Move nearly over (thanks to lots of help)

Today is my first full day with Internet access after nearly a week without it. I didn't realize how dependent I am on it until I went nearly a week without.

Though there is still some last minute cleaning to do at the old place, Jon and I are now officially in the new place. A huge thanks to my brave dad: between his "Escargo" trailer-that-could, and his amazing packing abilities, my dad and I got all the stuff moved in twelve trips between the two apartments and several flights of stairs at both, over two weeks. I can't imagine trying to do the whole move over a weekend, which was our plan before my dad stepped in and rescued us from ourselves (thank you Dad!).

I know I have lots of stuff. I guess I get some sort of comfort in holding on to things. Add that to all my hobbies, my love of reading, and my obsession with large houseplants, and you start to get an idea of how unpleasant I am to move. Once, in Louisville, I filled up an entire trailer with my houseplants alone. Then we had to come back for the rest of my things. I think I horrified the family members in Kentucky who volunteered to help me move, like my mom and my brother (my cousin stopped by later to help, and he said he's a pack rat too, so he wasn't nearly as shell shocked by the volume).

Luckily, this time I have less plants. However, I still have this weird thing where I don't like anyone to touch my plants but me. And when they are in the car, I like to be able to keep them in sight at all times. I'm not sure exactly what I think will happen; it's not like they'll run out into traffic if I take my eyes off them, but oh well. I guess we all have our quirks, eh?

It snuck in

I am moving this week and next, so I thought I should probably talk about this product before it got packed away and I didn't see it for months to take its mug shot.

I'm always looking for good conditioners to comb my hair with. My favorite thing to do is find little gems in drugstores that have nearly identical functioning ingredients as more expensive brands. I then happily take my new discovery back home like a squirrel that has just found a giant acorn.

A while back I found Citré Shine Colour Prism Conditioner. On the bottle, it says it contains "Multi-Reflective Illumination", and "Citrus Prismatic Waxes" and I imagined combing into my hair a slippery, sparkly cream that (hopefully) shimmered slightly when dry. Perhaps the images of shimmery hair danced before my eyes, and blinded me on my first scan of the ingredients in the store. I usually scan a product twice before I buy it, looking for any ingredients I know to be bad. If I don't see any (well, or notice any), I then go home and research any additional ingredients I'm not familiar with before it even touches my hair.

Almost all the ingredients on the long list on the back were familiar, and there were even many conditioning ones in there. It wasn't until I got it home and was looking it over again that I saw this one had three ingredients I consider bad for the hair: isopropyl alcohol, zinc chloride and styrene/acrylamide copolymer.

Isopropyl alcohol is an easy one. I just overlooked it. It's known to be very drying to the hair. What it's doing in a conditioner is beyond me. I mean, I know it's only in there by a very tiny amount, but still...(I guess I really was blinded by the hope there were shimmery prismatic waxes in there).

The second ingredient was trickier: zinc chloride. I had to do some research. But from what I've found so far, it looks awful. Every scientific site that mentioned it had a big CORROSIVE listed for this product, saying it dissolves fibers including skin, and even some metals, apparently. If this wasn't bad enough, it also does terrible environmental things when it's put in water. Again, I know it's in there in tiny amounts, but why they would put something like this in a product at all is odd.

The third ingredient, styrene/acrylamide copolymer, and I go way back:

You see, long ago when I was still a teen, when I was trying to learn what to do with my hair, I thought I'd found the perfect products. I loved this particular orange colored shampoo and conditioner, and faithfully used them every week. This was back in the days when I thoroughly rinsed out my conditioners, and then used some kind of hair dressing to moisturize. So imagine my horror when I was doing my hair for school one morning, and found that it was sticky! My fingers actually stuck to my hair. And of course I couldn't leave it alone. I had to keep pressing my hair between my fingers, getting more upset as my fingers got stickier. School papers stuck to my hands like I was Spider Woman.

Being the easily mortified teenage girl that I was, I had a dramatically bad day, until one of my teachers pulled me aside and asked what was wrong. I told her about my sticky hair, and she told me about product build up. Needless to say, I never used that brand again. Unfortunately, I had no idea what ingredients in the products caused the build up.

Now that I know ingredients, I know which ones get crunchy or sticky. And styrene/acrylamide copolymer is one of them. This ingredient is often found in hair gels, and it's one of the things that gives gels their hold. Now I know you are supposed to rotate products so this doesn't happen, and I do rotate them. But since I leave in my conditioners, I don't need all that stickiness in my hair, ever. Plus, you need stronger cleansers to remove sticky/ crunchy ingredients than you would with a product without them. I won't say that this ingredient would hurt your hair unless it really built up on there. If you want a little hold, a product with them in it is perfect for you. But after my sticky-note hair incident, I am staying away from it.

So alas, with a sigh I have to pass on this juicy conditioner, with its promise of shimmer, because I am paranoid. That and I hate having hair that can double as fly paper (along with a few other issues).

The story behind the wavy orange hair

As I've been finding old photos, all the stories behind each style come back to me. Every style I tried was an attempt to find the style: A 'do I could maintain, that would make my hair grow, and that I could feel good about wearing. This hair style was one of those stories:

It started out during 10th grade. I had recently gone after my hair with kitchen scissors and cut it short except for five braids I liked to put beads in. I loved the clink of the beads, but if I turned my head too fast, they'd swing around and hit me in the teeth.

I decided that in order to grow my hair, I needed to choose between either coloring it, or relaxing it (not realizing that because my hair is so fragile, neither is an option). Since I'd been relaxing it and that didn't seem to work to get it to grow, I thought maybe coloring it without relaxing might be the key. At the time, I didn't realize that lightening hair was nearly as damaging as relaxing. Looking back on it, I see how unhappy I was with just about everything my hair was. I wanted honey-brown hair, and I wanted it straight. I couldn't imagine wearing my own dark and curly hair (funny how things have changed, because I now can't imagine wearing my hair any other way).

So I lightened my hair with store bought color until it was a honey brown color, and wore it curly that school year (photo on the left). I actually began to enjoy those little curls, and I even started to think that maybe having curly hair wasn't so bad.

That summer I visited my mom in Kentucky. I spent a lot of time hanging out with my grandmother, who lived two houses down from us. I didn't know this at the time, but my African-American grandmother did not like curly hair. She tried to talk me out of the curls. I told her I actually liked them, and my hair was easier to take care of this way. For weeks she tried to talk me out of the curls, but I held firm. I wanted to keep them. They were my curls, and I saw nothing wrong with wearing the hair I was born with (I still wasn't quite there with wearing the hair color I was born with, but this was a big step in the right direction).

Then one day she tried a new approach. She asked me if there was anything about my hair I'd like to change. I said I did wish it was easier to comb. And then she had me. She said she knew how I could keep my curls, but would make it possible for a comb to just glide through them. That sounded heavenly, but I was worried it would take away the curls. And she said to me "You see, hair like yours can never have all the curls taken away no matter what. The only thing that will happen is that they will just get softer and easier to comb." Those were the magic words. I believed her, and I agreed.

My grandmother got a family friend to put the chemicals on my hair. Throughout the process I asked several times if I'd still have my curls, and she said yes. It wasn't until the process was over, and I was standing in the shower running water over my hair that it began to dawn on me what had happened. My hair hung down like a defeated cloth. I tried scrunching in curls as it dried. Nothing. My hair just fell back down. It lay there. The joyful curls were gone, and in their place hung crinkly orange straw.

Soon after, 11th grade started. The stringy hair hung in my face, so I cut the front down to about an inch with kitchen scissors (photo on the right after lots of scrunching. My hair was much lighter than it looks in the photo). Damaged beyond hope, the ends got lighter and lighter. When they approached a platinum color I'd cut them off.

I have since learned many things about my hair. One of them is that our hair is not lay down hair. Combs do not pass easily through spirited coils. That's just a fact. But the rewards for spending the time it takes to gently comb through wet and well conditioned hair is enormous. It is worth every minute of time I spend with the Denman to have the hair I have now. Hair with spirit means that it is happy and healthy. It sure beats limp and broken every time.

It's like this...

Here's the thing...I've been working on putting up more pages on the website, so I haven't written here for a bit. And I must also confess I've fallen behind in answering letters from the site, too (sorry about that). In a couple weeks, I'll be putting up a curly hair Ingredients Dictionary, along with a few other pages (such as a FAQs page) on the website (I'm so excited!). This is thanks in a huge part to Jon, who helps put my HTML and CSS code back together when I turn it into exploding spaghetti after working on it for even a few minutes, it seems. He is also the one making the ingredients dictionary manageable. If it were just me doing it, I'd have all the words on one VERY long page, and any poor soul who wanted to look up a word would have to scroll yards down the page to find their word. Because of his programming agility, words will be displayed letter by letter. He is in fact working on this as I type here (thank you Sweetie!).

As soon as the new pages are up and running, I will be back with more stories and product trials.

Not for me: Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating hair conditioner

When I left off last post...

I had found the Alba Botanica coconut milk extra-rich conditioner to be not only drying, but when I added enough product to clump my curls, it got flaky. I wanted to see if it was the guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride that was causing this. So I decided to try Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating hair conditioner, which had nearly identical ingredients, except that it was missing the guar hydroxypropyltrimonim chloride.

So a few weeks later, I tried the Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating conditioner. Just like the coconut milk version, things started out fine. The combing was nice, and it clumped okay. It was a bit light, and when my hair dried, I added more product to my ends. And sure enough, this time it didn't flake or glob! So I knew that guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride, though a fine ingredient for a product you will rinse-out (as far as I've been able to find), was not ideal for a product you were going to leave in your hair. This was fair.

Now the real test: was this ingredient also to blame for my hair feeling dry? Or because it was included in the ingredients, I wasn't able to use enough product to keep my ends together, and that just made them feel dry? Or was/were there other ingredient(s) lurking in there that caused the dryness and matting?

As the days wore on with the gardenia conditioner, my hair felt dryer. I'd put a generous amount on my ends, but when the product dried, they felt even dryer. Not good. By the end of the week, it seemed like I had little matted areas in my hair.

At the end of the trial week, when it was time to wash and re-comb my hair, I decided to comb with a stand-by very slippery conditioner, and used Paula's Choice Smooth Finish Conditioner. To my surprise, my hair took even longer than the usual two hours to comb and smooth. It was really matted. I grumbled to my guy, Jon, about how long it was taking me to get through my hair, and he said he'd noticed my hair had looked sort of matted this week. So that decided it. There was something in those products that was drying, and I needed to find out what it was! This way I could avoid it in future products and save my money.

During that time I was doing some reading and stumbled upon a mention that pineapple was drying (per Don't Go Shopping Without Me by Paula Begoun, pg 352), mostly because it has the enzyme bromelain in it. I know when I eat lots of pineapple, my tongue gets really raw. It's mostly from the the acidity, but also the enzyme action. So I checked back over the ingredients in both bottles of Alba conditioner, and saw that they not only had pineapple, but papaya as well (a source of the potent enzyme papain). I'm thinking this product is pH balanced (it says it is on the bottle—though I haven't used litmus paper on it to make sure)— so it's probably the enzymes in those two ingredients that made my hair dry and matted, not the acidity.

However, these two conditioners also have citric acid, which puzzles me: Citric acid is used to balance the pH in products that may be too alkaline by making them more acidic. Hmmm. I think I will get some litmus paper. If I find out anything, I'll post again about the results.

So from what I can tell, the pineapple and papaya were mildly exfoliating my hair, which was what was causing it to feel so dry. So now I know to avoid them in future products.

I do want to say I use Alba's cocoa butter hand & body lotion and am happy with it. It's just that products have to go through a much more rigorous process when it comes to my hair. I'm much easier going when it comes to lotion for my skin than for my hair.

Not for me: Alba Botanica coconut milk extra-rich hair conditioner

I do tend to find a few products I love, and then stop looking. Lately I've been trying out different combing/ leave in conditioners so that I could offer a wider range of conditioners I recommend. Before I recommend a conditioner, I check out the ingredients several times. If there aren't ingredients I know to be bad in the product, I look to see if it has ingredients that look moisturizing, will give my hair weight, and seem like they will help me comb through with my Denman with little friction. If the conditioner seems to pass these hurdles, it's only then that I'll use it. I comb it through my hair after washing, use it to define my curls, and use it to smooth my hair every day for a week, until it's time to wash my hair again. The conditioners that work, I recommend on the site.

I often get asked about what I think of other conditioners that didn't make the cut. So I decided I would write about the ones that seemed like they would work, but for one reason or another didn't.

The first one I tried was Alba Botanica's coconut milk extra-rich hair conditioner. I have a special weakness for tropical flavors like coconut and mango. On looking at the ingredients, it seemed to have good weight ingredients, good moisturizing ingredients, and lots of slip ingredients. I don't have a very sensitive scalp, so I generally don't worry about extracts and essential oils. Everything seemed good to go. I figured it would be a bit light, going by the ingredients, but that just means I'd use a bit more. Sometimes I wait until my hair is dry, then go back over the ends, putting in more product to keep my ends together.

The combing went well. I was feeling excited I'd be able to recommend another conditioner that I found at the health food store. The clumping action also seemed to go well. So far, so good. As I suspected, it dried a bit light. No big thing, I'd just add more to the ends to keep my curls together. It was at this point the conditioner started to go a bit wrong for me.

When I added more, it started drying up as a rolly white film that flaked out of my hair. Instead of keeping my ends together, it seemed to ball up in confused little particles. Not a good sign.

I tried for a couple more days to smooth water and this conditioner on my ends, but my ends ended up looking dry and covered in little flaky globs. I finally stopped using it and switched to smoothing a tried and true on my ends.

So then I was puzzled. What ingredient caused this product to gunk up? The next week I used one of my regular conditioners I love to give my hair a rest. The week after that I tried Shikai Natural Everyday Conditioner. It was wonderful. And it's basic working ingredients were similar to the Alba. What gives?

After comparing the ingredients of lots of products that worked, I saw a few things that this conditioner had that others didn't. One was guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride. My research of as many objective sources as I could find all seemed to agree that this was used to condition hair, and so far, I haven't found anything to say this is a problem ingredient. Which makes sense, because if I were to rinse it out, this wouldn't have been a problem. It's just that I leave good products in.

So to experiment, I decided to try another Alba conditioner that didn't have this ingredient, but was basically similar otherwise. In this way, I could see if this ingredient was the culprit, or if there was another ingredient in there that was making my hair feel so dry. I wanted to get to the bottom of the flaky bits that occurred if I used enough product to keep my ends together.

To be continued on the next post...

Teri and the Book Propsal

It's no secret that I'm a ferocious avoider. I can out-avoid anyone. I have been known to walk a mile or more to go to a different store if I feel I've managed to embarrass myself at a store a few block away. I've had letters and phone messages I wasn't sure about sit, undealt with, on my machine or counter for weeks or months. I actually had my contact lens prescription for my left eye expire before I was able to pick them up because I felt a bit weird that I only had the money to buy the right eye at the time. I once even climbed out of a bathroom window in high school just to avoid a person—who didn't even know me.

When I was originally writing my manuscript, I knew that in order to present it to publishers, I had to produce a book proposal. A book proposal is basically a long sales document describing your book, audience size and composition, and how (well) it might sell. I began to write mine early on, caught up in the spirit of getting things done, and trying to go against another part of my nature...to procrastinate (I come from a proud line of procrastinators, just ask my dad). A deadly combination when mixed with avoiding, let me tell you. But I decided to face the beast, and write the document.

I wrote and wrote. And one day, when still facing the bulk of it yet to go, I decided, true to my avoiding nature, that maybe doing the book myself might be the way to go after all. So I got to work on designing the book and getting it edited to print it on my own. In part to avoid writing the scary book proposal.

And then the universe gave me a huge gift, one too amazing to avoid...I got an agent. Who then needed a book proposal to give to the publishing companies she was approaching.

I have heard that the universe gives you lessons, and it will keep giving you a lesson over and over until you learn it. Thus it seemed to be with the book proposal.

I wrestled with myself for weeks, but prevailed, and finally finished the proposal. Thinking it was now out of my life for good, I gave it to my agent. I was so relieved to hand it over! It was almost like I felt the more I touched it, the more potential there was that I might mess it up. Like my proposal was a new baby bird and I had puffy mitten-hands. I was almost afraid to look directly at it (in my defense, this was the document that went haywire in Fire and the Infinite Loop, so I'm not completely a wackadoo about that one).

Late last week the proposal came back to me once again for a few more adjustments. I have a feeling this will be a lesson the universe may have to give me a few dozen more times (or more). Maybe one day I'll finally learn to face things head on the first time, instead of going around the block to avoid it, only to find it waiting for me there around the corner.