Poop will make you beautiful

This is an old one, I know, but Nightingale Poop Facials are still around and people are apparently still paying good money to have bird droppings smeared on their skin. Some treatments combine good old-fashioned bird crap with ultraviolet light to create newer, trendier poop-based remedies. Does it work? I have no idea. Most articles that aren’t shilling the product directly are from health-and-beauty magazines with an incentive to reveal new beauty “secrets”, so I guess I may never know if poo is the next big thing in skin care.

Washing my hair with an avocado

Experiment

To determine whether avocado will work miracles on my hair.

Introduction

This site has a lot of things to say about avocados. Now, I like guacamole just fine, but I didn’t know people were going around calling these mushy football-shaped things “green gold”. My avocado face mask—supposedly the beauty secret of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan hotties—did not rejuvenate my skin with beneficial oils. Maybe putting some gross goo in my hair will work better.

Materials

Half of an avocado (This recipe also wants me to use an egg and some yogurt, but the only yogurt I have is fancy lavender-flavored stuff and I am not going to waste it in my hair.)

My head

A knife, fork, and bowl for avocado preparation

The wisdom of the ancients

Method

1) I cut the avocado in half and mashed it up. This fruit came from my school’s grocery store, where produce goes to die. It’s a weird reddish-brown color. I doubt it’s going to taste very good.

I didn't photoshop this picture. The avocado was really that red.

3) This avocado tastes all right.

4) I rinsed my hair and applied some avocado. Folks, if you’re planning on trying this at home, put the mixture through a blender first. Hand-mashed avocado is chunky and does not feel anything like a wholesome hair-care product.

Not pictured: dignity

5) I ate the other half of the avocado and communed with the spirits of the ancients.

How to use an avocado
Step 1: Apply to wheat thin
Step 2: Eat

6) When my hair was sufficiently stiff and gross, I rinsed out the avocado and towel dried it. This recipe says I should shampoo and condition my hair too, but that seems like a sneaky way of making the results seem better than they should be. If avocado has already made my hair sleek and beautiful, why do I need conditioner?

7) I let my hair air-dry and examined the results.

Results

A friend tells me that my hair feels “better than I expected hair with avocado in it to feel”, so I suppose that’s a pro-avocado recommendation. Even without shampoo or conditioner, my hair doesn’t really feel gross or unwashed. The picture doesn’t show it well, but my hair is very smooth now and shinier than hair should be. Seriously, I could blind someone with the reflection from my hair.

I know it's hard to tell because the light source is different, but my hair is dangerously shiny now.

Conclusion

Is my hair softer than it usually is after an application of commercial conditioner? Not really, but it’s not noticeably dry or greasy either. It’s also unbelievably shiny. If you’re dead set against putting artificial chemicals in your hair, or if you’ve recently inherited a fortune in swiftly ripening avocados, you might as well give this remedy a try.

(Update: My hair was really greasy and disgusting the day after, so you should probably use some shampoo after this treatment.)

24-Karat scam

Source

Are you tired of covering yourself in $100 bills? Does your skin suffer from an excess of money? Forget those plebian lotions and creams—now you can layer your face in 24-karat gold. Yes, you too can turn your hideous face into an eerie replica of the Mask of Agamemnon!



Actually, most of the gold facials on the market aren’t that expensive. Some of them are fake, most are snake oil, and none contain more precious metal than, say, a bottle of Goldschlager. The trick seems to be in the accessories. This video shows the application of one of these swanky masks. Before covering your face in bullion, you have to layer on a “serum” that keeps the gold in place. My guess is that the serum is the real deal, and the gold is an exfoliant at best. But hey, if you’ve got money to waste, go right ahead and lacquer your face with whatever you damn well please.

Healing my pain with a magnet

Experiment

To determine whether magnets will “increase ion exchange, increased blood circulation, and increased oxygen flow to the cells and especially the white blood cells”.

Introduction

Magnets are freaking amazing. They’re stronger than gravity, they make your refrigerator festive, and they turn ferromagnetic fluids into dancing alien sculptures. For millennia, people have been picking up magnets and applying them to afflicted body parts in the hopes that anything that awesome must have some kind of magical healing properties too. A lot of magnet-related healing guides operate under the assumption that blood has iron in it, and magnets attract iron, so blood must be magnetic. A few sources go even further and claim that magnets can treat both physical and emotional pain. Magnets are just that cool.

Materials

Fridge magnet

Bad cramp

Spare time

Method

1) I woke up yesterday with a serious cramp on the right side of my neck, so that’s taken care of.

2) This magnet is so strong that I had a hard time peeling it off the fridge, so I’m sure it’ll increase my ion exchange like nobody’s business. I couldn’t find any articles advocating for or against comical Bushisms on your healing magnets, so I’m going to assume that political humor is not known to interfere with magnetic fields.

I is learning about magnets today

4) I applied the magnet to my neck.

3) Isaac put a magnet on his head in solidarity.

4) I didn’t experience any gentle tingling under the magnet, as my sources told me I would, but I think my neck cramped up a bit more because I was holding it in an unnatural position to keep the magnet in place.

5) After about a quarter of an hour, I took the magnet off and examined the results.

Results

My neck is still cramped, and now it feels even worse because I had to hunch over and learn to the side to keep the magnet in place. Isaac claims he “feels at peace in a way he never felt before”, so maybe the religious humor on his magnet was better at moving ions around. Holistic healers, it’s time to look into the curative power of Jesus jokes.

Conclusion

I think Isaac has been bribed by the powerful pro-magnet lobby.

Inner peace?