I Didn't Shampoo My Hair For Three Months And This Is What Happened!

My friend has the most beautiful (bleached) white-blonde, shiny, healthy hair. I discovered her secret finally when I showered at her house.

"I use Wen," she said. It's basically an everything-in-one. A shampoo, conditioner, leave in conditioner...mix it with water and you get a hair toner! Smooth your frizzes!

I pumped several pumps and combed it through my hair. When my hair dried I felt like I had a halo around my head; it looked so shiny and healthy!

I checked up the prices. $32 for this stuff that lasts you only a month?! I couldn't bring myself to buy it and started looking for other alternatives.

Some online solutions included make-your-own with 3:1 shampoo:conditioner, and some people were adamant about "no poo" (aka no products whatsoever). I kind of like my hair smelling nice and looking shiny, so I came up with another theory when I thought about a simple science project back in middle school.

Water + alcohol + oil = emulsification.

Those are the exact ingredients of conditioner, which means, theoretically you can wet your hair, emulsify the grease and dirt from your scalp, and wash it all out with water.

I tried this and for three months I used conditioner to wash my hair. It was healthy, shiny, and smelled just fine. I got less split ends, and my hair never looked greasy after a wash. I alternated conditioners and found that all of them worked, although I avoided the ones with silicon to prevent buildup.

Once in a while I'll shampoo my hair or mix small amounts of shampoo into my conditioner, but now I don't really stress about needing to shampoo my hair. It's no longer a necessity.

I'm going Vegan for my Face

In 2001, I decided that my favorite color was purple.
In 2011, I excitedly went to the drugstore and bought 2 purple eyeliner pencils (one dark, one bright).

Armed with these two beauties, I embarked on a journey to the Mediterranean.

EVERY TIME I applied either of those products, my eyes became sore, swollen, bloodshot, and I looked like I had an intense eye infection. It was so bad that I had to wear glasses for three days to wait for it to subside.

I attributed it to a bacterial infection, and my friend adopted the makeup despite my warnings (she was fine).

Three years later, armed with a little more money in my pocket, I sauntered into Sephora and picked up two PURPLE waterproof eyeliners from Makeup Forever (one dark, one bright), thinking that for sure, EXPENSIVE makeup should be fine.

Same thing, even with the expensive makeup. Some foundations and mascaras produce the same effect, and lipsticks sometimes make my lips peel.

I quickly did a google search about being allergic to purple makeup, and many before me had the same problem! It was attributed to a dye called "carmine", or crimson lake, cochineal, or natural red 4.

Carmine is a "natural" red dye derived by boiling powdered dried insect and adding aluminum/calcium salts. The red color comes from the intestines/shells/eggs of the insect.

"In the 19th century, lipstick was colored with carmine dye. Carmine dye was extracted from cochineal, scale insects native to Mexico and Central America which lives on cactus plants. Cochineal insects produce carminic acid to deter predation by other insects. Carminic acid, which forms 17% to 24% of the weight of the dried insects, can be extracted from the insect's body and eggs. Mixed with aluminum or calcium salts it makes carmine dye (also known as cochineal)." -Wikipedia

Who would have known we humans have been rubbing insect juice all over our faces and lips all these years?

From now on I'm going to search and use vegan products.
Here are a few links to "vegan" makeups:


http://www.pinterest.com/tmbabw/carmine-cochineal-free-organic-natural-make-up/
http://carminefreecosmetics.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.ecouterre.com/crushed-red-bugs-are-in-your-lipstick-too/cochineal-beetle/
http://makeup.about.com/od/lusciouslips/tp/CarmineFreeLipstick.htm
http://www.goodguide.com/ingredients/232995-carmine


This is just for my face, for now. Food Veganism might happen when I am allergic to chicken.

What would you talk about at a Ted Talk?

"What would you talk about at a Ted Talk?"

My friend Charu recently spoke at TedEx. She and I met last summer, but both of us had also traveled on Semester at Sea in the past. Her speech was on taking risks, and that’s part of what I love so much about her. She asked me what I would talk about in a Ted Talk, had I been invited, and I sifted through my brain for all of my travels, and passion for dance, and people I met. But perhaps beyond the point, I wanted to speak about changing regret to knowledge, because that’s one of the biggest obstacles I’m working with right now.

I’m a dweller. Although I seem happy and friendly most of the time on the surface, I spend huge amounts of time dwelling in the past. I remember that one time I didn’t get to go to the fourth grade sleepover and went to Chinese class instead (everyone else’s parents let their kids skip class). When I didn’t save that kitten from the landslide earlier when I was eight years old, and it had died of the cold. And that I quit karate because I didn’t finish my homework in time one night.

Needless to say, my parents and my ex probably had the hardest time with all of this. Every little thing reminded me of something I could have, should have, but didn’t do differently in the past. You could imagine the arguments my ex and I had. “Remember that ONE TIME three years ago…how can I trust you now?”

I am the worst “what if” person I know. I was the day-dreamer in lower school, you know, the creative one who was able to write all these stories about why zebras have stripes. But I also created alternative scenarios and dreamed of a time machine.

After all of these years, I knew my regrets were causing more harm than good. I remembered a lot of things in which other people wronged me. I would go back, rewind, replay, and try to come up with alternative scenarios.

One time (a few years ago) someone very, very close to me asked me how school was going. I, of course, complained about the things I should have done. “Oh, well, Econ was awful, the instructor I got was lazy, and I didn’t learn a thing…I don’t know why I didn’t take these classes in high school or chose a different major..”

He listened patiently, and then softly cut me off. “Why don’t you stop looking into the past and start looking into the future?” He said.

I froze.

Suddenly all the hairs on my body stood up. Only a year before that he had almost died in an accident that left his right wrist and hand crushed, front teeth chipped, and one of his legs permanently damaged and shortened. He was talking to me from a wheelchair, and he needed assistance to go to the bathroom. And he was right! He was never going to run or play tennis or the violin again. And here he was, looking into the future whereas I was still trying to justify my past. I was ashamed and thought about what he said for years to come.

My girlfriends often call me up when they need someone to give them encouragement, or support, or to kick their asses. I’m kind of their Crisis Speed-dial Psychologist, and I always did it happily. Whenever they told me about a bad situation, I always tried to flip it around to see the other side of it. It was difficult to do so when angry, but if you make an effort, it’s actually possible. I realized that the first thing I did was call my girlfriends back; when something was upsetting me. But I can’t possibly be able to call someone ALL the time for every little thing.

So I’m starting to experiment with myself. Whenever I was upset, I’d think: why am I upset?

I asked Charu’s question to *Chad. “What would you talk about in a TedTalk?” He didn’t have to think very hard. He’s pretty much the opposite of me; by the age of five he knew he wanted to be a cancer biologist. That was the year he lost his dad to cancer. He began acing every test from the first grade onward. He got rejected from his Dream School. Twice. And he got in. Twice. He’s building and testing a molecule, that someday probably will cure cancer, and he already has a patent under his belt.

It made me think: *Chads, or the natural non-mopers, are extremely rare in this world. My end of the extreme (natural dweller) is much more common in comparison. Most people are somewhere in between. And since changing what thoughts pop into my mind is impossible (I’ve tried for years, it’s who I am), I can at least try to change HOW I’m thinking about it. So let’s go back to that Tradecraft moment. I’d isolated what had happened, but now my next job is to extract value out of it. What did I gain, and how am I going to use that knowledge?

Think things through before blurting.
Pay attention, pay attention, and double check.

I don’t want to be a person full of regrets. I want to be a person full of knowledge.

*name changed

Why do we love chocolate?

WHY does chocolate make us feel good? Why do we love it so much? Why does chocolate taste so good?

Apparently, chocolate has 380 known chemicals; therefore it’s really hard to say exactly which ones make us feel happy. Adam Drewnowski at UMich researched the production of opioids in chocolate consumption, which induce a feeling of euphoria and dulls pain. According to Drewnowski, if opioid receptors are blocked, chocolate consumption decreases.

There are three substances in chocolate identified that can“act as cannabinoid mimics either directly (by activating cannabinoid receptors) or indirectly (by increasing anadamide levels).” Anadamine is a lipid that is normally found in the brain; it can bind to the same receptors as THC and produce a similar feeling as “being high” on marijuana. There are chemicals in chocolate that act like THC and trigger dopamine releases. Additional research indicates that there are two chemicals in chocolate that inhibit the breakdown of anandamide, which, usually, without the help of chocolate, breaks down quickly. Thus, on a tiny scale, we can "get high" on chocolate.

So should chocolate be illegal? After all, people could become addicted to it and gorging on chocolate may very well induce a chocolate coma. Whereas THC activates many receptors throughout the brain, chocolate’s effect is more limited because anandamide and the other two compounds are found in more localized areas. In fact, the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that a 130-pound person would have to eat 25 pounds of chocolate at one time to get any marijuana-like effect. Chocolate also contains phenylethylamine, a chemical related to amphetamines, which can cause blood pressure and blood sugar levels to rise, which can also increase alertness and contentment.

In this era, however, chocolate produces more complex feelings than we would have expected. Alongside the feel-good dopamine effects, chocolate has also been known to cause feelings of guilt, which detracts from the positive emotional effects. According to Macht, in “Everyday mood and emotions after eating a chocolate bar or an apple,” these emotions are probably due to negative food-related cognitions. For most cases, participants who ate the chocolate felt a more significant mood improvement than just eating the apple alone. However, the limitation of the study was that the caloric difference and macronutrient content of the apple and chocolate were different. There are complex variables to be studied on chocolate and mood affection.

These studies have not addressed the fat and sugar combination, which has found to be so addicting in almost 30 studies done in the US in the year of 2010. According to Abraham’s article, some scientists have found that when shown pictures of their favorite high fat/sugar foods, compulsive overeaters experienced a surge of dopamine in their orbital frontal cortex, the same area that lights up when cocaine addicts are shown a bag of white powder. Thus perhaps it’s the high sugar and fat content in chocolate that makes it so addicting.

No matter whether it’s the macronutrient makeup or the 380 chemicals that may have to do with it, chocolate has become our guilty pleasures. I guess I never understood how my high school friend, Bonnie, always managed to get such good grades, but she always ate a piece of chocolate right before exams. Perhaps she had done research on how phenylethylamine could have increased her alertness.


Works Cited
Abraham, Tamara. (2011). Are cupcakes as addictive as cocaine? How high-sugar processed food can have same effect on the brain as drugs. dailymail.co.uk.

Kuwana, Ellen. (2010). Discovering the Sweet Mysteries of Chocolate. Neuroscience For Kids. http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/choco.html

Macht, Michael & Dettme, Dorothee. (2006). Everyday mood and emotions after eating a chocolate bar or an apple. Appetite, Vol 46, Issue 3. Pages 332-336.

—Side note—

In my research I also came across a study of scented chocolate lotion and chocolate consumption. There have been dieters in the past who’ve said to “sniff” a certain food and stop craving it, but the study showed that those who wore the lotion ate more chocolate chip cookies when given the opportunity! So if you’re trying to curb your chocolate addictions, it’s better to stay away from constant stimulation…