Val Kilmer has died, Cookie Bear is gone and The Body Shop NZ has gone into liquidation.
The author reflects on the disappearance of products and icons that defined her youth.
Gen Xers face nostalgia and change, feeling like the “oldest teenager in the room”.
Cookie Bear is dead and so is Val Kilmer. The makers of Brazil Nut Body Butter have gone bust and if anyone has a stash of L’Oreal True Match Naturale Mineral Foundation in beige creme, I will trade for a heavily used kidney.
I am growing older andthe things that (literally) defined me are disappearing.
That mineral powder foundation departed the cosmetic counter years ago. I’ve spent approximately six months’ wages looking for a replacement. Most recently, my search for a pore-filling, skin-toning Holy Grail took me to Mecca (this sentence is less problematic if you understand one is a synonym and the other a beauty retailer).
In store, a garden-fresh angel daubed my face with a soft brush. “I don’t use a powder foundation,” she said. “But my mum absolutely loves this brand ... ” Count your lost youth in shop assistant small talk.
Decades ago, I interviewed a very old woman who had what I swear was a Charles F Goldie painting over her fireplace and a car in her garage that had transported Queen Elizabeth II. Her thinning lips were cadmium red and the colour feathered into fine lines around a mouth that was recounting a very long life story.
“I like your lipstick,” I said. “Thank you,” she replied. “I only have five of them left.”
She’d first bought the shade in 1950 or 1960 or 1970 and was wise enough, even then, to stockpile. She said something like, “everything good gets discontinued”.
Before he played Jim Morrison, Val Kilmer starred as Iceman in the movie Top Gun.
To be honest, I didn’t much care for Val Kilmer in his breakthrough role as the Iceman to Tom Cruise’s Maverick. But it was a shock to read that the only Jim Morrison I remembered had died.
His demise came on the same day I learned that Cookie Bear had been dispatched as the face of Griffin’s chocolate chip cookies and The Body Shop had gone into liquidation with the loss of 70 jobs across 20 stores.
One of these things is not like the other but I honestly did not expect to outlive Cookie Bear.
I joined the Cookie Bear Club, aged 5-ish. I don’t remember many Shrewsburys et al in our house, but the annual birthday postcard was a treat my painfully young and financially stretched parents didn’t have to pay for. He was just a man in a fake fur suit with strangely immovable eyes, but dum-de-do-not ever underestimate the thrill of hard-copy mail.
Cookie Bear was 57 when he died. Val Kilmer was 65. The Body Shop was 49. And none of these numbers are remotely conceivable to a Gen Xer who, tbh, still imagines a time when she might get Winona Ryder’s haircut from Reality Bites.
Cookie Bear's eyes didn't move, but that didn't stop him sending birthday cards. Photo / Supplied
Your parents warn you this will happen. “Nothing stays the same” and “the only constant is change”. But they also struggle to believe you are closer to 60 than 50, possibly because you haven’t bought a house or bothered to have a child of your own and last time you phoned them you admitted to the worst hangover of your life.
Sometimes, being an early-model Gen Xer feels like being the oldest teenager in the room.
We spent our actual teens dressing like 30-year-olds (blame The Breakfast Club) and then we hit our actual 30s and that was far enough, thank you very much. It’s not like time stopped, but I don’t know a single Gen Xer who behaves like the 60-year-olds we knew in our 30s.
And then, one day, you realise that plenty of people thought Brazil Nut Body Butter was stinky and greasy. That the redrawing of Cookie Bear to make him younger and thinner (circa 2020) would, ultimately, result in his complete disappearance. That the things you have always done and known and referenced are always dead, dying or being discontinued.
There is a brilliant passage in Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss, in which a character called Peregrine explains the true meaning of “nostalgia” to his friend (and the book’s protagonist) Martha.
“Nostos ... returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.” Whether or not, he says, the home we long for ever existed.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on the lifestyle desk.
