Is it just ME?

Or have we reached peak posh hand wash?

How grand she is to have such lovely hand wash, friends would think. How chic.

I BLAME scented candles. That’s when it became a status symbol to light a smelly candle — Jo Malone or Diptyque — in the sitting room if we had guests over.

But now the scent war has shifted to the bathroom where hand wash has become the status symbol. It’s not enough to have a bar of Imperial Leather lying in a soap dish.

You must have a bottle of outlandishly-named gel. A bottle of Aesop’s orange and rosemary ‘Resurrection Aromatique’ for £27, perhaps, or Hermes’s ‘Eau de rhubarbe’ for £40.

I have strong feelings about absurdly-priced hand wash because I recently finished a bottle of Jo Malone Basil and Neroli given to me for Christmas. I eked it out for months, although I’m still not sure what a neroli even is.

Whatever, I looked proudly at the bottle standing beside my tap. How grand she is to have such lovely hand wash, I imagined friends thinking. How sophisticated. How chic.

But then I finished the bottle and went online to order a replacement. It was £30. What’s the point spending that much when there are perfectly acceptable, options for a couple of quid from your local chemist?

The Romans used soap made with urine because ammonia is a cleanser, so we should perhaps be grateful we’ve moved on.

But there’s something charmingly evocative about a big bar of Pears.

And if you want to be truly posh, follow the example of Baroness Rawlings, a Tory peer who we interviewed for her austerity tips while I worked at Tatler.

When she’s down to the last sliver of soap, Lady Rawlings secretes it in a drawer ‘to keep the moths away’. You can’t do that with a bottle of Eau de Rhubarbe, can you?