Tammy Fender Purifying Cleanser Gel Review

Let's be honest, I bought it for the bottle.

I have a personal philosophy: If it's good enough for GOOP, I probably can't afford it.  Ok I just made that up right now, but it's usually true.  However, in the case of Tammy Fender's line, who is now partnered with GOOP, it sounds like her products are worth the price.  She has a holistic approach to beauty and wellness, and she uses pure ingredients to harness living energy in every product, which I'm taking to mean that I get to skip Yoga when I use it.  Tammy Fender's Purifying Cleansing Gel with Spearmint & Alfalfa normally retails for $50, but I was lucky enough to get it at a heavy discount from a flash sale, although I don't think their flash sales happen too often.  I'm a huge fan of minty face washes, and the ingredients in this one look incredible, especially with no sulfates:

Ingredients

*Aqueous Extracts of Licorice (Glycrrhia Glabra), Alfalfa (Medicago Sativa), Peppermint (Mentha Piperita), Lauryl Glucoside (Plant Source), Olive Oil PEG-7, Jojoba (Simmondsia Chinensis) Oil, Methyl Gluceth-20 (Plant Source), Essential Oils of Tangerine (Citrus Reticulata), Rosemary (Rosmarinus Officinalis), Dehydroacetic Acid and Benzyl Alcohol (Natural Preservative System), Colloidal Silver
*Certified Organic

I am normally not one for spending an absurd amount on face wash, because it all goes down the drain within minutes, but I would spend money on this one.  The fragrance alone is HEAVENLY.  Super fresh, light and natural, I could smell this scent all day and not get sick of it.  It leaves a nice tingle on the skin due to the mint, but doesn't make skin overly sensitive, and when it's all washed off skin is super clean but not at all tight.  It takes off my makeup like a charm too.

It is a clear, thick liquid that has a light foam with sudsed up with some H2O.

One of the few face products pretty enough to leave out.  Hell, I leave most of mine out, but this is the only one that looks like it was on purpose.

The only possible drawback to this is the not very travel-friendly glass bottle, but hey, no one is perfect.  Would I buy this again?  In a heartbeat.  I have also heard incredible things about their Epi-Peel, so that is next for me on the list.

Where to get it: Amazon

Old-fashioned green beauty: leeches for the derriere

Why is it so hard to buy you?

For some reason in the past month I've stumbled across three different articles about all natural beauty treatments from ye olden days.  There were a lot of recipes that were really ahead of their times, such an old wrinkle remedy that involved a lead powder concoction (lead poisoning definitely takes the attention away from your crows feet), but the one that tickled my fancy the most was the mention of anal leeching.  I do appreciate that back then, women didn't pay $60 for an eye cream to evil salary magnets like Sephora, no, they just whipped up a skin mask with the good ol' arsenic supply from their pantry.  But you can't get greener than leeches.  Not only is there no packaging to waste, but you are supporting the eco-system by feeding them top-of-the-line human blood, which, according to my vampire book obsession, is so much better than disgusting animal blood.  And apparently, the "discreet lady" liked to keep her leeching private, and what better privacy for both her and the leech than to gently guide the creature towards the anus.  Apparently this was done for the sake of skin whitening, and I think if these women were to time travel today and see women paying to tan their skin in a machine they would most definitely faint whilst shedding a tear over the indecency of the loose-moraled modern women.

This is also pretty discreet, and with the application of a few well-placed rhinestones could totally be a glamorous earring.

Due to my genes, I think I would have lucked out in the anus department because my morbidly pale complexion is au natural, thankyouverymuch.  However, what I am really getting into with this is making your own beauty products, even if google won't let you buy arsenic unless you're in Europe where apparently they don't treat grown ups like they're kids who can't handle a little responsibility around poison, and I am guessing I am now on some kind of flagged list because I just googled "anal leeching for beauty" and "how to buy arsenic" in the past 5 minutes.  Bring it on, terrorism unit, I have a ninja cat to defend me*.

Anyways, I remember way back in the day when my friend Courtney and I would make our own beauty concoctions by mixing together everything we found in her bathroom, which surprisingly did not turn out to be all that effective.  Nowadays I do more research, if you can define research as "I put it on my face and see if my skin bubbles or not."  I've found through various successes and failures that when it comes to kitchen skincare, one should always refer to my life's motto: simpler is better, because when you mix shit together it tends to smell bad and burn you.

In case you care, here are some of my favorites:

1. Olive oil and honey: warm it up and put it in your hair for as long as you can stand to be sticky. Warning -- do not heat up for a minute in microwave and then pour on your head without testing, as it will scald you and you will have to ice your head for at least 2 hours.  The benefit is that if it drips in your mouth you can eat it, unless you are allergic to olive oil or honey, in which case you shouldn't do this mask, and you should probably also hate yourself a little because you can never enjoy the wonder that is bruschetta.

I love the presentation here.  Usually when I need sugar I get the plastic  bag that  is gooey from me grabbing it with lotion/soap on my hands, swat away the fruit flies and just cram my hand in there, like a lady.

2. Sugar. You can use this as a scrub for anything and it is awesome and you can eat it.  If i'm feeling productive, I will make a mix of this with vanilla extract and whatever oil I can find, but if I'm lazy and heading out and realize that my hands feel more like Gollum than I would care to admit I just squirt on some soap and lotion, grab a handful and 2 minutes later my hands feel less like ass.  Warning: do not do this right before a zombie attack.  It will make your skin taste much better.  I would recommend substituting salt, because I'm sure even zombies worry about their sodium intake, but you would still have the smooth skin necessary for living a life in fear of flesh-eating mutants.

3. My favorite, coconut oil.  You can put this shit anywhere. No makeup remover? Done.  Shaving cream? No problem.  Got your hand stuck in a mason jar trying to get the last chocolate chip that melted onto the bottom?  Well, this will only work sometimes, depending on the fatness of your hand and size of the jar, but all I can recommend there is that slamming your hand bottle against a hard surface to break it isn't a good idea either.  Anyways, this stuff is amazing and smells like Tahiti and works and lasts forever.

I have plans to phase out my purchases and make all my own skincare, so I will keep you updated on how that is going.  When I finally do it.  <Cough.>

Side note, I found out that Demi Moore admitted to using leeches. My absolute favorite part of the article is when she says that "These aren't just swamp leeches though - we are talking about highly trained medical leeches."  How do the workers at the spa keep a straight face when they tell clients that?  I'm picturing Demi in her fancy leech robe drinking spa water as some yokel trudges through the waiting room with swamp boots on slurring "I delivered them leeches ma'am, I was promised some moonshine y'hear?"

I'm willing to bet Swamp Thing  preferred to keep his leeching private as well.

*I am now definitely on a black list because I had to google "who will the government send if they think I am going to arsenic a bunch of people", which didn't even come close to giving me a correct answer, until I read this link which let me know that the government will just think I fucking grow chickens and feed them to the population at large, which really should be a whole other blog post because that is crazy and why don't more people know about this?

This chicken likes to grease itself up with coconut oil, lay on the beach, and dream of a time when  it wasn't fed arsenic.

The Ultimate Granola Move: Hennaing my Hair

As someone who prefers to take matters into her own hands when it comes to hair, I tend to shy away from the hair salon. Nothing against it, but I like to change things up so often that it would make it a very expensive habit, and I also have a passionate hatred for small talk. None of my friends seem to share the fear I have of being chained to a salon chair for an hour, inventing travel plans I will never make in order to avoid the awkward silence that will eventually come with a stylist who likes to chat it up, so I might be in the minority here.

Anyways, the point of the matter is that I have been dyeing my own hair for the past 9 years, ever since I discovered my sophomore year of college the joys of changing your entire look with $7 and 30 minutes. Since then, I have had numerous shades of blonde, red, and brown, and I can honestly say that I have been pretty lucky that I even still have hair, as there have been times when I hated it immediately, ran to the rite-aid and dyed it again that same night. I got into a chemical-free obsession a few years ago and started reading up on Henna, which would still let me change up my hair color without having to deal with the feeling of dissolving scalp that one gets with typical hair colors. Every few months or so, I would go through a pro-henna phase where I would read every article I could on it, then read some horror story about a woman with bright orange hair that had to grow it out and immediately talk myself out of it. Fast forward to a year ago, when I decided to get drunk and order a henna kit.

If you're not familiar with henna, you might be wondering why this is a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things, it really isn't. There are a lot more pressing issues to be thinking about than hair color, but here you are, reading this blog that has so far been pretty much useless in terms of world-changing content. So I assume that if you are still reading, you are saying "OK" to hearing about the logistics of spreading dirty goop on your hair and the resulting tantrum I threw when I saw the result.

Back to the matter, henna is a bigger deal than store bought because it is extremely permanent. Those "permanent" haircolors you can buy at walgreens? Not permanent. If you truly eff it up, it will fade or you can redye, but with henna, this shit ain't coming out. Hence why I had to resort to liquid courage to even place an order. Once it is in your hair, you can't use normal hair colors anymore (I have heard either your hair will fall out or it just won't work, but the worst case scenario is bad enough to scare me into making it a no-no.) So if you hate it, your option is either to grow it out or shave your head, or dye it black(with henna) to cover it up. Needless to say, I was well-informed of these warnings before hennaing my hair, but I think that information went back to hang out in the happy part of my brain that likes to pretend that what I'm about to do isn't a terrible decision. Instead, it focused on the pros, which is that I was embracing nature and my hair would be super soft and natural.

Another warning is that you have to buy body art quality henna instead of henna that has been mixed with metallic compounds. Why? Oh, because your hair might literally melt off your head. Seriously. So after this oh so inspiring post don't just run to Whole Foods and grab the first henna kit you see. I got mine from this site http://www.mehandi.com/ and found out a lot of information from http://www.hennaforhair.com/. Anyways, this post is getting to be way longer than I expected, so I'm going to try to speed it up to the good freak out part, but if anyone really wants me to expand on the whole process of mixing the henna and whatnot, let me know and I will add it in.

What the mixture looks like

So, I mix up the batch of henna, and you have to wait for a day to make it all good and ready to make things orange, and then you have to test it on something to see if the dye will release or something like that. So I waited a day, and I tested it, and said tester did not come out orange. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I'm impatient and decided to go for it anyways. On the poor advice of a blogger, I thought I needed to leave it in for at least an hour to make sure the color sets. Since I did not see any color on the tester thing (a piece of paper) I was like, oh, well I'll just leave it in for 2 hours, just to make sure, which I would determine later to be the worst idea ever.

During said two hours, I had random panic attacks that I was making a serious mistake which I decided to quiet down with wine, which turned out to be bad idea as wine tends to make people klutzy, which isn't the best when you have white furniture and a head full of drippy, bad-smelling crap that will dye anything it touches. I managed to make it out of the shower with only minor offenses to the apartment that were henceforth covered up with whiteout, and took off the towel to reveal sideshow-bob colored hair.

Hair before Henna

This picture does not even do it justice

This was a costume party, I don't normally dress like a 
gothic renaissance hooker.  
Unless its a Saturday.

After screaming at my boyfriend for laughing, then screaming at him for not stopping my destructive, impetuous decision, I rekindled my love for hats. I tried to find some pictures that show the atrocity that was my hair, but I didn't let a camera near me for about a month. Luckily, henna fades verrrrry slowly so the two pictures above show it almost at its glory, so just picture this but with jazz hands.  Picture below is after almost a year of fading.

A bit less cartoonish

In the end, it has since faded to a nice normalish color that I have actually gotten a lot of compliments on, so I guess I'm happy except that it would be nice to be able to change it. It is also ridiculously soft and healthy and I rarely get split ends. However, I can already feel myself itching for a change from red hair but seeing as I am unlikely to shave my head, I'm not quite sure when that will happen. Would I recommend henna? I think very few people would be able to deal with the inconsistency, time, and radioactive hair, but seriously, this is some soft hair people. I would imagine it's what unicorn hair feels like.