Beauty, Moroccan-style
Moroccan markets are full of touts looking to make a sale. So far, I have been immune to all of them - but one.
Silver teapot? No! Leather slippers? La choukran! Care to stand in my shop full of unlabeled jars of bark and listen while I invent cosmetic uses for them on the spot? Absolutely I do.
Herboristes are sort of a natural, unregulated CVS, stocking a combination of spices, herbal remedies, teas and natural cosmetics. The spices are the window-dressing draws, rising from their barrels in towering cones with razor-point tips. (On close inspection, the tallest and most pointy piles at the Marrakesh medina appear to be cardboard cones spackled with a flaking layer of spice.) The rest of the shop consists of various pellets, powders and petals displayed in glass jars. Depending on the shop, these jars can be bright and shiny; they can also look menacingly dirty. Entry into the herboriste industry appears to have a low threshold: simply scoop up some gravel, place it in jars and wait for thirty years of gullible tourists to wander by.
We visited two separate herboristes in Marrakesh, both of whom I am convinced were run by the most charming and knowledgeable herboreurs (?) in Morocco. We were offered cumin (for cooking the fish!), argan oil (for the massage!) and galanga root (for the man - Viagra! one cheerfully explained). With breathtaking speed a variety of products were wafted in front of our faces and pressed up near our nostrils. One man generously gave me a free demonstration of a white clay mask. Use it regularly, he promised, pointing at an apricot-sized zit on my forehead, "and you will have no more of those, inshallah."
They are nothing if not fantastic salesmen. And so while not a single carpet or slipper has found its way to my suitcase, we are bringing back to the States: orange blossom oil to reduce stress, green tea to cure my mother-in-law's diabetes, saffron cream for cold sores and chapped lips, the clay mask, 35-spice cooking mix, the most fragrant cumin I have ever smelled and a small jar of a mysterious substance that smells like mesquite and looks like tar.
This jar is the reason I happily forked over the dirham for the rest of the stuff (which together cost less than a tube of department-store concealer, anyway). Every few years I get an unfortunate case of psoriasis - basically, dandruff on my face. It's red and itchy and unsightly, and this latest round proved resistant to Western medicine's creams.
A young man in a white coat in the herboriste daubed it on my forehead. When I declined to buy the bottle, he wrapped it up and wordlessly stuffed it in my bag, waving me out the door as if to say, You need this more than you think. My rash is gone.
Posted on Friday, Jan 15, 2010
