Reading time: 1:45 | A very German habit: worshipping the British lifestyle, which is, by times, absolutely justified.
When my daughter became a toddler, and I could finally quit changing nappies, I quickly identified her hair care as my next core competence. Her daily hair brushing was to us what in a chimpanzee community would be the mutual delousing. It had two functions: the obvious one is the hair care, the second, more between the lines, is the physical closeness which such a daily ritual creates and which, in the end, can last a lifetime. But how to make the brushing, which was, at times, pretty challenging, a tender experience?
At the beginning of my endeavour with hair care, I used an old brush that my wife was using since ever. It’s been one of those things you have lying around; you’ve never cared much, and forgot how it came into your life. It’s just there. But it made her hair brushing to such a bad experience and the plaits I braided a fiasco that the relationship to my daughter was temporarily in tatters. A life-long trauma was looming.
A dear friend of mine, who shares my affinity to the UK, has two daughters who were a tad older than my daughter. She, naturally, experienced the same traumatic experiences and was looking for a solution which she had found here: The English Scent. The shop is located in Berlin, and, as it’s often with ex-pats, more British than it’s siblings in the UK.
This brush is the brush of all brushes. It is tender, effective beyond belief and designed in a way one typically expected a brush to look like. But it comes with a caveat (the word of 2020, let’s try losing it 2021). It’s not cheap, or to be more precise: it’s pretty expensive. But even this has an advantage. The Mason Pearson brush won’t become a nameless commodity in one’s household; it is an indispensable item we hold dear until today.
When we lost our first Mason Pearson Hair Brush Pocket Bristle B4 on a camping trip, the loss was big and the much-improved braids again a tragedy. The second Junior was a slightly larger variant and now, ten years later, is still my daughter’s brush-to-go. When the brush is not where’s supposed to be, she asks resoundingly, where’s my Superbürste?
