Well the heavens finally smiled upon us and provided us with a few beach worthy days over the holidays.
Basking in the sunshine on the beaches of the NSW South Coast, I was reminded how great the salt water and sand is for your skin.
I’ve always maintained that the beach will fix most minor skin problems, including blemishes and dry skin (sand is a natural exfoliant and salt is a natural antiseptic, combined with a good moisturiser this could be your whole skin care routine).
In fact one friend I was holidaying with delighted in informing us all that she was sporting an enormous cyst under her arm and was looking forward to the salt water fixing it up. Luckily, it did fix it pretty quickly as I was getting sick of hearing about the cyst’s progress every time we sat down for a meal (it almost put me off my calamari at the Mollymook bowling club one lunchtime, and for me to be put off my food is a pretty rare occurrence).
Anyway, the point of this Internet blog entry is not to discuss the ins and outs of my friend’s cyst, and to tell the truth I’m not quite sure how I came to be discussing it in such great detail. What I was originally leading up to saying is that while the beach is great for your skin, it can absolutely ruin your hair.
This is especially true if you are like me and already have fairly dry hair. But after all the salt and the sand of the last couple of weeks, by yesterday my hair was pretty much like straw. In fact I was having difficulty brushing it.
Yesterday I got fed up and decided to do a hair treatment. As I don’t use shampoo and conditioner, I also try to use natural hair treatments. Usually this involves coconut oil (the pure stuff from health food shops, not the supermarket skin cancer variety), but as I was out yesterday, I decided to go through my fridge for alternatives. Bingo, I found a couple of eggs left over from Christmas morning pancakes.
Egg yolks are one of nature’s best moisturisers, especially the yolks. To create a conditioning treatment for your hair you separate the yolks from the whites, which can then be used as a separate purifying masque for your face (followed by a good moisturiser) or in egg white omlettes if you are being healthy. Beat the egg yolks with a little bit of water and you’re ready to go.
Wash your hair first with cool water and pat off the excess moisture, then apply the mixture, concentrating on the ends. Leave it to sit for as long as you can under a towel.
When it comes time to wash it off - and this is very important - make sure you use cool water. Eggs tend to cook at low temperatures so if you use hot water you will end up looking like someone chucked a bowl of eggs over you.
This calmed my hair down considerably. It’s still in the recovery phase and will need some more work in the coming days, but it feels ten times more manageable than the unholy rat’s nest I was sporting on my head a couple of days ago.
By Caroline Warnes
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