Organic self-experiment
Brazilians + Formaldehyde: Not a Good Thing for Your Hair
Today the New York Times featured an article on the risks of having a Brazilian Blowout. I was so struck by this photo by Richard Perry – I felt like it captures perfectly the dangers women will subject themselves to in the pursuit of beauty. Apply formaldehyde to your hair to make it look Supermodel-straight?…
Read MorePokeberry: A Natural Dye that Acts as a Lymph Cleanser
Pokeberry, which grows around my home as a weed, is a natural lymph cleanser. Synthetic dyes are associated with allergy, asthma, bladder cancer and cause genotoxicity. Some synthetic dyes mimic estrogen in the body. Poke is a beautiful example of a dye that can create gorgeous color, and actually improve your health. This is a…
Read MoreD15 of August Break: My Favorite Natural Dyes
Oak galls (or Oak apples, as they’re sometimes called) fascinate me. They are a result of the puncture of the bark of an Oak tree by the female Gallwasp, Cynips Gallae-tinctoriae, who lays its eggs inside. Five to seven cm in diameter, they make a smokey grey or black dye. Beautiful. Thank you to Rebecca Burgess…
Read MoreGet Your Alkaline Broth Right Here
When I lead my Cleanse twice/year, alkaline broth is front and center. Why bother? What could it possibly do for you? We tend to love acidifying and mucus-producing foods. You know the culprits: sugar, dairy, meat, coffee, processed foods. Getting Things Back in Proportion As in most things, we seek proportion in the body in…
Read MoreBotanical Bliss: Wear Organic, Eat Organic
Today I sit with the question: If we are all so clear about eating organic, why are we not wearing organic clothing? Our conventional clothes contain toxic fertilizers/pesticides/herbicides/insecticides, heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, teratogens (causes birth defects) and carcinogens. The question lingers from a blissful day yesterday spent at a “Native Dye” workshop with my friends…
Read MoreBotanical Alchemist | Organic Fashion Designer
Was surfing Etsy last weekend, minding my own business, when I came across a mystic from North Carolina named Andrea Crouse. Check her out. That’s Andrea (above), modeling her Tulsi dress in organic stretchy wool. Here she is (above) in her super foxy fall shirt made of organic hemp/cotton with pin tucks in all the right places…
Read MoreSacred Socks & Pablo Neruda
Maybe you didn’t quite get just how obsessed I am with knitting. Here’s an example: I could not properly express the joy I feel with my new socks, knitted from delicious “soft girl” yarn from local Petaluma sheep, until I came across Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Socks, excerpted way below in English and Spanish. Thank you,…
Read MoreOrganically Jeaned: Change Up the Paradigm
Learned today that the European Union has rigid boundaries on the type of cotton they import – no toxic dyes, no cheap cotton laced with DDT, as several cottons from China and India were recently demonstrated to contain. The EU regularly tests their imported textiles carefully; we in the US do not. One of the worst…
Read MoreOrganic Right Up Next to Your Skin: Undies
Perhaps the most important layer in my organic experiment is my undies. Right up next to your privateness, you want no endocrine disruptors or heavy metals. Surprisingly, I found this to be one of the harder items to procure before January 1, 2011 when my experiment begins. Here in Berkeley, there’s a foxy brand called Pact.…
Read MoreAlchemist Next Door: Organic Clothes That Heal
Hokahay! Today is a fine day to dye – natural dye, that is, in the back yard of our LEED-Platinum green home with a group of intrepid women gathered to learn about natural dye and integrative medicine. Our group – moms, artists, gardeners, professors, activists – learned first about the toxic and completely unsustainable conventional…
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