For the Love of Boobies

High school kids love boobies.

We know that because so many of them across North America have been threatened with suspension this week for wearing bracelets that say so.

The naughty little bracelets are part of a breast cancer awareness programme aimed at teens.



Apparently Proctor and Gamble doesn't love boobies as much as the kids do.



Proctor and Gamble is using parabens, a chemical preservative, in their Oil of Olay Regenerist skin care line - even though parabens have been found in human breast cancer tumours.


I found out about this because I follow Toronto artist/writer/woman with a green conscience, Frankejames on twitter and she mentioned it this week.



***

I haven't been using the Regenerist line but I have been using an Oil of Olay face wash so I decided to get out the magnifying glass and take a look at the ingredients.

I didn't find parabens listed on that product but I did find a cheery looking substance
called methylchloroisothiazolinone.

"Well, well," I thought, "what's the good news here?"


I googled methylchloroisothiazolinone and found that although not proven to be a carcinogen (yet), it  "can be a skin and membrane irritant or cause chemical burns.

It was largely removed from most cosmetic products except for those with only short duration skin contact such as rinse-offs".   (wikipedia)



Eek.





 

Frankejames suggested looking for a cosmetic line with an Ecocert logo.

My quest for a safe facial product started and ended at The Body Shop.

 The woman who waited on me was quite familiar with the Ecocert logo and suggested the Nutriganics line, suitable for women "in their prime", like moi.

Not only does Nutriganics have the Ecocert logo, it also has the FCS* logo.

Organic and ethical!


Jeesh.


How much on the side of all that is right and good can one woman get??



Anyway, wearing my new Saint Frances persona, I am suggesting that if you love your boobies you read the ingredients on your cosmetics jars


and

if you love other people with boobies you suggest they do the same.

* FSC stands for Forest Stewardship Council.
It means the product came from a forest that environmentalists, developers and first nations people have worked together to manage ethically.

$ Note:  I bought the 50 ml day moisturiser and the 50 ml  night moisturiser @ $22 each and as there is sale this week at The Body Shop, I got the Face Wash for free. 

 

Related articles

• Cosmetics Ingredient Alert: Parabens (fitsugar.com)
• How to Find Paraben Free Products (brighthub.com)
• 'I love boobies' campaign deemed offensive by school board (parentcentral.ca)

Authentic Old White Woman

There are a lot of evil-looking, bloated things floating to the surface during this election campaign.


Much of it alarms me and for what it is worth I do find myself making outraged tweets and posting blogs every few days.



But on twitter I usually feel a lot like my family's late, much loved, old beagle.


Banjo liked to think he was in the thick of things.

If bigger, younger dogs were roughhousing, he would bark and run along beside them pretending to himself that he was part of the action.



I post the same things I say on twitter to face book, but I have a completely different feeling about it, mainly because on fb more people read my blogs.

Worse still, people I know read my blogs.

The result is that while I feel like a non-player on twitter, on face book I feel like a political zealot, a crazed Louis Riel raving away at the Federal government issuing fatwahs every second day and I always suspect that people think that I have gone over the edge.



I worry about that.

A lot.

Probably more than I should.



This morning I read Geezeronline's blog about being authentic.

http://geezeronline.blogspot.com/



Heaven knows most women spend their lives trying to please other people - unless they are as rich as Oprah or on anti-depressants in which case they don't give a flying fig about anything.

(Speaking from past experience.)



I guess a benefit of being an old white woman with no addictions at present other than blogging, is that I can be authentic, (online anyway), and say what I really think.



If I could just get rid of my guilt for daring to say it ...

It Just Isn't Canadian

Image by nosha via Flickr

A Canadian has always been a person who agreed with the opinion of the last person with whom she or he spoke. That gave rise to our well-deserved reputation as being a particularly polite group of people. Everybody liked us. If we had personal opinions, we kept them to ourselves until the rest of the world went home.

That isn't to say there weren't Canadians with opinions. That's why God gave us Rick Mercer and Christie Blatchford, after all.

The problem is, thanks to easy access to facebook, twitter and blogger, every single Canadian  has an opinion on everything now. Which might be okay except we don't agree on anything and nobody knows how to compromise because most of us have never had opinions before.

Take the outpouring of vitriolic comments about the G20 fiasco in Toronto. Like a dog with a bone, we just keep shaking it. But we aren't getting anywhere. Nothing new is being said. Not one mind is being changed. It just goes on and on.

I tell you, this business of having opinions, well, it just isn't Canadian.

I think we should quit talking about it, let the civilian-led police inquiry happen and then see where we are.

That's my opinion.

Not that I expect anyone to agree.

The Secret Diary of Frazzee1

Dear Dairy,

I'm being followed by a tomato in Twitter.

The tomato doesn't do anything. It never posts an entry. I mean I suppose nobody really cares how things are going in the vegetable garden, but still you'd think it would make an effort. Post a new recipe for chicken cacciatore or something.

The tomato found me. I didn't follow it first, I swear, although I might have if I had known about it. I mean If there had been a vegetable category when I first started browsing through Twitter looking for interesting people to follow, maybe I would have picked the tomato over say, the bean sprout.

Not that there is a lack of things to admire, but sometimes I wonder what is it about me that is so attractive to the tomato. Given my gene pool, if it had been a potato or a haddock following me around I could understand. But a tomato? I'm at a loss.

It's kind of creepy knowing this big, red blobby thing is in my personal cyberspace. Watching. Well maybe tomatoes don't actually watch. But they can hear. Remember the earmuffs in "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"? Or was that in "Killer Tomatoes Eat Paris"? Hard to remember, so many good movies.

I guess I shouldn't go to Twitter alone at night, diary, but I can't help myself. I need to keep up with things. I'd even miss those two weirdoes who keep trying to sell me naked pictures of themselves.

You are the only one who knows about the tomato and I trust you not to tell.

Until next time, dear diary, I remain your intrepid,

Frazzee1