Love In The Asylum

Problem: Ever since the last round of bleaching/dyeing, my hair's been...weird. The non-bleached parts are fine of course, and still loving my shampoo bars, but the purple bits really don't. When I wash my hair, those bits dry feeling stiff and kind of greasy, like I haven't rinsed my conditioner out all the way. However, they do really like CO-washing - the last couple of times I CO-washed instead of sampoo bars they felt fine after they dried. But I don't want to do CO exclusively, since it makes my hair smell a little funny and I get build-up.

Conjecture: Since the front part of my hair is damaged from the bleach, it needs the extra moisture of CO-washing, and can't handle the bars, which have a reputation of working less well on damaged hair. But the rest of my hair, which is virgin, doesn't need the heavy-duty treatment and likes the bars fine. Solution? CO-wash the purple bits only, and shampoo the rest.

Methodology: When I went to take a shower this morning, I combed out the front part of my hair, and pulled the rest back into a ponytail. In the shower I wet all my hair down, and poured conditioner just onto the loose part. Then lots and lots of scrubbing and scalp massaging and general tediousness. Once I had a decent lather, I undid the ponytail and shampooed the rest of my hair like normal, did a vinegar rinse and conditioner, and rinsed everything out.

Results: all my hair is happy yay! I may have to stick with this, even if it is stupidly time-consuming. But hey, it's only a couple times a week, I think I'll live. Also, this will probably make my color last longer, since it's the surfectants in the shampoo that lift it out so fast. So double yay for that.

I thought this would be fun to share - recipe from the LHC (original post was by Kimberlily, obviously, not me, and is quoted in full)

Kimberlily's Defrizz Spray

In a 4oz mister, mix the following:

2 tbsp aloe gel
1 tsp jojoba
1 tsp glycerin (you can leave it out if you don't have any)
essential oils of choice

Add distilled water until full, then shake. Spray can be used as a detangler, and it encourages wonderful waves especially when used for damp bunning. Tap water can be used, but distilled water is better since it will keep longer. I have hard water, so I never use tap water.

I don't just use it on my hair. Here are some other uses:

* If you omit the essential oils, it is a wonderful eye makeup remover. Just spritz on a cotton pad and swipe away your makeup.
* Keep it in the fridge in the summer for a refreshing moisturizing spritz after coming in from the sun.
* Spritz on your legs and use it for shaving if you're in a rush and have no time to shower.

Notes from me, masterofmidgets : I love this stuff. My mister bottle is a little smaller than this, so I had to do a bit of math to get the proportions right, but I got it fine in the end. I use Sweet Orange essential oil I got at Sunflower Market and it smells divine. I can't testify to how well it works for a shave lotion or a make-up remover, since I haven't tried that. But I spritz it into my wet hair after a shower and scrunch, and it makes my hair super sproingy. I also use a few sprays in the morning to liven up my ends after I take my braids out. And I spritz it into the air and walk through it for a nice light scent (since most perfumes kill me dead from allergies). Very nice stuff!

ETA: I do not use the optional glycerin. Because glycerin is a humectant, in a dry climate like New Mexico it actually works to pull moisture out of the hair to equalize it with the environment. Not good. But it works just as well without it.

I did a craft! I made hairsticks, to be specific. I've been working on this intermittently since this weekend, and I finally have some finished products to show off.

( cut for a fuckton of pictures )

Three Things About Wednesday (ha, yes, I am rocking the lists lately)

1. My dad and I have a tentative agreement that I cook Mon/Wed, he cooks Tues/Thurs, and the weekends are up for grabs. Today was my turn, and I tried out a new orange beef recipe I found online. OM NOM NOM ORANGEY. I think it could have used more chile peppers, but then I like things scorching hot. Surprisingly though the 3 tablespoons of ginger was not too much. VERY GOOD WOULD NOM AGAIN.

2. Since I'm hanging around the house and not seeing anyone except my dad mostly, I'm taking the opportunity to experiment with my hair routine, since I don't have to worry about going out looking like a freakshow. Today's experiment: aloe vera+scrunching - unqualified success. Impressive since I hate hair gel and mousse and spray and basically anything that makes my hair feel sticky or stiff. Aloe vera makes my hair look awesome without doing that. There would be pictures, but my dad made me take a walk with him and it's about to thunderstorm, so the wind's like 30 mph. D:

3. Oh PAD. Stop trying to make me not hate you by having boykissing in your books. I'm still not going to read them, but now I'm going to be annoyed that no one will post the boykissing in SD2.0 *pouts*

3a. Um. I am pretty sure that this video wins everything forever. *hearts hearts hearts* I really feel like it needs to be shared.

I've been taking a ton of pictures since I got new batteries for my camera, so hey, it's picspam time!


( Puppy! )

( Really Geeky Stuff! )

( Hair! )

ETA: HEY WOW I JUST NOTICED THIS IS MY 500TH POST. That is insane. I remember when I used this account for nothing but reading fic and never posted at all. I can't believe it's been two years since I started really being on LJ. And now I love it (and you guys! You guys rock!) so much.

I've always wanted to try hair-taping, because it sounds like a cute, practical hairstyle, but for one reason or another I never got around to it. Well, tonight I was watching Due South and I started thinking, you know, I've got first day hair that looks like rubbish, it doesn't matter if I play with it - maybe I should try hair-taping. So I did!

( Pictures, and a handy tutorial )

So, I think the highlight of my day today was getting chocolate at work - which isn't too bad for a Wednesday? And it was really good chocolate - my boss had leftover Easter candy, and everyone who was on goal by 8.00 got some. I got a marshmallow filled chocolate egg. Would have been better with dark chocolate, but still so, so good. And then after work I called my dad so I'd have something to do on the walk home and we got into an argument about whether the country should go back on the gold standard. Um. He's very, very libertarian? But I think a lot of the positions he espouses (like the violent overthrow of the Establishment into anarchy) in debate he doesn't actually believe in in anything other than a rhetorical sense. And he can't vote, anyway, so. But it was a pretty interesting conversation.

Milestone: the longest parts of my hair are (finally) tailbone length, when they are sopping wet. Of course, I'm still not-quite hip length when it's dry, thank you curly hair, but still, I'm making progress! I am trying to decide if I want to get to tailbone length and maintain for awhile, to get less taper/healthier ends before I try to make it to classical length, or just do it all in one go and let my hemline catch up in a year or so. Decisions, decisions...


Poetry: our lecture today on modernism, leading into The Wasteland for next week, was absolutely fascinating. I love my professor so much. And I learned some really neat things about the development in the 20th century of the interaction between poet and reader, and how writers write for a popular audience vs writing for the initiate, the people who already get poetry. At the very end of the class my prof mentioned this poet, and I think she's pretty neat.

I Go Back To May 1937 by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

So this quarter I'm going to be wearing my hair up a lot more. Partly because it's better for my hair, but mostly because I have an 11.00am class M-Th, and I straight out refuse to get up an hour early so that I will have time to wash my hair before class. Just not happening. But since I don't want to wash my hair every day either (I want to stick to the M-W-Sat wash schedule I have, it seems to work well), and by the third day my hair is itchy and flat and frizzy and ick, updos it is!

Given that, I've spent a lot of break practicing my updos, so that I don't have to fall back on the same-old same-old stand-bys of braided pigtails and messy Chinese buns. I mean, what's the point of having long hair if I'm not going to have fun with it? So here's a few pics (with links to tutorials, because I'm nice that way) of new updos I've figured out to do lately.

( Hair pics under the cut! )

Also! Check out my super-awesome new hairsticks in the pictures up there! I really love the metal fleur-de-lis one, it's quite pretty, but the plastic ones (which have a neat flower pattern that isn't really visible) aren't half bad either.

I like having dyed hair - if nothing else, it tends to be a good conversation opener - but I really hate the actual process of dyeing it. When Linda does it for me it's relatively painles, but doing it on my own...oof. Labor-intensive! Plus it's so messy. This may just be the long hair thing, but I always manage to make a huge mess of our little sink alcove thing when I do my hair. The whole basin ends up purple, there's water all over the floor, etc etc. Plus I have dye all over my arms where the gloves didn't go up far enough.

I leave it on for awhile to try to get the color to last longer, and I look like an idiot while I do - most of my hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and my bangs are rolled up in tin foil and bobby-pinned to my head. I can't leave my room while it's setting, because, hey, look like an idiot, and I'm superparanoid about getting dye on things so I can't get comfortable doing stuff on my computer and whatever. And the chemical-y scent of the dye makes me a little sick to my stomach, not crazy about that either.

It's almost enough to make me want to give it up and stop dyeing. Almost, but not quite enough! Having purple hair is just too much fun. Although I am a little worried about how it will turn out this time around. I wanted the color to be a little more purple than the violet Manic Panic I'm using, so I mixed in some of my leftover purple from the brand I used before - but I was half through before I thought of it. I'm hoping I don't end up with one side of my hair a different color than the other...that might be a bit odd even for me. D:

At least I have Nightwing to read while I'm doing this. It makes me so sad this book was canceled - Dick is so adorably awesome! And OMG pretty. Not just pretty, but in a blue-and-black bodysuit so tight it looks painted on. It's a GOOD thing.

Okay, so I totally caved to temptation. Even though Friday is a strict non-washing day this quarter, I couldn't resist trying  my new shampoo bars right away, so I went ahead and hopped in the shower anyway.

I'm just going to come right and say it: HOLY WOW SHAMPOO BARS. I still have three bars to try out, obviously, and I'll yammer on about those as I go through them. And I'm going to reserve final opinion until I've had a chance to see what my hair looks like on the second and third days after washing, and after using the bars for a few times in a row, since word on the street is that it takes some people a while to adjust to natural shampoos. But so far, I'm going to call this experiment a success in concept at the very least.

I started out with the Camomile and Citrus bar, since that seems to be pretty popular with people. Also it smells great - not as citrusy as I was hoping, since I have a dire citrus addiction, but very clean and mild and pleasant. I followed the instructions from the Chagrin Valley site and the Long Hair Comm pretty closely (first time is not the time to improvise): rub the bar on your hair, moving back from the hairline to the nape, and down the length, and then work up a nice lather, then rinse and repeat. It's a little more work than a liquid shampoo; it doesn't start lathering up just by looking at it funny. But once you get it worked in it does lather up really well. :D

After I rinsed for the second time, my hair felt really, really clean but kind of weird. Sort of squeaky, or even waxy - I could barely run my hand down it because it stuck against the hair. Luckily, I was prepared for this, and I had my vinegar rinse all ready to go. My measurements aren't very exact (I don't have a measuring spoon, only larger and smaller kitchen spoons), but I put about 3, maybe 3.5 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar in one of my empty conditioner bottles (I keep them after I finish them because I water my conditioner down a little to make it last longer) and filled it most of the rest of the way with water, then poured that solution on my hair. Left it in while I conditioned (supposedly a lot of people don't need to condition with shampoo bars, but my hair without conditioner is...scary), then rinsed it all out. As soon as the vinegar touched my hair the waxy feeling started to go away; by the time I was out of the shower, my hair felt great.

And now that it's dry (five hours later), I'm just blown away by how amazing my hair feels. Like, it is so soft and shiny, and thicker than usual, and I am getting crazy amounts of curl definition - resilient curls, even, that don't start to fall out the second I touch them. And for the first time in ages my ends don't feel all scratchy and dry and awful, even though I didn't use any oil this time around. It is FANTABULOUS. I really hope my hair looks good tomorrow, because if my hair is going to look and feel like this with shampoo bars, I do not want to give them up.

I also like how natural these bars are. They aren't full of petrochemicals and preservatives; I can recognize and pronounce every ingredient on the label, and it's not a long list of ingredients, at that. I'm not buying plastic bottles that will sit in a dump for the rest of forever; the bars come in an environmentally-friendly, bio-degradeable tiny paper bag. They aren't made by a massive, evil corporation that doesn't pay its employees a living wage or offer them any benefits; it's made by a woman named Ida and her husband. They live in Ohio. If you email them about the product, they will actually talk to you. I like the idea of supporting small, nature-friendly, women-run businesses. We need more of them.

So yeah, I may be very close to being sold on these shampoo bars.