500 k and thoughts on blogging

Look what I found this morning!

Amazing!
I cant believe I've had half a million hits on my blog now.
It really amazes me how so many people can find my hair and writing interesting!

My unusual growing out-story aside, what is the appeal to you all?

My guess is it's the honesty.
My blog is the (mostly) hair related things that actually happen in my life. The updos I take pictures of are the updos I would have done anyways, the treatments I write about are treatments I would have done anyways and the knowledge I write about is knowledge I would have looked up anyways.
I don't do anything "for" my blog I wouldn't have done anyways. I don't spend time on making a fancy updo just to take pictures of it for my blog.

Maybe that's it? My methods are simple and easy, and I have my own brand of laziness when it comes to care and updos. What I do can be copied by most other people.

One way or another, it's the honesty that keeps me personally checking in on a blog.
This is why I find the western oriented beauty bloggers to be such a total reading turn off. They really go with the lie of "Oh, I just rolled out of bed this way. Te-hee." The J and K-oriented beauty bloggers openly admit how much time and effort they spend on their looks and that honesty appeals to me. It's a kind of honesty I can appreciate: I see how many hours and how much effort it takes them to look like they do and I can go "Meh, not for me". Not like the western oriented beauty bloggers that makes me think I must be doing something fundamentally wrong.

In other news, my Hubby has been talking about starting a blog too! He would like to write about free training opportunities in the Lund-Malmö area, like the outdoors gyms and good running trails. I'm pretty excited about his idea and I hope it means we can combine photo opportunities.

Hair food: Soy bean pasta

I think the nutrition facts speak for themselves!

These started popping up in my little corner of the world the last year or so. 2-3 different brands are carrying these and they have lots of interesting colours and shapes.

Pros

• Good source of protein
• Good source of fiber
• Not too high on calories either
• Super quick to boil (Most of the packs instructs you to boil it for longer than it actually needs) but doesn't fall apart if you cook it for too long

Cons

• Kind of pricey still, but the price seems to be dropping by the month
• Weird texture that reminds me more of noodles than actual pasta
• Weird (Although subtle) flavor that reminds me of seaweed
• Kind of weird to match to a meal I think. The strange texture also makes it kind of fragile, so it doesn't tolerate being tossed around too much in sauce and stuff.

So far I think the best match for it is with some fried broccoli and onion, and some tomatoes. The good thing is that it tolerates being microwaved pretty well, even with the weird, fragile texture.

Weird things done for hair

Aka “Igor’s amusing hair failures from the past”

I revisited this thread and had some good laughs. Then I thought I should write down all the weirdness I’ve done for my own blog. In no particular order, all the stuff I could think of:

Deep oiling + shampooing it out

This seemed like teh bestest idea evar! for me some 11-12 years ago when I first encountered the longhair circuit. Of course now I know that my coarse hair and oils aren’t the best mix, so the oil probably did absolutely nothing.

No wash for 9 days

Well, I suppose for some people, just going shampoo free is disgusting, vile and evil in itself. But back ages ago when I first tried to go conditioner only, I seemed to hit a plateau where I shampooed once a week and CO’ed twice. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to break it.

Someone advised me to “Find a time where you don’t have to be social and just let it grease up”. So I did. I had some project work for two weeks and just stopped shampooing to see how long I could stand it. Nine days, this was an eternity for me back then. When I finally caved in and shampooed, my hair felt like I could just chop it off and use it as candles! Gross.

Well, my disgustingness aside, this actually worked. It broke the plateau and I could transition to almost exclusively-CO.

Feet elevated when sleeping

I blame this one on my nooby-ness as well. One of those facepalm-worthy advice out there is that you should elevate your feet when you sleep, to force more nutrition to your scalp. Of course forcing blood to a certain bodypart doesn’t mean you actually force it to absorb nutrition. One of those “advice” that got me into actually research the things I do.

Tapping nails, and driving my friends crazy in the process

Okay, this was one of those “Can’t hurt, but I don’t really believe in it”-things. Your fingernails are supposed to be acupressure points for your scalp, so massaging or tapping your nails should therefore increase growth.

Ironically, it pissed my friends off so much they might as well have started pulling their own hair out. Also my hair didn’t seem to care, I still got my usual 1,5 cm for each month I did it.

Palmer’s coconut oil

I received this one in a trade (I think) and applied way too much of it. I seriously couldn’t shampoo that s*** out! I shampooed, dried my hair and found it still greasy, then repeated the process until I was out of shampoo. The greasiness spread all over my scalp, down my neck and my forehead, ick! I had to wait until the next day, then go out to hunt for a clarifying shampoo. I still had to shampoo a handful of times with the clarifying shampoo before the last greasiness disappeared. My scalp hurt and itched for days after!

Aloe vera-based hair growth gel

For some reason I decided to buy an expensive hair-growth boosting gel with a bunch of herbal stuff in it. It seemed to “activate” my scalp all nicely, but after a while I noticed I was losing hairs at my temples! I even developed a  seriously sparsely-haired spot at my left temple (I almost called it a "bald" spot, but I think that would be an exaggeration) 

Of course now I know I’m actually allergic to aloe vera, or more specifically, something in the plants skin:

• Aloe vera pressed with the skin = Red, swollen, itchy nightmare
• Aloe vera pressed without the skin = No problems

Of course, this is the kind of information they leave out on the packaging.

Nuruk powder on my scalp

Nuruk is a type of kneaded flour that releases konjic acid which is one of the new wonders of skincare. I got a bag of it in a Memebox ages ago and tried it in some conditioner for my scalp. I thought it would have a nice “scrub” effect like cassia-grains do, but no.

But I suppose it’s weird enough to use fermented flour in any part of your beauty routine?

Removing the tags in shirts and sweaters

Well, I kind of think this one is logical, but some people would disagree: I remove the neck-tags from all my shirts and sweaters. Since I pull some sort of clothing over my head at least twice in a day, and a lot of those tags are kind of sharp, it should add up to some damage over the years. So I remove them.