6 June 2007 June 6, 2007
Excuse for having a random picture of cherries: I have been gorging myself on cherries. I think I might be going overboard on the cherries and pineapple at the moment, but I am making the most of summer. I have such a sweet tooth.
I’m a member of a support group for people with pemphigus and someone on the group was asking about just how rare a disease it is. It’s something I’ve wondered too, with regard to pemphigus foliaceus. I know that PF is rarer than pemphigus vulgaris, and there is consequently far more information out there about PV than PF. Anyway, I got down to a little bit of research and found that there are approximately 0.5 - 1 new cases of PF per million people each year in Western Europe. Now Scotland has a population of 5,116,900 (GRO Scotland 2006 estimate), so there should be 2.5 - 5 new cases of PF each year in Scotland. In 2006 I was one of those people, and the same month and in the same city there was another new case of PF (a man about the same age as me).
With regards to all the new toiletries I’ve been trying: I am an absolute convert to homemade skin toner. I’ve been using witch hazel and rose hydrolats and they’re marvellous. So much nicer and seemingly far gentler than toners I have previously used (Simple, Clinique, Avene …).
I’m going to be slightly less evangelical about Burt’s Bees products. I tried the Garden Tomato Toner, but it would take a lot to impress me now when it comes to toner. It was okay, but to be honest I wouldn’t bother - make your own instead! I love the smell of Burt’s Bees products, and I like that the company is so open and honest about its ingredients and it’s desire to use natural ones. Having said that a lot of the products seem fairly interchangeable … what is the different between the lip balms / glosses and the cuticle creme? They look and feel identical and smearing my lips with cuticle creme and my cuticles with lip gloss seems to work as well as doing it the ‘correct’ way round. Actually, the raspberry and cherry lip glosses smell okay in their pots, but they tasted of nothing when on - it was impossible for me to tell them apart. The Milk and Honey Body Lotion sounded nice, but it’s a pretty light weight lotion and doesn’t smell particularly ‘milk and honey’-ish, in fact it is the one item by Burt’s Bees that I’ve tried where the scent was a let down. The Citrus Spice Exfoliating Shower Soap smells very much of orange and cinnamon, but it’s quite a masculine smell. As an exfoliating soap it did its job and well - it was just scratchy enough. Overall, the range - or at least what I’ve tried of it - has left me distinctly underwhelmed.
I found my turquoise earrings. Mum had them - I give her most of my earrings on ‘long-term loan’, so her jewellery box is the first place I tend to look for things. I love the colour and they go well with my favourite pashmina, but my main reason for my sudden desire for turquoise jewellery is for its believed healing properties in crystal therapy (see The Skeptic’s Dictionary to see what a load of nonsense it probably is).
Last night, with my headache still lingering and while I was adding stuff to the online grocery shopping, I spotted 4head. It’s a little stick thing a bit like a stubby chapstick that you rub on your temples to help get rid of headaches. It’s something that has been around for decades in varying forms and under different names - Mum says she can remember it from when she was a child. So, I added some to the trolley at about £6 … then I went and looked at its ingredients: 100% levomenthol. As far as I can see, levomenthol is a form of menthol, which comes from … drum roll … peppermint oil! I immediately took the 4head out of the virtual trolley and ordered some carrier oils via eBay instead - much cheaper and I’ll have the satisfaction of having made my own headache relief. I’m really beginning to believe that peppermint oil is a bit of a must-have essential oil.
I got my Disclosure Scotland enhanced disclosure certificate. It’s official: I have no criminal record or cautions, nor does the government hold any ‘relevant information’ on me (in other less coy words: I’m not a sex-offender). Of course, I knew all this already, but it’s good that it’s official and that I now know ‘They’ haven’t messed up and confused me with someone less well-behaved. It also means that the city council have no reason not to officially offer me the library assistant job that I interviewed for back in April. The council had written to me to tell me that I was their ‘preferred candidate’ (although I presume I wasn’t the only one to get that letter), but that I had to get clearance from Disclosure Scotland before any job offer could be made. I just hope it’s not all too late and that someone else hasn’t beaten me to it.
