Natural stuff sounds so nice. It’s so damn romantic, you know? Rub some Vaseline Intensive Care on your legs, and you’re just a chick with moisturized skin. Slather those same legs with coconut oil, and you’re the Goddess of the Islands. I get that, I do. It makes you feel all magical and luxurious, like you’ve inherited your beauty secrets straight from Cleopatra.
Works on food, too. A sandwich is a sandwich, but that organic bread is like biting into the French countryside. Or the Great Plains, which is I guess more likely to be where the wheat comes from. It’ll make you just as wholesome as a cowboy! You can taste the sunshine!
Things start to go wrong, though, when we start thinking like everything natural is good and everything man-made is the product of pig-faced mad scientists from the Twilight Zone. Synthetic stuff, OMG, it will eat your face off and fill your bowels with radioactive plastic! One course of western medical treatment and you’ll have to up your colonics to twice a week!
This is problematic, because sometimes it’s the man-made stuff that works.
Here are some things about which one may safely be a hippie:
- Household cleansers. Dude, I get you on this one. As an eczema victim, I have nothing but sympathy for anyone who wants a little less detergent in his or her life. Vinegar and baking soda work fine, and your hands don’t get chapped.
- Moisturizers. Go ahead and smooth on that shea butter, you gorgeous Queen of Sheba, you! Put it on those sexy lips. Dab a little frankincense behind your ears. Whose navel is a round goblet that wanteth not liquor? Yours, honey. Yours.
- The common cold. We can’t cure it anyway, so if that whiskey-honey-and-lemon makes you feel better, go for it. I believe that colds can be cured by the spicy Hunan vegetable at the Golden Buddha on Clairmont, so who am I to judge if you want to put Tiger Balm on your feet? (Tiger balm is great and you should totally be a hippie about it.)
- Hair products. It’s your hair. Have fun.
- Tomatoes. Grocery store tomatoes are useless and you are absolutely justified in paying twice as much at the farmer’s market to get something that tastes like actual food.
Here are some things about which once should never, ever, ever be a hippie:
- Deodorant. I know someone who tried one of those all-natural crystal deodorants (you know who you are, and I’ll name you if you want). By noon she was so distressed by her own aura that she was reduced to sticking Altoids in her armpits, which apparently burns.
- Exotic magical cures. You know what? Acai berries don’t do a thing for weight loss, and all you’re doing when you eat them is steal berries from rain forest tribes that need them. Just because it comes from another hemisphere doesn’t mean the claims about it aren’t bullshit. (Speaking of tribes that need their own crops, SEE: quinoa)
- Bug spray. FOR REAL I MEAN THIS. There is plenty of DEET-free stuff out there for those of you who think West Nile disease sounds like a party, but for the rest of us: DEET is the only thing that works. Preferably high-concentration DEET. It is your only salvation from the vicious bloodsucking clouds of evil that haunt American summers. If I could, I would naturally exude DEET on humid days. It would also cover the smell left by my crystal deodorant.
- Antibiotics. In clinical tests, pneumonia has never actually been cured by anything else. Just eat some yogurt if you’re worried about your tummy.
(Yogurt, by the way, is totally something you can be a hippie about.)
EDIT: A friend just posted this on Facebook: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/skin-can-smell/
Clearly the hippie issue is something to consider further.
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