Why Always Eat the Food? Putting Cooking Oil In Your Hair & Almond Extract on Your Person

Now, I'm a big fan of eating food. Like, hands-down, in favor of it.

But sometimes, it can be useful to use traditionally food items in non-food ways! Like using eggs in place of snowballs, when there isn't any snow. Or mixing baking soda and lemon juice, and then putting the foaming mass of organic drain cleaner on my face. Because I did.

Today, I did two similar things, with mixed results:

#1. I put on almond extract like perfume

This should be a great idea, right? I get to smell like some non-human stuff, but I don't have to make anybody sneeze or complain. Seriously, if you even CLAIM that something in the world smells better than almond extract, then I will fight you. Or love you, if you introduce me to some game-changing new smell. I'm not really sure. (For example, my sister claims that there is a beautiful type of centipede that smells just like almond extract. So, if you have one, and we are close friends, please invite me over, so that I can smell it.)

So!

I dabbed a bit of almond extract behind my ears and on my wrists today, in the standard perfume ritual, and it smelled great. In fact, the smell was perfect. It was a perfect smell.

Maybe five seconds later, the smell vanished completely.

Sure, I've heard it said that a truly compatible perfume will mix with the wearer's own scent so subtly that it no longer becomes overtly noticeable. And I HOPE that this is the case. I would love to learn that I was simply made to wear almond extract. But my instincts tell me that it probably just evaporated into nothing.

#2. I mashed canola oil into the non-scalp part of my hair, knotting it up in a bun, and just letting it soak up the oil like a baseball mitt.

Luckily for me, I already KNOW that this one works, because I've done it before.

As a ginger, I have a handful of oddly specific vanity "issues."

One is that my eyebrows and eyelashes are as invisible as Tilda Swinton's, so if I want them to show up on my Cyndi-Lauper-round-not-Ziggie-Stardust-gaunt face, I'd better do my best to remember art school. Gotta draw within the lines, that kind of thing.

Another "issue" is that I don't get along with direct sunlight. I burn fast, and I hate the look of it. Did you know that Bram Stoker was a ginger? A ginger from Dublin, even! Are you surprised? Me neither. (I am not from Dublin, but when I was there I found the weather comparable to Seattle's, and I felt pretty comfortable.)

And ANOTHER thing is my hair.

Without the shiny mutant hair, I'd just have the coloring of a super-pale, eyeless fish from a sunless cave. But WITH the hair, complete strangers have an excuse to walk up to me and ask me if I use hair dye. Thanks for asking, strangers! I also have one more excuse to secretly pretend to be the Dark Phoenix from the 1970s X-Men comic books. And that's a good thing. ("Oh, X-Men, I must kick your asses severely, for no real reason, because I discovered some bad habits at the discotheque where we picked up The Dazzler last week. Also, I ate a solar system for the kicks.")

Sure, I might pretend to take my hair for granted. I've let it grow out in such a way that, when brushed fluffy and vigorously nodded to heavy metal music (we call this form of dance "headbanging") the appearance is oddly masculine, in an old-timely Metallica way. I can style it like Drew Barrymore's hair in that Charlie's Angels movie, but that requires art supplies and forethought, so I tend to just round it up to "pre-haircut James Hatfield with a sassy ponytail." It works out well enough.

But nonetheless, I secretly take intensely dedicated care of my hair, like it's a private little victory garden to tend in times of strife. It... Well, to quote some not-quite-metal, we could say that my hair reminds me of a warm, safe place, where as a child I'd hi-de-yide, and pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass me by. In fact, in middle school and early high school, I DID hide in my hair. But as a child, I hid in the fur of a collie that looked just like Lassie. The experience was roughly the same.

So!

Even as I type this, the non-scalp parts of my hair are carefully organized into a "super-cool," top-of-the-head ponytail, and that ponytail is THOROUGHLY saturated in canola oil. I seriously just mashed about 1/3rd of a cup of cooking oil in there, until it was ridiculously oily. Today was a sick day spent hanging around the house, so I've had the opportunity to just leave my hair like this for hours.

Because I've done this before, I know that once I've showered my hair into something clean, the previously dry ends of my hair will be much, much softer, and less frizzy. I've tried a wide assortment of different hair moisturizing masks, and cooking oil actually produces the best results. Yay for my wallet!!!

I know that many people have already done cooking oil hair masks for ages and ages, so while I can proclaim awesomeness, I can't claim discovery.

It's a trick that I'd originally picked up when reading about how to maintain gorgeous, curly, natural, African-style hair. (A girl can dream, eh? The grass being greener on the other side, and so on. I like to read about what I don't have.) The results in the how-to articles were always so lush-sounding that I wanted to try it on my own hair, just to see. And while my hair is a different texture, I can report that the results are still amazing. Huzzah!

Typically, I read about this being done with olive oil, but I use standard cooking oil instead, for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't want to smell like olive oil. I want to smell like almond extract!!! The other reason is that olive oil is CONSIDERABLY more expensive, and the results that I get with cheapo cooking oil are definitely good enough for me.

And that concludes today's report on using food in non-food ways! I hope you had fun, because I sure did.

See you later, everyone! Bye bye! Good night! Have a nice weekend! So long! Until we meet again! Take care, now! Say hello to your mother for me! Bon voyage! Godspeed! Let's do this again sometime! Well, look at the time. It sure is getting late. But drive safely, okay! Don't forget that you can always just call a taxi, and then get a ride back to your car in the morning. Alright, see you around, pardner! Goodbye!