Ever notice how the littlest things seem to send you down the most altering paths? I got fed up with my hair around my birthday. I've always fought with it, so the feeling was nothing new. It's curly, and temperamental, and likes to give me greif. I had a pretty good system for taming my hair that worked for awhile, but ever since having kids I've felt like it could look better. I dyed it on a whim, and that became a disaster. I ended up re-dying it, then using Color Oops to get the leftover green tint out of it. Soon after that I just decided to lop it all off, so I had hubby cut it for me as a long chin bob. This look really required straigtening for it to look its best, but lets be real. Its summertime in the Northern East Coast, where the humidity level frequently exceeds the temperature. My hair grows like a ChiaPet in concurrence with the rise in moisture in the air. So I decided I should try to go back to curly. Except everything I normally did to style it wasn't working out with the same results. And to top it off, it felt like all the products I were using were leaving a greasy coating on my hair. So I decided to check in with the Google gods for some advice or direction. Enter the world of Curly Girl by Lorraine Massey.
Basically the philosophy is this; curly hair is more prone to over-drying than normal straight hair, and therefore, most of the harsh chemicals used in many commercial brands of hair products strip the hair and make it misbehave. So Lorraine suggests a different approach of using more natural products to cleanse, condition, and style the hair. I figured what the heck. It's worth a shot. And I'm not going to go into the specifics since the majority of you don't have my hair problems, but I find myself laughing at, well, myself on an almost daily basis now. People always arch their eyebrows when they learn we cloth diaper(ed) our kids. The forays into organic, vegan, and natural substitutions for Scootch's allergies have led me to become acquainted with many health food stores, co-ops, and on mailing lists for many forward thinking newsletters. I love to craft and sew which ultimately translates into making the occasional clothes, or quilt, or draperies. My husband and I were recently discussing how great it would be to install solar panels to offset the cost of the electricity we're using to cool the house. And now I'm in the kitchen making my own hair gel from flax seeds and boiling water using a recipe adopted from a hair care handbook.
I feel like my house is thisclose to becoming a hippie commune.
