in a retreat brochure. You know the shot. White robe, terrace, mountains going pink behind her, smoothing something into her cheeks like she has all the time in the world. The kind of moment that happens to women in wellness magazines and never to me, in my actual life, at home, where I am 62, where my face changed somewhere around fifty and my foundation didn't, and I have been in sunglasses and a bit of tinted moisturiser ever since, and where putting foundation on is a chore I rush through and regret by lunchtime, when it's sunk into every line. ⠀ At first, I thought anything would look better on a woman who'd slept nine hours. The lie-ins. The silence. Nowhere to be. But on the eighth morning, my sister held her phone out to show me a photo from the terrace, and I stopped in the middle of saying "delete it". The lines round my mouth had gone quieter. Softer. I looked like me, ten years ago. ⠀ And I thought: it's the foundation. I need this foundation. ⠀ This is the bit that got me. A full week of mountain sun, bone-dry air and 4,000 feet of altitude, the exact combination that normally has my foundation orange by lunchtime on day two of any holiday. And my face looked better than it had at home in years. At home, where I have a drawer with about twenty foundations in it and not one of them has looked right on me since I turned fifty. ⠀ The bottle was nearly unbranded. I checked. Ingredients on the back, no brand name, no website. And no shade anywhere. No number, no "warm beige", which struck me as odd, because I have never in my life picked up a foundation that didn't have a shade on it. How do you put one foundation in every bathroom when every guest is a different colour? I picked up the in-room folder and there was a page on the sound baths, a page on the sunrise walk up the ridge, and not one word about where any of the bathroom came from. ⠀ I rang reception. ⠀ "Hi, I'm in Casita 12. I just wanted to ask about the foundation in the bathroom. What brand is it?" ⠀ There was a pause. ⠀ "I'm so sorry, madam, I'm not able to share that information." ⠀ "Sorry?" ⠀ "It is one of our retreat's signature amenities and our supplier relationship is private." ⠀ I asked to speak to a manager. I was put through to a very polite woman who said the same thing in slightly longer sentences. I asked if the retreat shop sold it. It didn't. I asked if there was a waiting list I could go on for when they did. There was not. ⠀ I put the phone down. My sister was reading on my terrace. ⠀ "When we leave, I'm taking it home." ⠀ She looked up. "You are not taking it home. It's screwed to the wall." ⠀ "The bottle comes out of the holder. I've checked. I want it on record that I am about to commit a crime, and you cannot say I did not warn you." ⠀ "I'm not taking mine," she said. "And I'm not sharing a suitcase with a criminal." ⠀ She was using hers every morning, same as me. ⠀ I sat with that for six more days. Six more mornings of two pumps, six more evenings of catching myself in the restaurant windows and not looking away. My sister did not bring it up again. I took that as consent. And on our last night, after dinner, I worked the bottle out of its metal collar. It took both thumbs and it came loose with a click I felt in my teeth. I rolled it in a sundress at the bottom of my suitcase, next to a pair of walking socks. A bottle that size rolls small. It simply disappeared. I closed the suitcase and sat down on it anyway, out of guilt. ⠀ The next morning my sister and I had breakfast, checked out at eleven, drove down to Málaga and flew home. Her bottle stayed in its collar, two doors down, like a decent person's. Somewhere behind us, a housekeeper wheeled her trolley into Casita 12 to get it ready for the next guest and found a bare metal collar where a bottle should have been. ⠀ The retreat had dozens of these bottles. I had taken one. And by the time anyone stood in that bathroom frowning at an empty ring, I was somewhere over the Bay of Biscay. ⠀ I unpacked the next afternoon and stood it on the shelf in my bathroom, where it looked like a Bentley parked outside a semi. ⠀ And at home, it kept doing it. The school run with my grandson. Sunday lunch at my daughter's. The supermarket under those dreadful lights. My face looked like my face, which is something none of the twenty bottles in my drawer had managed. Not once. Not in over a decade. ⠀ Then, on a Friday, the letter arrived. ⠀ Handwritten. Cream card. The retreat's logo embossed at the top. A Spanish stamp on the envelope. It was from the retreat director. ⠀ "Dear Mrs [name redacted], We were saddened to note, at housekeeping turnover on the morning of your departure, that the bottle of our foundation from Casita 12 was no longer present in its holder. We do not assume the worst. Amenities can be misplaced during stays, and we know our guests do not always take inventory. However, I write because if it is the case that you wished to take a piece of our bathroom home with you, we would like the opportunity to offer it to you formally rather than retrospectively. Our foundation is made to our specifications by a small supplier, and we do not, as a matter of policy, sell it through our boutique. If you would be kind enough to confirm or otherwise, we will close our internal record either way. With warm regards, [Name redacted], Retreat Director" ⠀ I cried at the kitchen table. ⠀ I had spent three weeks doing my face like royalty out of a stolen bottle, and now the director of the most expensive place I have ever slept, six thousand pounds for two weeks, had written me a personal handwritten letter, not threatening, not legalistic, just kind, politely asking whether I had taken it. ⠀ I wrote back. I confessed. I sent a cheque. I asked, with the cheque, whether I could possibly know the brand, because it was the only foundation I had ever put on my face that looked like my face. ⠀ He wrote back a second letter, two weeks later. He returned the cheque. He said that as a goodwill gesture the retreat considered the bottle a memento, and asked only that I refrain from doing it again. ⠀ He did not tell me the brand. I did not blame him. ⠀ For six weeks I lived with the stolen bottle. I treated it like a museum object. Two pumps, never three. Nobody else was allowed to touch it. When my husband borrowed it to hide a shaving rash before a wedding, I felt physically ill. My sister, meanwhile, had been texting me about that bottle since the day we left. "Do you still have it." "Is it as good at home." "I should have taken mine." I was very quiet about it. ⠀ And somewhere in those six weeks, the quiet things happened. At my niece's fortieth, I stood in the middle of the family photograph instead of at the edge. At the garden centre café, under those skylights, I took my sunglasses off and left them off. And my husband, who notices approximately nothing, looked at me across the table at dinner and said, "You look different. Younger." I did not tell him it was the crime. ⠀ But a stolen pump bottle goes down. By the end of those six weeks the bottle was light in my hand, and one morning the pump pulled half air, that little sputter, and I stood there doing the maths on how many mornings I had left. On that day, I understood, I would have nothing. And you cannot exactly write to the retreat director and ask for another. ⠀ Then in August a friend of mine, who had heard the retreat-bottle story at a dinner party because it is frankly the only interesting thing I have ever done, sent me a text. ⠀ "I think I found your foundation. Go to Mushi. Look at the shades. Tell me if I'm right." ⠀ I went online. I looked at the photographs. I looked for the shades. There weren't any. One bottle, no colour at all until it's on you. Then I read the ingredients. They matched, word for word, the back of the bottle I had stolen. ⠀ And then I did what any woman does at 11 p.m. I looked up how a foundation can have no shade. ⠀ Most women are never told this. The foundation that stops matching and sinks into your lines after 50 isn't bad application. And it isn't that you've lost your touch. ⠀ When your oestrogen drops in menopause, your skin gets thinner and drier, and foundation starts catching in lines it used to glide over. And it changes colour, sallower in some places, pinker in others, until it isn't one colour at all. The shade you picked at 40 was a photograph of a face you no longer have. ⠀ So you're putting a foundation made for your old face on your new one. It sinks into lines that weren't there before, and one fixed colour can't match a face that isn't one colour any more. That's the line at your jaw. Not your hand. Your foundation. ⠀ And that's why nothing in my drawer could ever get the colour right. Every one of them has a number on the bottom. A colour decided in a factory, for a face that doesn't stay the same colour from breakfast to lunch. Twenty bottles, all matching the wrong face. ⠀ Mushi hasn't got a colour until it's on you. The colour sits in tiny capsules, which is why it comes out white, and the warmth of your skin opens them as you blend it in, so your own colour comes up. And it moves with your skin instead of settling into the lines. Today's colour, not the one you had at 40. ⠀ Which is apparently the thing that decides everything. ⠀ I ordered two. With the sale they were running, the pair cost less than one sunrise yoga class at that retreat. I had been prepared to pay retreat-shop money. I had been prepared to pay anything. ⠀ They arrived on a Tuesday. I stood one next to the stolen one. I washed my face, and I did the left side from one bottle, the right side from the other, then took it off and switched, then switched again. I went through this sequence about four times. I washed my face again that afternoon purely for science. ⠀ It was the same foundation. ⠀ I do not know whether that retreat's supplier is Mushi, or whether the retreat bottles its own version of the same thing. I do not care. Because the bottle on my shelf now does exactly what the bottle I committed a crime for in Spain did. The thing I had thought was rare and unattainable and worth stealing from a six-thousand-pound retreat was sitting on the internet for a fraction of what I would have happily paid through the nose to a retreat shop. ⠀ I have since ordered six more. Two for our bathroom. Two for my sister, who was there, who used hers every morning for two weeks, who left it in its collar like a law-abiding citizen, and who has regretted it every day since. She got hers first. I owed her that. And two for the guest bathroom, which feels almost disrespectful, like sending a string quartet to a barbecue. ⠀ The stolen bottle has been retired, a quarter of an inch still in it, to a box in the wardrobe, where it lives next to my wedding tiara and the school reports of my grown children. It is a relic. It belongs to a younger, more lawless me. ⠀ If you are reading this, and you have ever stood in a retreat bathroom, looking at your own face in a good mirror, thinking "I would, in fact, steal this bottle," I want to spare you the incident. The foundation is Mushi. It is not stolen. It is for sale, on the internet, for a fraction of what you would expect, and you do not have to write a letter of apology to anybody. ⠀ They're running a 60% off sale right now, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. Try it, and if it's no good, send it back. You'll know the first morning. ⠀ And order from the official Mushi site. There are copies about that come out of the pump already beige, and a shade was never the answer. Believe me: I have seen what the real thing does to a retreat director's stationery. ⠀ Claire, 62, Surrey ⠀ P.S. I have not been back to that retreat. I want to. But I am not sure my photograph isn't taped to the back of the housekeeping office as the woman to watch. ⠀ P.P.S. I went for two bottles. If you already know yourself, that is the one. The single bottle is for people with more self-control. The website explains everything clearly. ⠀ P.P.P.S. Honestly, get the two. Because your husband will borrow yours exactly once, to hide a shaving rash before a wedding, and from that morning on his bare face will feel like a punishment to him, and he will ask, with mild outrage, where his is. This is what happened in my house. I have learned my lesson. Two bottles. Always.