History rewritten

There's an iconic picture circulating around the web of a group of female firefighters at Pearl Harbor, supposedly taken on December 7, 1941. [It wasn't and here's an article about that.] Nevertheless, the picture, shown below, strikes me as amazing for a couple of reasons.

First, it's of female firefighters at a time when women were still considered the fairer sex. Sure the war changed things, and women who had to step into traditionally male roles proved they could do more than bake cookies and make babies. Nevertheless, it's humbling to see these courageous women at work doing something so few women even do today.

Second, the ethnic diversity strikes me. There is a black woman, a Hawaiin woman and several Caucasian women, all working together during a time when diversity wasn't embraced or mandated as it is today. There's another new perspective for me of a time when I thought things were a certain way, and it turns out maybe they really weren't.

The third thing I notice about the picture also tells me that some of the historical facts we're bombarded with today, just may not be true. The 'fact' I question is that all those years ago people were slim and healthy because they ate fresh whole foods and exercised more. I look at these women, and I see courage and strength, but I don't see bony physiques and slim silhouettes. They're not supermodel shaped, thus evidencing the fact that back before the standard "American diet" took effect and began making everyone fat, women still weren't skinny.

In this related photo you can see it clearly. None of these women is slender. At a time when the fashion was the cinched waist and flouncy hips, these women didn't have an hourglass shape. I wonder how Dr. Oz or all the other weight loss and "health" gurus would deal with them. Eat less and exercise more? Who's got time for that when you're busy protecting the country? Seriously.

I have no doubt there are plenty of photos from this time of the ideal woman with perfect measurements, but I have the feeling she was no more 'average' than the size 0 supermodel is today. This picture shows women living life as it should be lived, not munching rice cakes and sweating on a treadmill or dancersizing. That's how to stay healthy and be real - do what needs to be done. Stop counting calories and fat grams and striving for the perfect BMI and go put out some fires. 

Product Review: Sally Hansen Salon Effects

I got back into nail polish in a big way this year, after years of not having the time or the patience to mess with a manicure. I decided one day that I needed more color in my life and went hog wild buying new colors.


Then I remembered all the reasons I gave up nail polish in the first place. The smell is headache inducing. The bottles can spill, and you can’t clean nail polish off of most things. You have to sit around waiting for your nails to dry and if you don’t, they get smudged. After a day [or five minutes] the polish chips. The nail polish remover stinks, and lastly, if you’re not coordinated, one hand looks good and the other one looks like a first-grader painted it.

I ran across Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail polish strips at CVS where they cost about $10.00 for a set that will do one manicure. Pricey, but if you compare – there are some bottles of nail polish that cost at least that much, and a trip to a salon for a live manicure would cost even more. I decided to spring for a pack in purple and I tried it out.

The effect is actually pretty cool. You get a very shiny look that stays shiny. You have, as the package says, no dry time, and you get some very cool patterns to choose from as well as nifty, bright solid colors. The set comes with a three-surface emery board and a cuticle stick as well as 16 strips. My favorite part is, once you apply a strip, the nail is done. You can stop in the middle of a manicure and answer the phone, dig the remote out of the couch cushions, pet the cat, whatever and it will have no effect on your nails. No sitting around blowing on your hands or waving them around just so you can go to the bathroom.

Those are the highlights. The con column is a bit more populated.

For the price, you get ONE manicure. A bottle of polish ranging from $1.99 to $9.99 can do multiple manicures and last for years.

You get 16 strips, which seems like a nice amount. In case you screw up the original 10, you have six more to play with. But why not 20? The application of the strips is fairly simple, so it’s hard to screw one up. Both times I’ve used the strips, I’ve had six leftovers.

The leftover strips are useless. You can’t save them. After a time, they become somewhat brittle, you can’t peel them off their backings, and they rip if you try. You could use one of the two packaged sets of 8 – and do an odd nail on each hand to get two manicures out of the pack, but once you open the foil pack they come in, those strips are done.

There is a mess. Once you’ve peeled your polish strips, shaped them to your nails and pulled off the excess, you have thin cellophane strips all over the place and torn pieces of nail strips that are still sticky on the back. Granted they’re not too hard to clean up, but there’s a pile of little pieces that can be a nuisance.

The polish does chip, just like regular polish. And of course, with no bottle of that color, you can’t do a touch up. I solved the chip problem by cutting my nails after a couple of days, which made the manicure last another week, but don’t be fooled. You’d be hard pressed to get 10 days out of the manicure as the package promises.

There is a faint smell. It’s nothing like when you open a bottle of polish, but there is some mild chemical odor. Not enough to be a deterrent, but it’s there.

Removal still requires regular nail polish remover [which stinks] and the strips come off in layers, first the color, then the white base, so it takes some work to get your nails completely clean, more so than with most liquid polish.

Overall, I’d give Sally Hansen Salon Effects a C+ - they’re fun to work with, it’s a different process than applying nail polish that circumvents some of the nuisance of liquid polish, but the price and the chipping problem take away from the idea that this is a perfectly convenient alternative to liquid polish.

Back with a vengeance

I’ve seriously neglected this blog for a lot of reasons, chief among them the feeling that it was becoming just a place to rant and I wasn’t sure how much negativity I wanted to spout into cyberspace.

On the other hand, I do need a place to vent about things that irk me, especially the things in cyberspace that irk me. So I’m back.

What got me started on the need to vent was this puff piece I stumbled across by Susan Cheever of SELF magazine, who opines that being nice can make people fat, because apparently her lack of assertiveness resulted in weight gain and therefore everyone should learn to be mean in order to lose weight.

Like most of the media-drugged masses, Cheever thinks she’s found that simple trick everyone craves in the race to weight loss. She’s noticed that the nice people she knows are overweight, the jerks are skinny – hence, ipso facto, being nice must make one fat.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Isn’t it?

She goes on to explain how learning to say ‘no’, and subsequently being a bit rude and self-centered shaved 25 pounds off her, and also got her invited to fewer parties. I suppose it’s better to be thin than to be liked.

What’s interesting is that Cheever let’s her readers in on the real reason for her weight problem in the beginning of her article. It has nothing to do with her kindness or sensitivity, but her dysfunctional family attitudes about food and weight.

Everyone is so busy blaming obesity on the wrong things – we’re too nice, we have fat friends, we watch too much television, we eat too much fruit, blah, blah, blah. Let’s face it, we all know the real reason the population is gaining so much weight – it’s because the diet industry wants us to. How would they make billions of dollars if we were all as thin as they promise us we can be?

Diet books, diet shakes, diet gurus, diet reality shows – all encourage dysfunctional eating. Lose weight, gain it back, starve yourself, gorge yourself, strip out nutrients from your diet, overeat to compensate, fill yourself up with pills and shakes and bulking agents, rice cakes and Slim Shots, and when you gain it all back, someone else is there to tell you the only reason you failed was because you did it wrong and you just have to follow THEIR diet plan for lasting success.

I’m tired of it all, so the gloves are off. I’m done being nice – not because I expect it will help me lose weight [it won’t] but because there needs to be a counterpoint to all the blathering about how easy it is to lose weight if you just know the right thing to do or the right way to be.

Unhealth and Beauty

I was never a big fan of Brooke Shields. Nothing against her personally, I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but her movies aren’t on my hit parade.

No matter. It’s not her movies that get under my skin, but the choices she makes when it comes to hawking products on TV. She’s a big advocate of toothpaste – which I have to admit, can be useful. I like minty-fresh breath as much as the next person though I’m beginning to worry about fluoride. [That’s a topic for another post]. Ms. Shields’s recent car commercial was just ridiculous – something about women getting pregnant just so they could buy a certain type of car? Someone at the ad agency dropped the ball with that clunker, but the worst of the lot has to be the ads for Latisse, a prescription drug for growing longer eyelashes.

This product recently made a list of the decades worst beauty products which is not surprising. I find it baffling that anyone is in such dire need of longer eyelashes that they need to paint a drug on their eyelids. I also find it hard to believe that Ms. Shields suffers from a clinical eyelash deficiency, also known as eyelash hypotrichosis.

Speaking from experience with ophthalmological drugs, I can say, it probably does work. My son suffers from glaucoma [he was born with it] and he relies on the medication Xalatan to help control intra-occular pressure in his right eye. The side effects of Xalatan include lengthening of the eyelashes and darkening of the iris. So far his right eye has not changed color despite his having used the drug for the past eight years, but his lashes have grown considerably – so much so that we have had to cut them to keep them from brushing against his glasses.

I looked up eyelash hypotrichosis and didn’t find much about the condition that wasn’t directly linked to ads for Latisse. It makes me wonder if this ‘condition’ is something that really doesn’t pose a problem for the majority of humans. It’s interesting that ads for the medication talk about growing ‘longer, thicker, darker lashes’ but don’t mention much about the medical problem of not having enough eyelashes. It seems to me that Allergan [the maker of Latisse] is plugging a beauty product in its ads more so than a medicine.

I would love to hear from someone with eyelash hypotrichosis or anyone whose doctor has prescribed Latisse. Do you think this is a breakthrough drug that will offer relief to people suffering from a serious medical disorder, or do you think it’s a poorly thought-out beauty gimmick designed to bring the need for longer, thicker lashes out of the OTC makeup game and into the pharmaceutical arena?

Is Latisse a bad beauty product because it's really a medicine? Or is Lastisse a bad medicine because it's really a beauty product?