Laser-Potatoes

The internet is a harsh mistress. She offers you wonder drugs and easy DIY projects, but somehow all those ideas that looked great on your screen don’t quite work in the real world.

Now that consumers are hesitant to throw away their money on $200 face cream and 24-karat facials, beauty publications are recommending cheap solutions that, well, seem a bit dubious. Should you moisturize your skin by spraying yourself with milk? Can you wash your face with an avocado? Will your hair get shinier if you rub it with coffee grounds?

The answer is almost certainly no, you can’t replace scar-removal laser surgery with a potato or melt fat with apple cider. If the cures for bad skin, depression, dull hair, obesity, the common cold, and so on are already sitting in our kitchens, why would anyone buy expensive (and often equally useless) products? Why, if these miracle foodstuffs are so readily available, aren’t advertisers leaping at the chance to tell you how much coffee is in your shampoo or how many potatoes they’re using to fuel their lasers?

This is what I found when I looked up "laser potato"

Still, every once in a while someone suggests a cheap, common product that actually does live up to the hype. Baking soda really can substitute for a variety of abrasive cleaning products. Vinegar can do more than make your salad taste good. If there is in fact a miraculous product lurking in my refrigerator, I want to know about it—even if I do have to rub a lot of crap on my face just in case.

I can’t afford fancy-pants double-blind tests and research assistants and data collection. Those things are for real scientists, and I hope to god real scientists are not researching the cleansing power of avocados. My only test subject is myself, and my laboratory is my fridge. My experiments will be messy, gross, and of dubious scientific value--but they will be delicious.