"My hair is fantastic!" Ailyn exclaimed after her shower. "Look how smooth, and the ends curl so nicely – it's perfect!"
This is a little like hearing an alcoholic rave about a Shirley Temple. Two years ago Ailyn was in tears each night as we worked the painful, terrible knots out of her hair left to her by the ravaging Aegean. We used multiple products. We called lifelines for help – including and especially our cousin Arielle whose similarly textured curly hair makes her a go-to for curly-hair advice. By the end of the summer, we had discovered donkey milk hair mask which solved the terrible tangles – leaving us to stock up on donkey milk for the year, bringing home huge quantities.
What we didn't realize was a better answer was sitting under our noses the entire time. That same summer, I began buying Olive Era body wash and shampoo – a Greek brand with incredible fragrances made, not surprisingly, from an organic olive oil base. Olive Era very smartly got their product into the Sofitel Athens Airport – leaving me, as intended, to want to buy a bottle. Going back to our alcohol metaphor – one bottle led to two, two led to three, a couple of additional fragrances and pretty soon not only was an Olive Era user, so was our then-au-pair Alex and I had the house here stocked with product for my Airbnb guests.
At some point, Ailyn tried out Alex's supply since they use the same bathroom in Westlake and discovered the shampoo and conditioner worked really well for her. That led to Ailyn picking out her own pomegranate scented Olive Era hair products at the Athens Airport Duty-Free as we were leaving last summer – armed with tons of donkey milk products to which she was very committed. The lark of a purchase turned into a staple as Ailyn quickly found Olive Era shampoo and conditioner got her not only better results than donkey milk products (of which we have a ton sitting around should anyone want), but it freed her from other products like hair mask and leave-in conditioner.
Hence during my day in Athens at the beginning of this summer's sojourn, I went to the Olive Era store in Athens specifically to load up on what the house here would need for the summer – with Ailyn's anti-Aegean needs at top of mind. To the mix of my favorite body wash and her favorite shampoo and conditioner, I added their new hair mask (just in case) and an hair-restoring oil the lady insisted was THE thing for a curly-haired girl battling the damage of the Aegean.
Two nights ago, Ailyn was already pleased with the performance of the Olive Era shampoo and conditioner – which even under stress of post-beach hair can still out-donkey the donkey. Then she tried the new recommended conditioning hair oil and that's when the exclamation of victory occurred. To me, the trauma of the other year was so bad that hearing Ailyn happy about her hair here on Patmos was a similar feeling to finding one of them broke a fever.
It's important to note – we didn't leave Ailyn's fate only to donkey milk and olive oil. We tried traditional products from the grocery and beauty stores including L'Oreal, Vidal (Sassoon?), Dove and a couple of other things that are eating up space in my bathroom closet. The natural products seemed to work best – and of course I could feel better about toxicity for both Ailyn and the environment – a triple win.
Generally, I try to choose healthier, environmentally friendly products and solutions. At both houses I have the plant-based, environmentally-friendly laundry detergent, hand soap, dishwasher detergent, cleaning spray and dish soap. I like products that smell good figuring I'm paying for them either way – why not like the smell? So I have nice scented soap at my sinks and of course the Olive Era products in my shower. It at least SEEMS like a win – pleasant for me, better for the world.
Yet, I always feel like responsible choices live on shaky ground.
One day you're buying cage-free eggs only to discover that doesn't mean the chickens really have much room or eat a good diet. So you get the free-range eggs only to learn they still have limited room, don't necessarily go outdoors and can still be fed a crap diet. So you get organic pasture-raised eggs to make sure you get eggs from a chicken that runs around and eats bugs and organic seed. Then maybe you're getting a good quality, humanely raised product for a price that should be affording the chickens prime real estate in the South of France.
Patmos being such such a beautiful place with what I have to assume to be a more modest, less-advanced wastewater treatment plant than what we have in Southern California, it seems to me picking environmentally responsible products might be more important. So I get Planet brand laundry and dishwasher detergents and hand soaps that smell good and say they're natural. The Olive Era products are supposedly mostly organic olive oil. In theory, we're putting at-least-not-terrible products down our drain. I can't know given the labels are in Greek. But as I illustrated with the eggs, even when the packaging is in English you never REALLY know. Some better informed, virtue signaler might show up and tell me that everyone in Europe knows the parent-company of Planet pays off some EU official who adjusted the standards for "eco-friendly" to allow sludge from French nuclear power plants, because it is, after all, "plant based".
Still, as a general rule, it seems the European Union keeps more stringent standards around both environment and health standards. The EU banned glyphosate – marketed in the US as Monsanto Roundup. Increasing bodies of research show glyphosate may be one of the most hazardous chemicals in use in the-for-human-consumption supply chain – being tied to a range of health concerns from cancer to autism to metabolic disorders. I'm sure it's far from perfect, but the EU seems to have a little more resistance to sacrificing health for expediency. So, I'm hopeful our laundry detergent is somewhat honest.
Of course there is the plastic bottle when it's done, which begs the question of whether the recycling really gets recycled. One person told me she heard the plastic really gets burned. I hope not. In America too, the legitimacy of recycling programs have also come into question. It seems China – the main recycler of plastic – stopped accepting American post-consumer plastic, leaving an insufficient number of capable remaining plants, most of them in Southeast Asia. A tragic result is post-consumer plastic costs more than new plastic – which in turn makes recycling a less profitable business, further limiting its scope and capacity.
Meanwhile China churns out and exports new-plastic like crazy making it so that even in Patmos – for the first time – restaurants have begun using plastic containers for take-out rather than the recyclable paper or aluminum packets they used even this past winter. Moreover, I can't help but notice - much like when I lived in Southeast Asia – everything we buy is given to us in a plastic bag. Often I refuse the bag – because I don't need a ton of little plastic bags, let alone to contribute to plastic proliferation.
As Yuval Noah Harari points out in his thought provoking books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, one of humanity's biggest challenges is that no one really understands how all our systems work. Perhaps 100 to 150 years ago, a high-level political leader or academic could explain the world's systems – financial, political, industrial, etc. Within the past few years, city councils around America were shocked to learn their recycling wasn't being recycled – because they are all serviced by large third-party companies who win contracts. Municipalities don't manage their waste – national conglomerates like Waste Management do.
More significantly, there isn't one person who can single-handedly explain our entire global financial system. It's no longer a few bankers in London and New York sitting in high-backed chairs. There are forms of investments, exchanges and interwoven networks that elude even Wall Street's brightest. In 2008, few people thought mortgaged-backed securities would pull down the global economy – and those are relatively conventional and well-known investments compared to some of the complex derivates in operation today where algorithms have more to do with financial outcomes than anything else.
All of that to say, we make most of our decisions in a bubble – knowing only so much about their meanings and implications. For anyone with a conscience, it can be maddening to try to figure out what the right thing to do is. Mostly, we make our best decisions off the limited information we have and hope our good intentions come to pass.
Sure, we can research at least some things. In today's world, no one has to remain ignorant. Equally, we make so MANY decisions, we can't become informed enough about all of them and ultimately rely on things like labels to help us. If Planet is the only eco-friendly brand within the four grocery stores on Patmos – only two of which are sizable – then it doesn't seem to me any amount of research will make a difference unless I choose to start ordering products specially or bringing them with me on the ferry from Athens. I have enough other areas to need to research and care about that I decide to trust the label and move on to the next decision. Rightly or wrongly.
So, I hope Ailyn's fantastic hair is really the result of good natural ingredients. I hope I'm not poisoning Patmos. I hope the "local fresh eggs" I bought at the produce shop really are local and better than the packaged ones at the supermarket. I hope my feedback that I don't need so much plastic for my takeout order resonates with the nice restaurant owners who return to the more benign containers of yore.
And I hope that our pivot to olive-oil based products doesn't put the donkeys out of business. You never know if they're hardworking donkeys being harmed by this post or if they're really abused slaves waiting for the collapse of the donkey milk industry to gain their freedom. Or if the collapse of the donkey industry will prompt angry, ignorant, heartless masters to take their rage out on the donkeys – driving an escalating donkey-abuse problem. I can only hope no matter what we use for Ailyn's hair – the donkeys' lives are beautiful. Namaste.
