After wasting more time online in forums, researching what skincare products I should and shouldn’t have in my bathroom, I stumbled across a bunch of naturopathic recipes. The type that involved items that I had in my fridge or pantry.

Despite having avoided the cheap, homemade fixes all my life, I decided to try one. In desperation, I pulled out my never-used jar of manuka honey and dotted it over a few blind pimples I’d already iced, and, as a YouTube tutorial had suggested, stuck plasters over them. When I woke the next morning, the pimples felt ever so slightly less prominent.

I wasn’t convinced: I’m someone who likes instant results, and this is especially true when I’m going against my instincts. For some reason, though, maybe quiet desperation, I decided to commit to this honey ‘treatment’ for a week. I felt better. Calmer; there was hope. So much so, that, when I spoke to my grandmother on one of our weekend phone calls, I told her about my little experiment.

“How did you get into all this?” I asked her, referring to her homemade masks.

“It was just something we did in my day,” she replied, “we had to have good skin - there wasn’t that much makeup around those days and the only soap on the market was Pears. And that’s horribly drying, you know.”

I never considered that my grandmother did these things out of necessity. She didn’t have foundations that fit her skintone entirely, or all the toners and cleansers I did. And, like most people back then, she barely used shampoos growing up - it was soap or nothing. My grandmother, it turned out, used “no ‘poo” before it had a name: “We used to have this jug of dried gooseberries steeped in water that we’d use to rinse our hair in the summer months,” she said.

“My mother used to use a drop of ghee on her face after a shower - while there was still the tiniest amount of water on her face - to moisturise. It’s great you’re doing this… it’s good to know what works for you.”

“How my grandmother’s DIY beauty regime helped me reconnect with my Indian heritage”