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Southern Oregon Journal: Pea green with envy Sunday Oct 30, 2016 at 12:01 AM By Peggy Dover for the Mail Tribune A concoction I whipped up smelled like the inside of a long-neglected vegetable bin full of old kale and spinach, and I had smeared it all over my hair. The color resembled ancient salad fixings, too. Maybe that’s exactly what it was, this all-natural hair color product. No chemicals or artificial fragrances, just dehydrated greens salvaged from a restaurant dumpster. It should have been called Decaying Herbal Essences. Before I go farther, I must confess to a history of trying, um, weird things for the prideful sake of beautification. This morning, as I spread a slimy green paste over my head while gagging and vowing never to eat cream of celery soup again, I reminisced about an earlier time when I may have been forgiven the naïve indulgence of my youth. It happened on our grandparents’ farm in Battleground, Washington. My cousin Linda and I had reached the universally awkward time between girlhood and young womanhood — not quite old enough for make-up, while yearning to resemble, however remote, some model on TV or magazine cover. We’d seen Cover Girl ads with beauties like Jennifer O’Neill and Brooke Shields. Corn Silk was a popular product name. You can probably guess where this is going. If we used Corn Silk liquid makeup and face powder, our flawless skin would be a dead ringer for Cheryl Tiegs’ professionally made-up, photographed and touched-up images. Well, we had the corn handy. In fact, the season was ripe for swallowing whole all varieties of corn. We chose a nice ear all tasseled-out with, you know, corn silk. We mashed it up in a pan of water and allowed it to cure, reasoning it would be more effective with time. Have you ever tried to mash up corn silk? We ended with wet, smelly tassels draped over our faces. We had to lie back or the concoction slid onto our laps. We faked it pretty well, imagining the positive outcome of our brilliant and thrifty idea. I can’t speak for Linda, but I fully believed my skin appeared smoother and softer after the treatment. Today a spa would do the same thing, add a hot towel and cucumber slices and charge us 50 bucks. Compared to some modern treatments, ours looked sane. There’s a spa in Santa Fe that smears “sanitized” nightingale droppings on one’s face, claiming that the high nitrogen content draws out bacteria. Corn has nitrogen. In northern Italy, one may indulge in a warm hay bath to relieve joint and muscle aches. Dried corn stalks might work here. With what spas charge for slipping this malarkey past you, I think I’m in the wrong business. So, this year, after the local corn mazes confound their last entrant, I plan to harvest the stalks and begin the build-up of Peggy’s aMAZing Rogue Valley Corn Treatments. Because the corn has been used as maze corn for a season, it is permeated with magical properties drawn from all those lost people, which will help you find yourself. Do you buy that? How much would you pay? I have mercifully forgotten other imaginative efforts I’ve tried, until this morning as I sit typing with something that resembles hardening guacamole on my hair. I also have my head inside a plastic bag, which will come in handy if this green shmear doesn’t pan out (or wash out). If my hair turns old-greens green, I will wear a sombrero when I meet my friend Linda for dinner, though I will still smell like hay. I hope fellow diners won’t mistake my hair for a salad. Anyway, now that my head is properly mulched, I could probably grow a nice chia crop. — Peggy Dover is a freelance writer living in Eagle Point. Reach her at [email protected].