Spice Rack Face

My girlfriend Anna is taking my face through an abbreviated "boot camp" to prepare for the wedding. My care regimen is longer than ever at night and in the morning, but the results have been worth the discipline. She only wishes we started 6 months ago...

Typically I come to see Anna's skin care salon for waxing- a far cry from the olfactory and tactile delight you experience from being bathed in lavender water with a warm washcloth, steamed, and cleansed with delicious and fragrant chamomile and lemon cleansers and massaged. And with hardly any attention my decolletage has also cleared up and improved as a result of the neck and shoulder massages.

Anna has brought the Ilike (Szep Elet), Peter Thomas Roth, and Christina of Israel product lines to bear on my troubled skin. Ilike in particular has products derived from rose, nettle, lemon- a feast for the skin. Most interesting is that Hungary, seems to be a seat of innovation in this type of product. Given what it says on the Szep Elet site about what exists in that part of the world, perhaps one of those Eastern European spas will be where David and I venture on our second leg of the honeymoon (we wanted to try to visit Slovakia and Slovenia anyway, the home my now passed father's parents came from at the turn of the century). Interstingly, Peter Thomas Roth himself is the child of Hugarian parents. This part of the world that seems to birth such wonderful innovation?

The organic, all natural movement has embraced not just our food chain (as we struggle to re-educate ourselves about where our food comes from). Thankfully, we're starting to put these efforts into products that touch our bodies. It's a strange fusion- we create tons of toxins and all these salves and potions to rid ourselves of them. What a world for our children this will be indeed! A couple of loops perhaps need closing, don't you think?

But the process hasn't been painless. To get my skin looking healthier, the journey has included some discomfort to help rid my skin of comedones. I've now had two intense facials with ingredients intended to stimulate circulation to my skin. The first was paprika layered with blended fruit pulps. Holy paprika Batman! Most recently, it was another Christina product containing capsicum combined with a blend of glycolic and salicylic acid. An Israeli product vs. Hungarian. Innovation has the darnedest ingredients! Having all this done makes me feel like the most pampered...skillet, cup of tea, or piece of raw meat.

The eternal quest to find out where the products that touch our skin come from and why they work so well. Hail the magic ingredients: sulfur and glycolic and salicylic acid.

Both photos by me. OK, OK. My face layered on the spice rack image. It has 57% opacity in Photoshop. Happy now? Pretty simple really.

Featured Creatures Wedding

Many months ago the Shelter's green space outside (and the facility) was offered to me as a wedding site in partial jest. More and more, I am thinking about the roads not taken in terms of wedding things I will never be able to do. For example, I would love to have my girls at the wedding. Alas, they are not dogs and wouldn't be allowed anyway because after all, I'm doing business in Berkeley. Let's just say, the experience would probably rank right up there with going to the vet in their minds.

But involving animals might be just the answer we need for those expecting a more traditional wedding. Zoe's dog Smackwater Jack would be an usher, Pasha would be the [grumpy] Matron of Honor and Joule, would be our flower girl? Weed, bug and salamander chasing skills are a very important and tranferrable skill in dealing with flowers, except that we're doing business in Berkeley so there won't be any flowers tossed about.

What's most interesting is I was searching on Flickr for fun photos and coincidentally, when you search on Pagan wedding and when you search on cats and weddings, you intersect at this same wedding of Cat and Pete- with their Pagan ceremony and her luscious green gown. Best I can tell is they had a handfasting last September in Norfolk, Virginia.

Surprisingly a "dogs, weddings" search comes up with a lot less than I'd expect as well. Is it wedding photographers who've locked up the artistic skills here? Here's a lovely one except that that dog wasn't part of the party. Maybe my search skills are leaving things to be desired.

In the end, it's really horses that get all the wedding PR- pulling the carriage, riding in on a white horse, etc. I adore horses. Left up to me, at this moment, our wedding would either be a shelter-raising wedding (like the house-raising they filmed in Witness) or a theatre-raising wedding- Oakland used to have lots of these and many were torn down but we still have a few lovely ones left from the turn of the century. We'd all show up in tool belts to go build something awesome. Is that the definition of a "service wedding?"