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Updated 92 Days ago
Why Are You Putting Bat Poop and Beetle Juice on Your Face?
Most people have heard the expression "you are what you eat," but after learning what I just have about some ingredients in today's make-up, I really hope I'm not what I put on my face.
As I was watching a past season of Nip/Tuck last night, I got to the episode where Joan Rivers decides to endorse a face cream that Julia puts on the market via her cosmetic surgery recovery center. Sounds pretty tame (as long as you don't look at Joan Rivers too long), but what really made me shudder is the secret ingredient in the face cream. (It's a discreet bodily fluid, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions from there.) Anyway, it got me wondering: do any of the products that my friends and I use have equally disturbing ingredients?
Lipstick - Although using whale fat has long since gone out of style, an ingredient known as carmine is still commonly found in many lipsticks and lipglosses. It seems innocent enough, but carmine is actually made from ground-up, dried-out female cochineal beetle carcasses. Although that good 'ol beetle juice might give your lips a nice, red color, I'm going to have trouble applying shimmer to my pucker without thinking of those crunchy little legs.
Face Masks - Recently, Japanese company Nihon Sofuken has began making a new line of products, including face masks and jellies. Their secret ingredient? PIG PLACENTA! No joke. Since placenta is so rich in vitamins and nutrients, Sofuken has decided that it would be great as a face putty, as well. Apparently, pig placenta was the most plentiful placenta they could find. The company also uses this ingredient in a line of peach-flavored health drinks, but I'm going to stop here before I lose my lunch.
Mascara - It is considered to be one of the most essential beauty products that is currently in use, but mascara is actually full of poop. Well, sort-of. It's a long-standing urban legend that bat poop, aka bat guano, is an ingredient in most lash-lengthening mascaras. In actuality, guanine is the product that is actually used in mascara, but some guanine is thought to be derived from that bat guana. Either way, it doesn't paint a pretty picture for when I'm getting ready in the morning.
Perfume - A musty spritz on your wrists and another behind your ear, then you're good to go, right? Well, before your significant other sticks their nose on your neck, consider the possibility that they're smelling an oily substance from beavers called castoreum. Castoreum is gathered from smelly glands on the oversized rodents, and is used to give some perfumes an unusual, distinct smell. Do you really want to catch a whiff of that?
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.