Wednesday, September 26, 2007

french beauty secret revealed!

At last! I finally learned a trick that I can share! And it comes from a most unlikely source. Here, lemme 'splain:

As you may or may not already know, the water in France is notoriously hard. It is so hard that special products can be bought to fight calcium deposits on nearly every thing that water touches - the dishwasher, the clothes washer, the shower, the sink, everything!

You know what else the water touches? My freakin' hair! Shortly after I moved here, I realized that I was going to have to change my hair washing habits in order to make my hair act "normal." In the states, particularly in the South, I enjoyed soft water and enough humidity to keep my hair naturally curly. This is actually a relatively recent phenomenon for me, as most of my life I brushed out my naturally wavy hair and finally decided to let it act natural, to usually nice results. My biggest problem was that the hair on the top of my head doesn't curl as much as the rest (just like my Dad's was).

I tried everything I could think of - expensive shampoos, conditioners for curly hair, after-shower products and still my hair felt fried and dry. At last, a few weeks ago, I found my saving grace in a magazine - the same one that my sister-in-law gave me a subscription for for my birthday. As soon as I read the article, I literally smacked myself on the forehead, because it seemed so obvious.

What do all the calcium fighting products have in common? Vinegar! For generations, French women have been passing down homebrewed vinegar recipes for hair, but now several companies have come out with vinegar based hair products for keeping hair free of calcium deposits. So the next time I went to the big grande surface shopping center, I found one of the brands mentioned in the article and brought it home.

The hair vinegar I bought is applied after the shower, and has a funny top with only a little hole for shaking out the vinegar (like table vinegar, which was bizarre) but I got around that by putting the liquid in a spray bottle. The first time I used it, it took me forever to get out all the tangles, but it has been easier and easier every time I've used it. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now, and my hair has never looked better (and it smells nice, too)! In fact, it's actually too soft - I'm going to start using it after every other shampoo to try and get it balanced.

I've been letting my hair grow out for a couple of years now, and I had gotten so desperate that I was seriously considering chopping it all off again. Now that I've got my secret weapon, I am at all systems go for hair growth! Thank you French magazine for sharing this most excellent beauty secret!

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