Messy vs. Toxic

"Lucille Ball and other Hollywood beauties dyed their hair with pure henna when they could get it. Henna was exported from Egypt to the US, and not grown in the western hemisphere (except for a few places in the Caribbean, where it was cultivated by immigrant labor from India.) The henna supply in the USA was scarce and unreliable, and gradually fell into disuse."

—Excerpted from "Henna for Hair," a most interesting (free) e-book that separates henna myths from facts. (Like, it IS safe to color chemically over pure henna!)

Ingredients you'll find in your drugstore hair color: sulfates, parabens, pthalates, petrochemical solvents... these chemicals pollute where they are made, are tested on animals, irritate our eyes, skin, and lungs, and wash down the drains. And the plastic bottles aren't usually recyclable.

Henna's messy; it smells and feels like mud (but you can mix it with cloves or coffee or other fragrant things). But it's actually GOOD for your hair!

Depression-Era Beauties

<< This gorgeous watercolor starlet by Meaghan Olinski...Check out more of them here...
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from style.com:

There's nothing sexy about bread lines. And yet, thanks to a bevy of glam 1930's starlets, the Great Depression decade was more than just soup kitchens, the Dust Bowl, and the collapse of Lehman Brothers (oh wait, that came later). Yes, hemlines dropped like the Dow, but calf-covering skirts couldn't conceal the appeal of babes like Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, and Jean Harlow—just ask Clark Gable; he married Lombard and starred with the rest.

see more photos (on style.com)

The era's sinuous siren gowns were as much a result of practical constraints as they were of a nationwide mood change. Fabric was in short supply, meaning not only that tighter silhouettes came in, but also that designers cut corners in the lining department. What's more—and maybe this is where Lindsay and Britney got the idea—women sometimes skipped underwear. Take Josephine Baker, who often played up her feminine form in nothing at all. Ernest Hemingway dubbed her "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw," and he saw a lot of her. Nudity aside, present-day designers can take comfort in knowing that fashion as escapism meant a booming business for their Depression-era counterparts. As for present-day women who might be looking for doldrums departure routes, they can take a page out of their predecessors' book and play up their natural assets. As Claudette Colbert put it in The Palm Beach Story, "You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything."

—Alison Baenen

can't get enough depression-era glamour? Here's a great price on a great book!

Depression-Era Movies

10 Tips for the Unemployed from 1930s Movies

By Christopher Campbell