Going South: The Omorovicza Care Package

One thing you certainly won’t find written on my hopefully well-tended, over the top, baroque gravestone is the word: ‘organised.’ Here lies Imogen Thingy – ‘OMG she was organised!’ I doubt you’d find that on anyone’s gravestone but certainly not mine. Mine will have something like: ‘She was quite chatty.” “Terrible with money” or “Could do the splits after vodka.”

But not organised. Never organised. Organisation is not one of my strong points. I am the sort of person who’s always slightly late, who rushes in all apologetic for lunch, who slams the church door at a wedding, that flustered sweaty sod who’s running for the plane. I am the sort of person who gets surprised by the arrival of the weekend.

And so it was, last week, when I finally emerged from my sweatbox office where I had been typing solidly for three weeks and blinked myopically in the sunshine, only to realise not only was it a weekend, it was a sodding Bank Holiday and we were booked to go to the seaside and stay with friends. Glamorous friends - whose feet aren’t cloven, whose hair is occasionally tended by products and tongs and who have their children’s names hewn in gold swinging around their necks. And here was I, hunched with RSI, with my hair stuck to my skull and skin the colour of forced asparagus.

I need a makeover, a giant makeover, a makeover of Richard and Judy proportions and I need it fast. Scrabbling about among the various carrier bags in the dark corners of my office I came across a fragrant-looking package – the Gold Body Set - from Omorovicza. Made in Budapest, using water and minerals from their 200-year-old spa, I have used some their fabulous unctuous products before. But this little grouping of Body Buffing Balm , £36, Gold Sugar Scrub , £57, Gold Shimmer Oil , £52, and Glam Glow , £46, looked like the ultimate emergency care package.

So in a terribly old fashioned way, I took three bottles into the shower and got making over. The Body Buffing Balm was fabulous. Thick, dark and smelling distinctly medicinal, it is just the sort of thing tired, dead winter skin needs before it steps out into the sunshine. All those lovely white flaky bits of skin that normally collect like a cloud in the feet of your black tights (do stop me if this is just me?) disappear, and your skin is left feeling smooth and soft like the proverbial baby’s behind.

Next came the Gold Sugar Scrub, which brilliantly is exactly like covering yourself in some oily Demerara sugar - and it smells divine. The gold itself is supposed to be anti-inflammatory so it calms the skin down as it exfoliates. And finally, like a peeled pink prawn I stepped out of the shower and into Bond Girl heaven. The Gold Shimmer Oil has actual little bits of actual floating gold in the oil, so when it slithers down your shin, you ended up shining slightly, glimmering, shimmering like someone who’s been expensively maintained with regular pummelling and a salon loyalty card, rather than some harassed harridan ho who’s just realised it’s the weekend.

Mix it all together with a bit of Glam Glow self-tan to slowly disguise your asparagus tones and you too could look like you just stepped off Philip Green’s super-yacht, laughing and chatting and fagging with Kate.

Well, perhaps not that glamorous! But I really did manage to get away with it. I had a fabulous weekend, where my skin, shins, arms and thighs didn’t make small children weep with fear. I wore shorts and - sod it - a bathing suit! And I even managed a vest top at lunch without feeling like I had just been exhumed from under the compost next to the shed.

The Omorovicza Gold Body Set is the sort of emergency kit that every girl should have next to the shower. It can turn a harridan into a Bond Girl in 15 minutes flat. And the Gold Shimmer Oil is something to be slapped on all summer long – shimmering shins, what’s not to love about those? In fact I am packing it for next weekend in Ibiza – that’s forward planning for you!