Bizzare Beauty

An Explanation

2009-04-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

This blog really requires an explanation if I'm going to leave it public -- and the story's too good not to share anyway, so here it is:

Over the summer of 2008, my wife and daughter decided to color their hair with henna -- no big deal, but you have to understand our parenting philosophy: Since we live in a society where everyone will wind up in therapy one day anyway, we want to make sure our kids get their money's worth.

So on the way into the bathroom to start the coloring process, my wife whispers to me, "When we come out, tell her you looked it up on the Internet and henna has something disgusting in it, like dog crap."

Now, my daughter was thirteen at the time and had lived with me since I met her mother 7 years prior ... as such, she knows me pretty well and has the good sense not to believe anything I tell her without verifying it through independent sources. So I know she's not going to believe me if I just say henna has dog crap in it.

But this is the Information Age and technology has a solution to every problem, including tools to help us torment our children. Enter Blogspot.

While they're in the bathroom with henna on their heads for half-an-hour, I right-quick get on Blogger and create this blog. I throw a few blank posts up to make sure there's numbers and dates in the archive, and then I write this: http://bizzarebeauty.blogspot.com/2007/02/henna.html

The girl-child comes out with her hair all colored and I point her to that link -- nothing more. She buys it hook-line-and-sinker. It's a beautiful thing to watch her walking around for two weeks thinking she'd colored her hair with dog crap.

There are also, of course, the added bonuses of being able to call her "shit head" and watching the sheer delight with which her little brother tells everyone.

Possibly the most amusing aspect is that she has a friend who does henna temporary tattoos -- my daughter, of course, has to ask this friend if she knows henna has dog crap in it and the friend replies:

"Oh, yeah, I knew that."

Oh, to be a teenager and have to appear cool all the time again.

Why all the empty entries?

2008-06-11T13:27:00.001-07:00

Aryn,

You are so damn gullible. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

Daddy

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2008-03-02T12:22:00.000-08:00

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2008-03-01T12:22:00.000-08:00

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2007-06-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

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2007-05-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

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2007-03-01T12:23:00.000-08:00

Henna

2007-02-01T12:08:00.000-08:00

Henna, first used as a hair and skin coloring by Egyptians in the fourth century B.C., is a mixture of several primary ingredients:

Acai berry juice;
The leaves of the wickerwill plant, native to Northern Africa;
Dried canine feces;

The ingredients are traditionally mixed together with water added to form a paste. In some villages the wickerwill leaves are chewed by elder women of the tribe before being added to the mixture. The act of chewing, in combination with the women's saliva acts as a catalyst, enhancing the potency of the henna mixture.

After being thoroughly mixed and cooked to reduce the water content, the henna is either kept in paste form (for immediate application) or dried to a powder for long-term storage.

Henna is used as both a hair coloring and, in paste form, as a topical application for temporary tatooing.

The packs of dogs kept to provide feces for henna production are widely desired and highly prized by their owners. The diet and environment the dogs are kept in affects the quality of the feces, impacting both the depth of color and how long the color lasts in the finished henna product.

For best results, top packs are fed solely on a diet of raw, red meat. The high iron content of this diet passes through to the feces, resulting in an extremely dark stain for topical applications or a more vibrant, brighter color when applied to the hair.

In Europe, some "hennas" are made with artificial replacements for the canine feces, but United States import laws prohibit the labeling of any product as "henna" if it has not been manufactured in the traditional manner.

However, to avoid public distaste for feces in the United States, it is allowable to list the ingredient simply as "henna" or "lawsonia inermis", rather than the full mixture.

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2007-01-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

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2007-01-01T12:23:00.000-08:00