hold the mayo.

Eleven summers ago, I was at the beach with my extended family. My older sister had read in some teenage girl magazine that you could get rid of all the dead skin cells on your scalp by rubbing damp sand hard into it. It sounded like a great idea to me, because I was twelve and had just gotten my period and started wearing a bra and was really new to all this womanhood stuff. I figured she knew these things; she was eighteen! So when we were in the ocean, we reached down and scooped up big handfuls of wet sand and rubbed it into our hair - lather, rinse, repeat. We enjoyed the tingly sensation and thought about all that nasty dead skin we were purging from our heads. My sister and I were not (are not?) close, and I was happy to be sharing this experiment, bonding with her like a sister, like a woman. I hadn't even known that dead scalp skin was such a problem, but apparently it was enough of one to merit a home remedy in a nationwide publication.

I'm sure that we did indeed get rid of a lot of skin cells, and judging by how hard I was rubbing, I probably took out some living ones, too. What the magazine failed to mention was how to get all the cotton-pickin' sand out of your hair. I think it took us the whole week to get all the sand out, and by then we'd probably grown some more dead skin. I didn't need an extensive menstrual history to figure out that the sand thing had been a stupid idea. Rather than lose faith in my sister and her feminine knowledge, the experience seemed even more like actual bonding; maybe she didn't have womanhood down either.

A few months ago, my sister told me to wash my hair in apple cider vinegar to...do something nice, I forget what. The results were so disastrous that I can't help but think that she might have been playing a trick on me. One day, I will stop listening to the things my sister tells me to do to my hair. Until then, pass the mayo.