Zit Removal Guide, the Daisy way

My face thinks it is 15.  

I predictably break out once a month (thank you, hormones).  This is payback for my teenage years when I think I got 3 zits total from the time I was 12 until I was 21.  Now, you can set the clock to my zits.  Awesome.  But even though I'm in my 30's, it still stinks to get blemishes.  I mean, it's not life crushing like when you're 16, but it is still stupidly annoying.  

I tried Crunchy Betty's face scrub with milk and nutmeg, and it does make you have a baby butt face (that is - your face is so soft it feels like a baby's butt, not that you are a small butt face), but honestly, I think for the zits, it really might only help a teense.  

I was wondering what was out there that would be helpful to crush the life out of the red little hormone dots in my life, and I may have stumbled upon something.  Now, obvs, different things work for different people because of our different chemistry, but this works for me.  What's the secret mix?  

Well, if you followed Crunchy Betty a couple years ago, you may remember the month or so when everyone was washing their face with honey.  Were you on that bus?  I tried it.  It was pretty cool.  Honey is anti-microbial, and filled with wonderful enzymes and lots of other goodies that make it a wonder.  

One day a few months ago, I had a few zits and the thought dawned upon me to combine the wonderful properties of honey with the scrubby exfoliating powers of nutmeg (yeah, seriously, but don't use nutmeg on your face more than twice a week - the overdose of nutmeg on the face looks like your face got into a fight with sandpaper and a cat). 

I poured a small blob of honey into my hand, sprinkled nutmeg into the mix, squished it around and slimed it on my face (in an upwardly circular motion, of course - I really should be less technical, but I just can't...).  I stared at my weird looking face in the mirror for a few minutes, thinking this was likely a necessary step in my experiment.  I pretended I was at a spa as I layed a hot washcloth over my face (even though I was standing in my vintage 1950's bathroom - but hey, when you have a washcloth over your face, you can pretty much pretend you are anywhere) and then followed with wiping the magical mess off.  

I don't have any hard empirical evidence, but from my point of view, I honestly think it was helpful in zit reduction.  It makes sense that it could be, anyway, right?  You have the anti-microbial properties of the honey gutting out your zit dirt (I think that's the scientific name for it), and the nutmeg is smoothing to the areas on your face that are having skin distortion/flaking/etc.  Anyway, it  worked for me, and if you want to try it, I hope it works for you.  

Happy zit reduction!  

Peace, love, and grow up, face, 
Ms. Daisy

Get Rid of Orange Hair: My Shameful Journey

Sometimes, very rarely, I make mistakes (okay, okay, maybe a bit more oftener than that, but I was hoping you might not notice).  Sometimes these mistakes are apparent only to me and God.  Sometimes they are only apparent to my family or friends.  And then sometimes you make a mistake that upon making, everyone in the whole freakin' world notices any time they look at you or in your general direction.

This was me circa the end of May up until two days ago.

I thought it would be a really fanstastic idea to follow my dream of becoming blonde again.  Yes, the organic side of me was saying, "What the crap, yo?  You know better than that!  You know you can't use bleach and all those toxic chemicals, you'll kill yourself, your brains, your liver and you'll be soaking yourself in carcinogens like nobody's beeswax, homegirl!  Hello, ever heard of PPD?  Like, total death sentence, dumbface!!  DUH!!"  

The kind of hair I wanted.

The diva side of me didn't want to listen.  It wanted to find a way around the poison and solve it, being a non-toxic blonde.  I thought I had figured it out.  Oh glory, could it be that there was such a thing as organic color?  I looked it up online and after many hours of reading, there really was something called organic color. And it could make you blonde.  Is this for realies?  Oh baby.  I called the salon and made an appointment.  But first, I asked, "Can this really make me blonde? I have brown hair.  I don't want orange hair.  I don't want strawberry blonde hair.  I don't want golden blonde hair.  I want straight up ash blonde.  Can your product do this?"

I was then repeatedly assured it could and would.

I was so excited I could hardly stand it.

The day finally came and I took a picture of myself and sent it to the hubby with the caption something along the lines of "Sayonara brown hair! SUCKAAAA!!!!"  

It would be the last picture I remember having happy hair.

My visit to the salon was in an extremely upscale town about a half hour away.  These people use their Coach bags as gym bags because they're so common and refer to their Jimmy Choo as "these old things?!"  The people who live in this town have servants, nannies and Porches and Rolls Royce are as common as the F-150's (with the stickers of deer heads on the window and the "I work for Ford, I drive a Ford" plastic around the license plate) are in mine.  I thought I was safe.

I was el-wrongo.

I sat down in the chair and asked to see a hair color wheel.  I showed them the exact color I wanted and pointed out the colors I wanted to avoid like the plague.  I told them that when I used to get bleach highlights, my hair would take about an hour and a half to two hours to come up.  I have freak hair.  Is this going to work?  Are you sure?  Yes, yes, yes.  Do it all the time!

Okay.

This stuff you leave on your hair for 30 minutes and then rinse it out.

Rinse 1: hair slightly lighter, slightly more auburn, but still brown.

Did it again.

Rinse 2: resist swearing, sweating, stabbing and screaming.  My hair is flaming freak orange yellow.  Clown hair.  But fried to a freakin' crisp.  Dead.  Feels like straw.  By bending it sideways it breaks.  Thousands of split ends and shortened hair.  Oh. My. Gosh.  I am Ronald McDonald.  And I have to go to a wedding.  In 48 hours.  Use your tae kwon do for good, use tae kwon do for good, use tae kwon do for good.  It's just hair, right?  

His solution: bleach highlights to blonde up the orange.  He says, "Oh, you wanted  bleachy light blonde color?  Well, of course you cannot achieve that with this product.  That comes only about by bleach!"

Are. You. Freakin'. Kidding. Me.

She is cute, but this is not the color I wanted.  Unfortch, I got it.

So he pulls a 1980 vintage and pulls my long hair through a CAP with a crochet hook and bleaches it.

Thanks.

My hair was destroyed.  My childrenos suggested that I shave my head bald.

Along came my friend.  My sweet, sweet friend.  She rescued me from my desperation, took me to her salon and they toned the orange down significantly.  Then my sweet friend PAID for my fiasco-fix.  She has been with me through the worst times in my life, and she came through in true cape-like fashion.  She is a sister to me and I love her terribly.  God bless that blessing.

Fast forward two weeks.  My hair is getting oranger.  What the heck?!  The combination of swimming for several hours a week and the Trader Joe tea tree shampoo and conditioner are stripping the toner out of my hair with lightning speed.

I make pleas of desperation to make some cash and take it to another salon to have them dye my hair brown.  It works great.  For two weeks.  Then my hair is flaming orange again.

Hubby kaboshes the spending on the hair.  I am stuck.

Crap.

I try to dye my hair with coffee.  It doesn't work.

I try to dye my hair with black walnut hull powder.  It works.  Until I shampoo my head.  Then it is gone.  So much for those two hours.

I consider coloring on my hair with a brown Sharpie marker.

I spend hours looking up hair online.  I wear thick headbandy things to cover up the bulk of it around my face.  

I put Mrs. Stewart's bluing laundry brightner (the pre-bleach solution of 100 years ago to get your yellowed/dulling whites bright white again) into my shampoo and conditioner hoping to tone out the orange.  (I read about purple shampoo, but it was out because of all the chemicals it contained.)  Maybe my hair wasn't fluorescent orange anymore, but it was still orange.

Then I calculated how long it would take, based on the regrowth of hair from late May until now to have a full head of my (changed perception!) wonderful brown hair back again.  Oh.  Three years.

Sigh.

I am being punished for my foolishness.  And I must suffer my punishment for three years of horror every time I look at myself in the mirror.  Every time I meet a new person, they will think I am aiming to be a 17 year old prostitute who went wild in her bathroom with 50 developer and some bleach.  Why did I do it?  WHY?  WHY?!  WHYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

Pause.

Maybe you're asking me, "Hey Ms. Daisy, why the HECK didn't you just go to the store and go get a box dye?  Why didn't you go to Sally's and get something to dye your hair brown again?"  

You should know by now that I don't usually do the traditional things, my dear.  (No, that would be too easy.)

You do know I research those chemicals, right?  Steeping my head in carcinogen tea was not going to be my option.  My diva self was tempted to try it, I can assure you.  How easy it would have been!  I even had a box of dye in my hands at Target.  And then I did what I always do.  I flipped the box to the back and read the ingredients.  ARGH!!!!!!!!  WHY!  WHY!!  WHYYYYYYYYY!!!!

Knowledge.  Hmph.

Then it happened.  I found a product that contained 100% natural, organic stuff.  And it had a bunch of happy people who had used it.  They were using it to color their grey hair, though.  Would it work on my orange fiasco?  What if I ended up with green hair?  Maybe I'd like that better.  Huh.  Decisions to consider.

What the heck.  It was $11 online, so I ordered it.  I couldn't find it even in my uber-healthy health food store, so I had to wait for it to be shipped to me.  Patience, hurry up!

It contains natural indigo, henna (this is what freaked me out - visions of yet oranger hair kept me in a hyperventilation state of panic), amla and two other herbs to chillax your hair.

Well, what the heck, right?  I did a strand test and made it quite watery.  After 90 minutes it didn't work.  I called the company.  They said, "You did it too thin.  Think cake batter paste."

Good thing that was just a strand test.  The next day I got it all ready.  I sloshed my head with a greenish brown mud that smelled like baby food peas and put a cap on.  I prayed, "Please, God, let this not be a failure like all the rest and have my husband be so furious about spending even $22 (I got 2 boxes just in case) on another failure.  And please let me not have green hair.  Amen."

Yes, it took a little bit of work to get the mudpie out of my hair.  I had to climb into the bathtub, dunk my head into a basin and I let the faucet pour over the back of my head, dump the bucket of blackish sooty water, start over.  Repeat 5 times until clear.  Yes, my hair felt like it was made of sticks, but this was just the in-betweenies.  I put conditioner on it until I could rake my fingers through it again and then it was time for the test.  After spending 90 minutes with my mud hair and now having a sort of aura of baby food peas, I can tell you it was all TOTALLY WORTH IT.

What joy in a box looks like.

I washed and dried it.  Then I heard angels singing in bright sunshine streaming down into my bathroom mirror.  Glory hallelujah!  My brown hair was back.  My tending toward fro-chemically-burnt hair seems to be 90% repaired! And could it be?  Is it possible?  It was a normal brown color (oh wait, that's because it was from a natural source, um, duh)!  It was not orange.  It made me look like a human adult again.  It was not green.  Sayonara orange!  Thank you God!

The product is made by Aubrey Organics.  It is called "Color Me Natural" in dark brown.  It contains things that are all good for your hair: indigo (indigofera tinctoria), lawsonia inermis alba (henna), emblica officinalis, eclipta alba, acacia cathechu.  That's it.  It is 100% herbal.  My hubster said, "Your head smells like plants."  See?  Natural.  I got it here, at iherb.
 And I have a $10 off code if you want it - VNR736.

Yes, I have learned my lesson.  And in case you were wondering, no, I will not be hoping to have blonde hair ever again.  I will be happy with what the good Lord has given me.  

Peace, love and the natural way is ALWAYS the best way, even if it smells like peas,
Ms. Daisy

Hippie Diva at Plato's Closet

I have just discovered for myself...Plato's Closet.  Yes, yes, all of you out there the world over know and have been one MILLION times, but I just went for the first time this week.

If you're wondering what on earth Plato's Closet is, let me summarize it for you this way: someone smart realized that teenagers cannot bear to wear the same clothes more than five times, so they made up a retail store that only accepts higher end clothing, with a surprising amount of clothing with the original tags still on them.  

(You were originally thinking it had something to do with Aristotle, Archimedes and Homer, but alas, no, you were a teense off.  Oh wait, never mind, that is what first sprung to my mind.  Not really.)  But I did wonder where they got the idea of Plato. Maybe because he was so dang smart and so are they?

But I digress.  

But seriously.  I am fairly certain I have been wearing the same jeans (outside of pregnancy) for the last six years.  Maybe longer.  My 22 inches of closet space contain amazing fashions circa 2007.  Now, I don't really care and I make it work anyway, but for $4.00, yes, I will take that glittery tag-still-on-it tank top from some place I would not even dream of shopping since I could get an entire 25 pound bag of wheat berries for the same price, thankyouverymuch.  Priorities, peeps, priorities.  

My hubby asked me, "Are you a diva or a hippie?"  I wondered why I couldn't be both at the same time. Mostly, the frugal hippie side takes over because it is making the most logical sense, but living happily beside Ms. Long Skirt is Ms. Pink Glitter Everything Who Would Dye Her Hair So Platinum Blond With A Pink Stripe In It In Two Seconds If It Weren't For All Of Those Chemicals.  Instead, here I am, hair looking healthy and brain cells intact, but weeping secretly inside everytime I see a fantastic blond color that would look totally amazing on my head.


Why, WHY did I ever read about the poisonous danger that is hair dye?  Blasted!!!  (This right here, my friends, is the ONLY down side I can see to being health educated.  I said it.)

But meanwhile, back to the Batcave of Plato's Closet.  It is a sad thing in one way - it shows the wastefulness of our society and speaks to that issue on a very tangible level.  But yet, it is a totally SCORE thing for me since hello - they have shirts there with glittering sequins.  Which begs the question, "What kind of people are these who don't want glittering shirts?"  Yeah, I know.  Now we have two things to ponder regarding the sad aspects of our society.

Well, I'm going to go think about that while I go score some more glittering deals.

Peace, love and you could probably empty your change purse and get something good,
Ms. Daisy