I have a question. How do you put music up on your site? Thanks

Hair falling out. What is your diet? Our hair like plants need nutrient from the roots and I don’t mean scalp. I mean blood stream. True that you are stressed and that causes it to fall but also look into your particular diet.

I’m hungry going to lunch

Man, I had me an insane weekend *crackles wickedly*. I’m obviously lying to myself there…

Tealeaf, you held out on that Biolage sweets *pokes*… totally next on my, to explore and experience list.
Girl/woman and mane power all the way baby. =)

Gramps, there you are! You know, just when I had given up on hearing your delicious input in the important matter of locks! tis always a pleasure.

So next open thread we shall explore skin care, yeah, all?

@kotatsulove:
i’m glad you broke away from the comp for family time. sometimes even that is hard! jk lol

@tealeaf:
what’s robber? sounds familiar…time to google. haha.

I gave in long ago to the more expensive shampoo brands because of my extremely dry hair. After much experimentation, Biolage’s Ultra-Hydrating Balm is the best I’ve found. Yes, it’s pricey, but worth it. Even after rotating with other salon brands – Aveda and Pureology, included – I had to come back to Biolage to repair my tresses.

As for coffee, I give you the recommendation of my coffee-purist husband. He roasts his own beans, but when he doesn’t have the time, he buys Peet’s fresh coffee. He says that Peet’s uses better quality beans. The last time we were in LA, he actually drove 20 miles farther to get his morning cup at Peet’s rather than the Starbuck’s down the street. I must admit, properly home-roasted coffee is very good (in fact, the only kind I can drink black – otherwise, I stick to lattes). Coffee loses it’s freshness five to seven days after roasting, so I *cringe* at the thought of those single-serving instant coffee packets I see so often in kdramas. Blah! Did you also know that darker-roasted coffee actually has less caffeine?

On to another topic…I took an intro class to Sheila Kelley’s S factor, the poledancing class. Let me tell you girls…GO TRY IT! It makes you feel good about yourself and you can be as sexy as any of those kpop singers (some of them should take a class from some of the vids I’ve seen. It’s about 95% slow, slow, slow, sexy, sexy, sexy stretching on the floor and 5% pole time, which was really thrilling. I got to show off my bruises with a satisfied little smile . It’s a great workout for your abs, glutes, and hamstrings without breaking a sweat…until you get on the pole. I feel so disloyal, but…it beats power yoga hands down.

As a male literal and metaphorical egg-head, I’m not into shampoos as such. But I do have a linguistic-cultural interest in one brand, namely Procter and Gamble’s Rejoice.

When their labs cooked up a way of allegedly combining shampoo and conditioner in a single product, they needed to find a market to offload it on. They decided that South and East Asia was the place to find the maximum number of long-haired females. So they then set their advertising teams to dream up localized campaigns for the various submarkets in those regions, with the common theme “long, shampooed and conditioned from a single bottle shampoo good / long non-conditioned hair bad”.

I suppose everyone has seen the Hong Kong version, if only on YouTube, where the guy’s hands, unaware of the silky smoothness of Rejoice-conditioned locks, suddenly slide to a part of a girl’s anatomy where they are not supposed to venture, or at least not on prime-time TV. Then there’s the Tamil version, where the new bride has sadly failed to wash her hair in the right product, so her mother-in-laws hands get badly tangled up in it, and the Japanese one, which goes back to the smoothy aspect and allows a young lady who is, er… a little tied up to do a Houdini act thanks to the head-lubrication that comes with the product. Was there a Korean version of this campaign, because if so I missed it? The nearest I know was the Philippine campaign which featured failed Korean starlet Sandara Park (well she failed in her home country, hence her quest for stardom in warmer climes) singing in her supposedly cute Korean accent of the way that using Rejoice shampoo provided both a love-life and a head of hair that was “walang sabit” — had no snags. The follow-up campaign used a native performer with a jingle that was so catchy the memory of it irritates me still, so I will spread the pain to my Filipina fellow readers by reminding them of “Instant Ayos”: “Parang magic talaga / Kinamay lang umayos na!/Bilis ayos, kamay ayos/ Mula ng mag-Rejoice…”, where the claim is that you don’t need a comb to fix your hair if you use Rejoice

And coffee brands. Where pre-packed beans are concerned, despise not the ones they sell at Dunkin’ Donuts. By all means (and despite the prominent product placement given to the brand in Alone in Love) despise everything else that franchise sells, including the “coffee” it serves in liquid form on the premises. but the beans are consistently of a quality that I find hard to beat anywhere outside Switzerland (where even the Nescafé tastes divine — as does, incidentally, real Swiss Home-Market Toblerone, the sort they don’t let out of the country). Any transatlantic visitors to the House of Gramps must drop a pack of Dunkin’ Donuts Traditional Arabica on the kitchen table (taking care not to crack the table surface — seven hours in the baggage hold of a Jumbo turns vacuum-packed coffee beans into mini slabs of concrete) if they want clean sheets on their bed.