Tumbleweeds

I didn't want this blog to seem as if tumbleweeds were rolling through it because I wrote in it so little, so for now the blog and comments have been suspended. I'm just sort of putting it on hold for the time being, but if more things to say come up from time to time I will certainly post them.

For right now I want to put more time and energy into the site, to make it a better reference source, and I'm doing some writing, and I want to do a bit of painting, and at the end of the day there seems little room to give the blog the attention it deserves.

Thank you so much for visiting and reading the posts here! I'm sure I will still visit and write; I wanted to be let you know what what was going on with the blog.

In the mean time, you can always check out the site updates , or you can visit me on Facebook, or check out some of my art at terilaflesh.com.

Book Out Tomorrow!

Throughout the process of writing the book, drawing the pictures, and getting it published, it always seemed too good to be true. I kept thinking that at some point Wiley would change their minds, and I would be starting all over again. But here it is! The book is out tomorrow, and I can't even wrap my mind around it. If you get a chance, please stop by your local bookstore and ask them for a copy of the book. Thank you thank you to all of your support and your encouragement, tough questions, and thoughtful comments. You helped make this possible.

Energy and Hair

Most of my life I was obsessed with hair. I'd spend hours nearly every day poring through magazines for pictures of people with curly hair like mine, for information. I'd cut out those pictures and study them for hours trying to figure out how the models got their curls to look so lovely. I filled binder after binder with the pictures and spent hours going through them looking for clues. I'd try all the suggestions they gave for "kinky, curly, frizzy" hair, but none of them worked. I spent almost an entire day as a teenager every weekend, for years, miserable, trying to wash and set my hair. Every night I tried to set it so it wouldn't embarrass me the next day; every morning was a soul dampening exercise trying to style it in a way that made me feel less ashamed. It seemed like my hair fell outside of the realm of help.

Of course, there were things I didn't know at the time I do now. That my hair was so damaged from chemicals back then that very little could help it. And that the instructions the magazines gave were really for wavy hair, not hair like mine. And over the years I began finding pieces on my own how to care for my hair, the biggest of which was simply to stop putting lye-like chemicals on it.

Many years later I was working at a lab, and I loved my hair, and it was to my waist, and it struck me: I hadn't actually thought about hair in years. I hadn't cracked open a hair magazine, no longer hung out in beauty supply stores, no longer looked for books on hair care. I didn't talk about it much to anyone. Apart from the time I spent washing, conditioning, and combing my hair, I didn't think about it. My hair was simply no longer a big deal to me. It was my hair, I loved and accepted it, and that was it. And it was then I began thinking I might want to share what I'd learned, because apart from maybe a tiny piece here and there, I hadn't found any of it in one easy to reach place.

And it hit me also that my true goal was to help others have their hair no longer a big deal. That they could do their hair, and be done with it. That they could spend their energy and time focusing on something more important to them. I mean, it's one thing if you truly love obsessing on hair. But what about those of us who didn't really want to obsess about it?

So the site as well as the book are focused more for people who want to get in and get out. People who want to know what the heck to do with their hair so they can move on with their lives. That instead of using precious energy fighting their hair, that energy is used to create something wonderful and positive in their lives. And finally, not having to care that much if they get caught in the rain on the way there.

Dead Leaf Hair

Through all my high school years I wrote fanatically in journals. I wrote in tiny writing on both sides of loose notebook paper, often six pages a night. I bound all the pages between covers that clipped together with metal fasteners. When I got about 100 pages, or when I thought a new chapter in my life was starting, I'd begin another notebook. By the time high school, and then my brief year of college (the first time I went) was over, I had thousands upon thousands of angst-filled pages written.

When I visited my mom in Kentucky last July, I grabbed as many of my old journals as I could fit in my carry-on bag to bring back with me to Seattle. When I got back, I was thumbing through the journal I wrote right after high school, during the summer before college. In it was a chunk of the hair I dissolved with a relaxer. You can even see the words "dead leaf" right above the hair clump, which describes exactly how the hair that didn't totally dissolve or fall out of my head felt when it dried. It was so crunchy that I had to cut the rest of my hair off, and was basically left with a narrow fringe of hair at the back of my neck that the relaxer hadn't touched.

How did I manage to dissolve my hair with a relaxer, you ask? Well, it takes a special person to do something like that, I tell you. I had worn locs during 12th grade, but had put them in wrong, so they were little more than pieces of a large mat that I'd cut into strips to make my locs. So I cut those off at the end of 12th grade, and was left with my curly, and still damaged hair (because I'd been bleaching it auburn). Not knowing what to do with it, I fell back into old habits, and decided to relax it.

However, it had been well over a year since I'd relaxed my hair, and I forgot how to do it. This would have been okay, except I didn't realize I'd forgotten how to do it. I thought I knew exactly how to do it. But I was wrong.

I bought my first box (yes, that's right, my first box) of relaxer, opened up the big jar, and put it on my hair. I waited about 20 minutes, rinsed it out, and saw it didn't work. It wasn't until I looked through the box later that I saw the activator bottle I'd neglected to mix in with it. So I bought another box. My reasoning being that the first time didn't do anything at all to my hair, so I could do it all again with no problem.

I was wrong. When I went to rinse out the second relaxer, it gummed up in my hair and wouldn't rinse out. I went through all my bottle of neutralizer shampoo, and had to use some of the half-used bottles my mom had saved through the years as well. And as I finally rinsed away the relaxer, my hair came out too. When I was done, the sink was filled with hair, and the hair left on my head wasn't really even hair anymore.

And being the dutiful journaler I was, when I cut away this hair, I saved some in my journal, to properly record the day. And then I went out and bought myself my first weave.

New Improved Cover Is Out

I just got the newest version of the cover...the version that I think is going to be the actual, real live cover! It looks pretty similar to the old one, but just a bit more polished, and you can see more detail in my hair. I'm so excited!

I know I haven't been posting nearly as often as I'd like to...but I have been working on the site behind the scenes to add several new pages, as well as beefing up the answer bank with lots more fresh new answers. I do appreciate all the wonderful support I've had through this process! Thank you so much for reading. I truly am humbled.

The book is available for pre-ordering!

I know it's been a long time coming, but I still can't believe I'm writing these words: Curly Like Me: How to Grow Your Hair Healthy, Long, and Strong is available for pre-order!

Here's a bit about the book:

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (May 2010)

ISBN: 978-0470536421

WHERE TO PRE-ORDER:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Borders
• Indie Bound
• Wiley
• Coming soon: Books-A-Million

The simple secrets to growing healthy, long, naturally curly hair!

Do you spend countless hours— and untold dollars—on weaves, perms, salon visits, and products that promise to “cure,” change, heal, or make your hair more manageable, only to end up even more frustrated? Do you wrestle daily with hair you can’t get a brush through? Do you struggle to keep from hurting your child when you comb through their tight curls? Would you like to learn how to grow your tightly curly hair long and make it happy?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, this is the book for you. It gives the information and techniques you need to take charge of very curly hair. You will learn how not only to care for your curls, but also to cherish them, all the while saving time, effort, and money.

Curly Like Me is a complete beginner’s guide to tightly curly hair care.

Within it you’ll learn:

• Simple, easy-to-follow instructions with over 250 original photographs and illustrations
• Proper care, the best products, tools, and ingredients for curls
• Pain-free techniques on how to comb and style your curls, or your child's curls
• Over 30 easy curl-enhancing hairstyle ideas, tips for growing out your perm, and more

Say goodbye to broken, frizzy, damaged hair and begin your journey to naturally curly hair free from breakage and damage. Applying the ideas and information in this book will end the damage, frustration, and heartache of the past so you can love your hair the way it really is. Curly Like Me empowers you to take back the care of your own hair. It gives you the secrets to growing healthy, long, natural hair without costly treatments, products, marketing misinformation, or styles.

New Ingredients Dictionaries Have Arrived!

It's no secret I'm a total ingredients geek. If I could spend all day researching ingredients, I'd be a very happy person indeed. I have many ingredients dictionaries I use to look up ingredients to put in the Ingredients Dictionary on the site. I love the reference books I have, but they don't have nearly all the ingredients in the different products out there.

I've been coveting the mother of all dictionaries, the CTFA (Cosmetics, Toiletries, and Fragrances Association) dictionaries. These dictionaries are the industry standard. I'd requested them from my library previously so I could look up more elusive ingredients. My local library would borrow and ship in one volume from, like, a library in Ohio. But then I wasn't allowed to leave the building with it. I'd been wanting a copy of my own for years. New products come in all the time with ingredients that I can't even find out what function they serve in their product. And finally, we got the entire set of dictionaries (thank you, Jon!).

The reason for such massive tomes? In a few months, Jon and I will be offering a new feature on the site called ProductsGeek. It will give not only all the ingredients in any product, but you will also be able to get information about every individual ingredient within that product. Also, it will let you know what that ingredient does in the product, and if there's anything harmful to your hair in it. The service will also let you search for information on the ingredients in your product in multiple ways. This way you can see if a particular product you've been eyeing is worth the money to buy it or not. We're really excited about it, and building this feature is what we do in the evenings when we get home from work.

I've been happily petting our newest arrivals since I first pulled them out of their box, in such happiness they're finally mine. There will be few ingredients that escape me now!

Carol's Daughter Tui Hair Smoothie

After visiting it several times in the store, I finally decided to try a Carol's Daughter product. There were several conditioners all with very similar ingredients, such as the Tui Hair Smoothie, and the Black Vanilla Hair Smoothie. I liked the scent of both of them, but finally settled on Tui. I was hesitant about the Amodimethicone it has in it as the main slippery ingredient (for combing). I'm fine with Amodimethicone in something I rinse out, but because I haven't been able to pin down yet what exactly it's made of (it's a mixture), Amodimethicone makes me nervous. Also I haven't found it to be as slippery as other silicones, so I've found it doesn't seem to work as well for getting a comb through my hair.

That being said, I'm trying not to be so stubborn about trying new things, and I've been surprised at some ingredients doing a better job than I thought they would, so decided to give this a try.

Since the Tui Hair Smoothie is in a jar, it's a bit thicker than conditioners you can squeeze out of a bottle. I tried to be very careful to make sure my hair stayed very wet during the combing out process. However, the product becomes sticky quickly. I spent much time having to wet every section before combing it (usually I don't have to re-wet my hair once when I comb with a good conditioner). It was a struggle to get the comb through without tugging or getting frustrated. So, alas, I'm liking Amodimethicone even less as a slippery ingredient than before.

The Tui Hair Smoothie dried well, and my hair seemed to clump okay, so I was thinking maybe I could recommend it, but with a caution about combing, as I have with Blended Beauty.

As I do for all products, I use it for a week to see how my hair does after seven days using it to smooth my frizzies every morning. And after seven days, I hate to say, my hair had matted on one side. I mean, after a week, my hair is always a bit tangley, but generally it doesn't have a chunk of hair that's melded together by weeks end, that takes a long time to get a comb through during the following combing, usually. So because of both the difficulty combing it, and the matting afterwards, I can't recommend this product.

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews out there for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.

The book has a publication date!!

I am so excited to be able to write these words: Curly Like Me is set to come out early May of 2010!!

I haven't seen the cover yet—Wiley is still working on it—but I can't wait to see what it will look like!

(The above picture was one of the covers I was thinking about when I was originally going to print the book myself)

New hair tool!

In Bellevue there was recently a small arts fair. I wandered around for a while, and a girl who looked alot like me caught my eye. She had her hair pinned up, and it looked much like mine did when I wore relaxers, except hers looked way better than mine ever did back in the day. So I stopped to catch a closer look at her hair. By then, she'd gone into a booth, and when I made my way up to it, she was letting a vendor demonstrate a hair comb on her hair. Heck, I hadn't even noticed the combs, but he had one wall of his booth covered in large, shiny metal combs in all kinds of beautiful metal-worked designs, in bronze, copper and silver (as well as combinations of all three).

As I watched, she undid her hair, and he began to style it. At first I was struck that he didn't try to run his comb through her hair. He simply twisted it gently up, and slid in the comb. It went in easily. It stayed in. She commented how light it felt, how secure it was. Then he slid it out, and did another style. And another. And another. Each time the comb came out easily. There was no frizz. And the comb was sturdy enough to hold her hair. I was impressed. But cautious.

The woman and I bonded over our hair for a while and marveled at the combs before she headed on her way. I cautiously entered the booth, and looked over the combs. I asked what they were made of, and the guy said they were actually made of copper, bronze, or German silver (which he said is a very strong type of silver). He said there was a lifetime repair on these combs. I touched one. It was smooth and heavy. He offered to do my hair, but being not only stubborn but paranoid, I declined. No one touches my hair. But I had liked what I saw, so I picked out a comb to buy.

I took it up to him, and bought it. It was pricey—I won't lie. But worth it. Then he asked if I wanted to put it in a bag, or wear it. I hesitated for a moment (since I'd seen how gentle he and the comb seemed), and then I decided to live a little , and said "wear it". So he had me sit in his chair, and he began showing me many of the styles for this comb. He didn't even try to comb my hair. The styles easily went from one to the other. The comb slid in easily, held firmly, and came out without catching. Usually my hair is too heavy for me to put up comfortably. But this comb was big enough to evenly distribute the weight of my hair, so my hair actually felt light. He showed me about 6 styles in 5 minutes. He would have shown me more, but when he asked "Can your hair be separated?", I said that it couldn't (it can, but not easily, and I didn't want to take the chance of it being pulled apart). But I really appreciated that he asked. I had seen the half up, half down styles he'd done on a few other people who stopped by his booth, though.

He asked what style I'd like to wear out, and I chose what he called The Figure Eight Bun, which I'm calling a Split Bun. He simply swirled my hair into a high bun, split it in half, and slid in the comb. Below, I'm including some pictures of this style, along with a few others so you can get the idea of what this comb can do. (The first four photos show the Split Bun at different angles, including from the front. Two are the right and left sides of a French roll, and the last one is a loose bun I swirled around and pinned with the comb.)

Down the road, I'm thinking of collecting a few more of them. They are more like works of art that will most likely last me the rest of my life. For more information, you can check out his site (where you can order a comb, as well as check out many styles and the instructions for creating them) at www.simplistic-designs.com.

Product quest

One of the missions I had going to Kentucky (besides, of course, visiting my family) was to look for hair products there that I haven't been able to find here. I looked for the beauty supply shop I used to go to many years ago when I was living in Louisville, and was happy to see it still there. It used to be a big highlight of my week to shop for new hair products back in the day, hoping that maybe that trip I would find a miracle product that would stop my hair from breaking and get it to grow. Well, I never found that miracle product, but I sure enjoyed looking for it.

So this time I spent about an hour looking at all the hair products in the Beauty Supply store in downtown Louisville. On the three or so blocks before you reach the store, there are at least two wig shops that I counted, anyway. Inside this beauty shop I visited there was an entire isle devoted to weaves and extensions. I used to buy my extension hair there (mostly nylon), and when I wore weaves, I bought the hair at a store across the street.

It was fun picking up products, looking over all the shampoos, conditioners, hair dressings and lotions. I read through their ingredients and looked for products I might be able to try out so I could recommend them. I located about five possibilities. I know many ingredients to avoid, and many I like to see, by heart. But there are probably tens of thousands of ingredients out there, so I never know about every ingredient in a product, and therefore if a bad ingredient or two has snuck in, until I look them all up at home in my books.

I crammed the new bottles of products in my suitcase and brought them home to Seattle, eager to perhaps find a new one to use. I brought each one in to the room with my reference books, and began to look up the ingredients that weren't yet on the site. And wouldn't you know it, one by one, all of them had at least one ingredient that turns out I don't trust. Almost all of them had one sticky ingredient lurking under a poly- something. Some poly- somethings are okay, and others are sticky. And due to a bad experience I once had with major product buildup when I was a teenager, I always try to avoid things with these sticky ingredients in them (unless they're supposed to be there, like in a gel). Also, by avoiding sticky ingredients, I can use a very mild shampoo because there isn't that sticky buildup that needs removing by a stronger shampoo (or I could use a conditioner-wash, but I break out when I don't shampoo. Otherwise I'd go that way).

So with a sigh, and a realization I am truly paranoid and stubborn when it comes to my hair (well, more than just about my hair, but in this case, it's about my hair), my search continues for finding products I trust enough to use.

Something behind the door...

I'm back from Kentucky. I miss it already and wish there were some way to be both here and there at the same time. When I first got to Kentucky I told my mom at the airport that I'd written about her house and the raccoon. She said "Well, there's something else in the pantry now. " She said she didn't know what it is, but it sounds too big to be a mouse, squirrel or rat...maybe it's the other raccoon. They were only able to catch one of them. But she said you can hear it rummaging around in there, and when you go to open the door you can hear it frantically trying to scramble away, little paws making scraping noises as it tries to catch its footing and run before the door is opened. She said she always gives it a minute to escape before she opens the door. So I was instantly curious.

For the whole visit I listened for the thing in the kitchen pantry. And for the whole visit, the pantry was silent. I had the room right next to it, so perhaps hearing me moving around at all hours (when left on my own, I revert to my old ways of staying up until dawn, or later). But on the second to the last day of my visit, I heard it. Well, first I heard the squirrels in the attic running around. They were also dragging something. Maybe insulation or clothing, because it sounded like a blanket sliding across the ceiling. Soon after, I heard noises coming from the pantry.

At first I thought it was my mom searching for something in there, until I remembered she said she doesn't go in there anymore. So I got up, grabbed my camera, and approached the pantry door. As I turned the knob, I heard frantic scrambling, like a plump body falling over itself and slipping on boxes to get away. I must confess: I hesitated before flinging open the door. At the last minute I got this image of opening the door too fast, panicking the creature, and it now feeling cornered and with no other choice but to leap for my face in self defense. So by the time I opened the door it had vanished, leaving in it's wake a pile of violated boxes with their contents strewn all over the carpet. Not sure if the creature was huddled in an unseen hole somewhere amongst the boxes, I snapped a quick picture of the inside of the pantry (this is the above photo) and shut the door again, leaving it to continue with what it was doing.

My Mother's House

Last Fall, my mom had a raccoon outbreak. A raccoon (she suspected it was two of them appearing at different times) suddenly appeared in her kitchen from a hole no one knew about in the pantry. At first she was willing to work with it. Mostly it was there for Grey Kitty's cat food. The raccoon would raid the dry food dish, taking cat food and rinsing the pieces in the water dish, leaving a soggy floating mess in their wake.

She would put Grey Kitty's bowl of dry food on the kitchen table to hide it, but the raccoon would climb on the table to get to it. She accepted this, too. She told me about combing her hair and watching television in the living room and getting up to get a snack in the kitchen. As she walked into the kitchen, there the raccoon would be, on top of the kitchen table. It would watch her without moving, until she returned to the living room, then it would go back to eating. Later when she returned to the kitchen, it would be gone, leaving behind its calling card of the mess in the water bowl. Sometimes when she came into the kitchen to make dinner, it would be sitting on one of the chairs at the dining room table. As she fixed dinner it watched her from under the table, still sitting in the chair.

Others in the household were not as zen-like about the visitor. Grey Kitty would avoid the issue all together. He'd pretended there wasn't a raccoon on the table eating his food and just walk on by. My younger sister Chrystal would scream when she saw them and run from the room. My mom's husband Leon wasn't at all pleased with the new guests and wanted them gone. They tried to shut the pantry door, but then it seemed to be coming in from a hole a plumber had left in the bathroom floor.

This went on for a few weeks, until one day, for some reason, the raccoon became a vandal. My mom would wake up the next morning to find it had pulled cereal boxes down off the shelves, torn them open and dumped their contents all over the floor. It marauded through the kitchen while they slept, shredding apart anything plastic, including medication bottles, and throwing the contents about the room. It was then the raccoon had to go. Her solution was reasonable: she simply got a humane trap for it, caught it, and set it free in the woods far from her house.

When I visit her, the room I stay in is the back room of the house. At night (and often during the day), you can hear squirrels that live somewhere inside the roof and inside the walls. They scamper loudly all across the ceiling, sounding like they are actually in the room with you. They've even appeared inside the house, freaked out and hostile, on occasion.

Another thing about the house is the electricity. It's an old house, and the wiring has never been updated. One time when I came for a visit, as I was putting my bags away in the back room, I noticed a handwritten sign above a light switch by the door that said "Do not turn off". Curiosity overcame me, and I turned it off. Dramatically, all the electricity groaned to a halt in the entire house. My mom had to call the electric company to turn the power back on. Turns out an old friend had installed a ceiling fan in that room, but once the fan was in, the switch that turned it on and off now shuts off all the power. (That light switch is now duck taped in the on position looking like a silver cocoon against the wall.

In the back room I stay in, there are two outlets. On one wall by the television, the bottom socket doesn't work. I found that out the hard way during a visit when I plugged something into it. The outlet made a loud popping sound and a bright flash of light. Now most all the appliances for this room are plugged into two piggy-backed extension cords that stretch across the kitchen floor from behind the stove and across the back room.

One visit, as I was showering there, when I touched the hot water faucet, I could feel it vibrating with electricity. Not enough to hurt, but enough to give that creepy electrified feeling. Of course I told my mom about it, but like her philosophy with the raccoons (before they became delinquents), my mom felt that as long as it wasn't hurting anyone, it isn't worth all the fuss I was making about it.


My mom and Grey Kitty



The reason I'm writing about my mom's house is because tomorrow I am going to Kentucky to visit her. I love visiting her, and I love that house. To be there is like a totally different world. And now, in the summer, if you sit in the back yard after dusk swatting at the cloud of mosquitoes surrounding you, you can see something that fills me with such unreasonable joy that I can't even describe. Just as the sun is setting, the fireflies come out. They rise from the grass, winking yellow-green, rising to the trees. In a good year, they are so plentiful that it looks like the trees have been hung with thousands of tiny winking lights. Everywhere you look the earth is sparkling. And I can't imagine anything more beautiful than to stand in that tropical humidity, toes deep in emerald grass, surrounded by little winking stars in every direction.

Cornflake

My hair has managed to tangle around some impressively odd things. I've tangled myself into buttons, my bra strap, rings and earrings. I've gotten caught in the wood grain of cabinets at work as I passed, and it's nearly guaranteed I'll be caught in shrubbery when I walk in the woods. It catches on items on store shelves and knocks off onto the floor what it can't hold onto as I go by. It catches in notebooks and pens. But just when I thought I've gotten my hair caught in about every surface it can get caught in, my hair surprised me once more.

The other day I was peacefully eating a bowl of cornflakes while reading. I put a spoonful in my mouth, not paying attention, and discovered hair in my mouth, too. This is normal (it often sticks to my chapstick or gloss). But when I tried to pull it out, I found it stuck fast inside my mouth. The only way I was able to get my hair out was to open my mouth, and when I pulled out my hair, a cornflake came out too, still tangled in my hair like a crunchy fish on a curly fishing line. The cornflake rotated slowly at the end of my hair until I untangled it. Then I tucked my hair safely behind my ears, and went back to eating.

Aveda Dry Remedy Moisturizing Conditioner

I almost recommended it. Well, okay, I sort of did recommend it for a few days before too many things began to bother me. And I have to admit I was intrigued by it. I also had conflicting feelings about trying this conditioner. I've been wanting to add more variety to what I recommend on the site, but Aveda conditioners are so darn expensive. And I feel that they have basically the same working ingredients for your hair as less expensive brands—they simply throw in lots of exotic-sounding plant-water to sell it.

This is where my issues started to nag at me. It began to bother me that this product has several ingredients with very little objective information available on them. I hadn't heard anything bad about these mystery ingredients, necessarily. It's just that I like to read, from at least one unbiased source, what the function of each ingredient is. One ingredient in particular really got to me: Palmamidopropyl Trimonium Methosulfate. I spent hours trying to track this down. I mean, how can there be no references to this anywhere, not in any of my books on ingredients, nor online, except in listings of Aveda ingredients. How did Aveda get any information on this ingredient to use it in the first place, then? I tried lots of variations of it's name (sometimes companies like to change the way an ingredient is listed on their label by adding spaces, leaving off part of it and such). But no such luck. In desperation/ frustration, I even called Aveda (and if you knew how much I hate talking on the phone, you'd know this was quite a drastic action on my part). I asked the customer service representative if she might know of any objective source that would tell me what this ingredient did. Though very nice, instead of giving me an objective source for this ingredient's information, she simply told me the ingredient was "a conditioning agent". But if you think about it, it's not like she would tell me if this were a crappy ingredient in their product.

But I do like how environmentally conscious the company seems. And I want to recommend more products that work, so I tried it anyway. The combing was amazing. I tell you, it combs like a dream. This would be the conditioner to use if your hair is matting. (However, it dries very light, and isn't as moisturizing as other conditioners, so this might be best for hair that doesn't need as much weight and definition or moisture. Perfect for tangles, though. You can also wait for your curls to dry and smooth a bit more on the ends to keep them together. This would also be a good candidate for adding a little olive oil or jojoba oil in the bottle (about a teaspoon and shaking it hard) to make it more moisturizing.)

At first the scent caught me by surprise. I was expecting it to be sweet, but it smelled more like a bitter sap, and I didn't like it. Although, once it dried, the scent grew on me. It began to smell more like frankincense or myrrh, or another warm, smoky scent. Now (I say grudgingly) it may be one of my favorite scents. It may not be for everyone, though.

But those mystery ingredients started getting to me. Usually I gloss over the extracts. Extracts are in hair care products for show. They are so diluted by the time they are put in the product, and then they are in there in such teeny amounts that they are nearly non-existent. And what are they really going to do for hair anyway? Hair isn't alive, so it can't use vitamins and minerals and antioxidents. And if the extract or exotic oil is being marketed as moisturizing, simple olive, coconut, or jojoba oil would do the trick. And on top of that, if the extracts did have a function, the product would have to be labeled as a drug.

Then, as the last straw, I saw two extracts the bugged me. The first was styrax, which may be a resin, which means it could harden on the hair. However, I didn't see that concern mentioned in any of my books, and it's mostly used as a fragrance anyway. And it's low on the ingredients list, so it may be okay. But then...then I saw it had tomato extract. Not just of the fruit, which, though totally pointless in a hair-care product, is harmless. But then the label said it included the leaf and stem extracts—and those are toxic! (As are the leaves of potatoes, by the way. They are both in the Nightshade (Solanaceae) family). What on earth is that doing in there?! So that was it.

Grumbling and fussing, I pulled the conditioner off the site.

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.

Monster in a Box

When I took this picture last night of (most of the drafts) of my book as I've worked on it over theses past couple years, that was what popped into my head: Monster in a Box. This was actually the title of a movie by the late Spalding Grey, where he talked about writing a book that just got bigger and bigger, but he couldn't seem to find an end to it.

Though I have an ending for mine, I keep adding to it, so it grows and grows. But now it's time to stop adding, and prepare it. When I first started the book, I was planning on self-publishing it. I figured that since I was unknown, my time would be best spent learning typesetting, and print it myself. Through an amazingly happy turn of events, my book will be published by an actual publisher (Wiley). I just got the contract in the mail yesterday to prove it.

I know I am stunned, and absolutely happy. I've been writing books since at least the age of four. And soon I will have a real live book. The only thing is that it's due at the end of this month (ack!). I'm going to have to focus over the next week on getting it in the right format, so I don't horrify Wiley by turning in a mess. So I guess for the next week and a half, if you don't hear much from me, it's because I'm grooming my monster to not be so scary in the light of day, finally out of the box.

Thank you MixedChicksChat!

I had a great time on Mixed Chicks Chat! Both Heidi and Fanshen were very sweet and I had so much fun talking to them. It was a huge honor to be on their show. Though I was nervous (I'm always much more comfortable writing than talking. It's almost impossible to get me to talk on the phone in real life), they were absolutely wonderful, and asked great questions. If you want to listen, or to leave any comments, you can check out: Teri's Interview on Mixed Chicks.

A huge congratulations to Heidi on her book The Girl Who Fell From the Sky! I can't wait to read it. Heidi surprised me by suggesting she and I should go on a book tour together. I have no idea when my book will be out yet, but it floors me how cool that would be!

I'm going to be on Mixed Chicks Chat this Friday!

I wanted to give a quick update on what I've been doing. I don't want it to seem like I've disappeared or anything. I've just been doing most of my work behind the scenes. However, the big news is that on Friday at 3:00 pm PST I will be on Mixed Chicks Chat! I'm really excited! I have been a fan of theirs for such a long time, and it seems almost unreal that soon I will be talking to them. I've been visiting their sites for so long it's sort of like having a book you really love, and one day you find out you will get to talk to the main character (okay, I know, I'm goofy).

Other than that, Jon has been hard at work putting together the structure of the "Ask Teri" page, so that I will be able to offer a selection of questions and answers. This means that if you have a question, you won't have to wait on me to answer it. You'll be able to get the answer instantly, and maybe find the answers to a few other questions you didn't even know you had as well.

As for me, I've been reading lots of ingredients encyclopedias to give better and more comprehensive explanations about what is being used in products. Mostly, however, I've been working vigorously to answer emails from the site. I got behind when I moved, and a few other things came up unexpectedly, so now I'm working to catch up. So if I haven't answered you yet, I haven't forgotten!

Where have I been?

Snow outside our apartment at the end of December


I know it's been a while since I've posted...it's been a hectic couple months. For now I'm concentrating on catching up on emails from the site, adding lots more words and cleaning up the hair care products Ingredients Dictionary, and working on a few more pages to add to the site. I'm still here, I've just been doing stuff more behind the scenes.

Here are some of the pages Jon and I are developing (he does the code-magic that makes the pages I write actually work—you should have seen the idea I'd had for the Ingredients Dictionary if left to my own devices: one unimaginably long page with all the words on that. I couldn't imagine how long it would take to scroll down that thing):

Ask Teri: I get asked so many great, thoughtful questions. I feel it would be helpful to create a resource to share them and their answers so everyone who wanted to could learn from them.

Product Reviews: I get asked all the time what I think about other products not mentioned on the site. Here I will be able to post why I like or don't like a product, and it's ingredients good and bad.

Express Your Curls: Useful products adorned with curls and swirls (designed by yours truly) to celebrate the beauty of our curls.

I'll still be posting, but for now I'm mostly concentrating on getting as many resources to you as possible.

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?