How to Wear an Avocado

Spa day. Ordinarily this would mean lounging around in a fluffy white robe all day, drinking water with floating cucumbers in it. Or listening to a CD of whales groaning at each other while a stern woman with needle-thumbs attacks my pressure points. Or being dipped in Hungarian mineral mud and left to ferment in a steam room with no clock. (Because when you put mud on an airplane from Europe, it becomes fancy mud.) DIY spa day, however, was something else entirely. DIY spa day was about playing with food. 

I've been reading a lot of articles recently about the presence of harmful chemicals in beauty products. Articles with fun titles like "Is Your Lipstick Trying to Murder You?" and "Carcinogens: Our Cosmetics in Crisis." OK, I made those up, but they're no more dramatic than the real headlines. Over and over again the message was drilled into my brain: the opposite of wellness is chemicals. So, clearly, our DIY spa day was not going to be as simple as buying out a shelf of the local drugstore. Instead, we'd be whisking together our facial mask and body scrub in the kitchen, like dermatological Betty Crockers.

I went to work finding recipes without frightening or impossible-to-find ingredients. (I have no idea where to buy pure algae. And no promise of luminous skin was going to make me smear my face with the placenta of a farm animal, in some Real Housewives meets Lord of the Flies quest for beauty.) I also ruled out things that would smell bad. Raw egg. Beer. Mayonnaise. All of those were out. In the end, we selected two (incredibly vague) recipes:

Body Scrub: A bunch of sugar, a banana, and some sweet almond oil. (Consistency of cookie batter.)

Facial Mask: An avocado, a banana, some yogurt, some olive oil. (Consistency of monkey brains.)

Lauren and I went into this phase of the project a bit skeptical, to put it mildly. I didn't expect big results. To be honest, I didn't expect any results, except maybe smelling like a banana. And Lauren doesn't even like bananas. We were wrong. Scrubbing our hands and feet with the sugar/banana goo made our skin so soft, it was like having hands made of butter. (In a good way, not a Tim Burton movie kind of way.) It was so good, we packed up the leftovers and brought them home after the retreat was done. This led to my subsequent discovery, which is that when you use the scrub in the shower, it makes you and your home smell like Funfetti cake. I still can't decide if that's good or bad. We might have noticed that aroma earlier, except after the scrub we put on argan oil. Which smells like ham. Or tanned deerskin. So here's my verdict on argan oil: overhyped, over-priced, really stinky.

Last but not least, there was the avocado facial. First things first, if you read the ingredients list above, you may have noticed that our face mask was technically edible. So you may be wondering, did you taste it? Answer: yes, we did. And while I'm not about to suggest you bring to your next party, it was much tastier than the green juice. I would rather eat that entire bowl of face mask with my hands tied behind my back than have to take one sip of the green juice. 

Also, eating it might be easier than using it for its intended purpose. Putting on a thick layer of gloppy avocado was a challenge to say the least. It was not interested in cooperating with the half hour time requirement and voiced its displeasure by making my face sting with varying degrees of intensity. A rogue avocado chunk also spent five minutes abseiling down my nose before making a kamikaze plop onto the sink. Needless to say, it was not very glamorous. And I'm not sure it did anything for my skin. 

But I did learn an important lesson: it is very difficult to wear an avocado. 

Lauren and I, demonstrating sea monster chic.