8.28.2010

Dear Rachel Dratch,

A friend of mine revealed that if he were to win the lottery he would need to buy a mansion to house all of the scented candles, lotions, and soaps that he would buy because he loves them. He loves them! I think I kind of completely understand.

When my sister and I were younger, I swear she spent a period of her life hold up in the bathroom playing with different products. She'd have out the hard soap, the liquid soap, the shampoo, the conditioner, the detangler, the mousse, the gel, the hairspray, the mouthwash, the toothpaste, the Triaminic. She would be mixing and messing with all of these things, putting the final mix into some sort of spray bottle and call it her concoction.

This wasn't something she did in private, either. She'd be up in the bathroom, door wide open, wasting all kinds of money just to get something that smelled pretty and minty. I think she'd sometimes attack the Windex and the 409 just to make sure that if she were to ever put this thing on her body that it would also degrease and shine.

I wasn't jealous of her work when she would do this. But it does kind of make me think about my own love of face and hair products.

I don't know if I would buy tons of candles and soaps, but if I were to win the lottery a la Bow Wow, you better believe I would have the most expensive hair and face on earth. I love a good conditioner and some creamy gel to smear into my mane when I get out of the shower. I love to get a good scrub on in the shower with some kind of face wash that also contains teeny-tiny rocks that exfoliate and ultimately rip my old face off leaving me with the fresh skin of a teeny-tiny baby.

There was a phase recently when I was plat-num blond. My hair is naturally quite dark so it took some work to get up to the level where I wanted it to be. It wasn't just the dying part that was high maintenance, but the upkeep was also something that was high maintenance but also fed into my love and desire for doing my hair right. I would ask people that came into the store where I work what they did to maintain their platinum glow, or what they did to get it looking so good and natural. Nothing I did seemed to work to get it nice and soft.

My hair is already kind of crunchy and coarse and the bleach I covered it in did nothing to help it. I would go three or four days without washing it to see if some of my natural head oils might get it just a bit softer or more natural looking, like maybe some of the wave I get when my hair gets longer might return from the nuclear winter I set in motion the day I went blond. But I never had such luck.

So not washing my hair didn't work in getting my hair any softer. I would get all my hair products together and just mix them up in my hand when I got out of the shower. In the same vein as my sister, I was attempting to make a cure-all for my head that would make my hair amazing looking and take away its brittleness. Well, kind of like my sister's concoction, all I got was a head full of greasy yet hard feeling hair that only looked like a mess. It did not work and did not smell minty.

Also during this time, I tried all kinds of different shampoos for color treated hair. I had special purple shampoo that fake blonds are supposed to use to make your color last. You needed to leave it on for at least five minutes before you could rinse it out. I take quick showers and this was just too much! I had read on my T-Gel bottle that the color of the T-Gel could cause bleached hair to change colors, and I spent too much money on my hair to be fucking it up. So I went a few months with no T-Gel. This meant that my psoriasis sort of came back in a bad way. I bet you didn't think I was going to drop that bomb--I have psoriasis!

It eventually dawned on me that maybe this bleached out beauty just wasn't a good look for me. My hair was such a giant dry and flaky mess--Head and Shoulders couldn't even work me out. Right before my sister graduated from college this past May I decided it just might be a good idea to just buzz all the blond and start over. No products, no special shampoos (save my T-Gel!) this time around. Just regular old sort of that weird gray/brown dude colored hair that only seems to affect men. It's turned out pretty good, my hair.

Sometimes I like to think about my sister and her crazy mixing up things to get your hair, body and mouth right. And then I think about how Gillette just ripped her off with their new thing for guys that does everything but buy you a razor. I guess sometimes we're onto something and we don't even know it when we're kids.

Or you're a grown ass man and you just need to do something about your dandruff!

Jon