Hazards of henna

There is a potentially deadly chemical in some henna and hair dyes that is flying under the radar of most consumers. Para-Phenylenediamine (PPD) is a petroleum-based coal tar dye found in most hair dyes, whether they are purchased at a drugstore or an upscale salon. It is also the coloring agent in black henna, used to apply temporary decorative tattoos (1st image). Aware that it may cause an allergic reaction in some individuals, the FDA does not approve of its use for direct application to the skin and yet - even though when used on the hair it is in contact with the scalp for up to 30 minutes, and quite often touches the skin on the forehead and ears - it is allowed as an ingredient in hair dyes. The cosmetic industry successfully lobbied decades ago to be exempted from regulation, and so only includes a warning on the label and a suggestion that concerned users should test the product on a patch of skin 48-72 hours before use. Reactions to PPD range from minor (throat irritation, rash, swelling, and burning sensation) to major (bronchial asthma, urticaria, dermatitis, and liver and bladder cancer). Carmen Rowe, a 25-year-old resident of Swansea, U.K., swelled up "like a football" (3rd image), was temporarily blinded, and spent 3 days in the hospital with subsequent complications after using Clairol Nice n' Easy. Others had reactions to the chemical contained in L’Oreal Casting Creme Gloss (stories and photos here) and Garnier Herbashine ("At one point my eyes swelled shut, the whole of my nose became level with my cheeks and a golf ball-sized swelling came up on my head. It was so painful."). In the most severe cases, PPD can cause anaphylaxis which can result in death ("My heart rate was at 180 bpm - around the same rate as a heart attack - and I couldn't breathe.") and cross-sensitization (a responsitivity to related chemicals including textile dyes, pen ink, gasoline, oil, food dyes, medication dyes, preservatives, and fragrances). "You...become allergic to just about everything found in modern society," writes Perri Jackson for the Organic Consumers Association. Warnings and horror stories may not be heeded by those applying henna tattoos, so clients are encouraged to seek out artists who advertise their dye as PPD-free and to employ other safeguards. Driven by the startling photos (2nd image, more here), I hereby do my part to bring public awareness to this issue, as the American Contact Dermatitis Society did in 2006 by awarding PPD the title of “Allergen of the Year.”

Tommy breaks a promise

Despite having other plans for today's post, I couldn't pass up this photograph of 69-year-old Tommy Wells, Britain's oldest tattooed man, looking a bit crabby on his scooter...

Tommy has spent thousands of pounds over 52 years to get the 1,000 tattoos he sports head to toe - speaking of which, he even has them on the soles of his feet. When his (uninked) wife of 44 years, Sandra, died in 2004, he got one more tattoo: "I love you always, love Tommy," it reads across the back of his head. The ink honors her, but also breaks a promise he had made to her to keep his head design-free. She had implored him to stop when he had covered his body, but Tommy explains, "[A]fter she died I was so devastated that the only thing that I could do to make me feel better was have a tattoo tribute to her - and my face and head were the only places I had left....I just so hope that she can forgive me but I do have that feeling that heaven will be hell for me in the years to come. When she died she was cremated and her ashes went into an urn. I did say to my daughter, 'Put me in there with her in a brown paper bag, because I know if Sandra sees me she will kill me!" In fact, it was Sandra who had dared the retired coach driver from Worsley, Greater Manchester, to get his 1st tattoo at the age of 17. The initial design on his arm was followed by skulls, daggers, flowers, and the names of family members. Now a great-grandfather, Tommy has inspired his children to get tattooed, but is convinced they will never catch up to him because they got off to such a late start. Tommy has had over half a century to accumulate his body art and reveals, "I would do the same if I had my time again."

Zombie timeline

"Zombie got tattoos he
thought would disgust
other people, using
his body to express his
anger and social alienation.
But instead of pushing
others away, his tattoos
drew them to him."
~sociologists Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp

2001
Montreal native Rick Genest (above) gets inked for the 1st time at the age of 16, and eventually - over 3 years and at a cost of several thousand dollars - has 80% of his body tattooed by Frank Lewis to resemble a cadaver.

2008
Taking the stage name "Zombie Boy," Genest (click here for extensive slideshow of color portraits be professional photographer Neville Elder) performs for sideshows - including the one he established, Lucifer's Blasphemous Mad Macabre Torture Carnival - as a geek, a blockhead, and a fire-eater.

2010
Someone creates a Facebook page featuring Genest called "I bet this guy will regret getting this tattoo once he's older!" The Facebook page is seen by Nicola Formichetti, who is both a creative director for fashion designer Thierry Mugler and personal stylist to Lady Gaga. She hires Genest to debut the Autumn/Winter men's collection in Paris. Lady Gaga, who debuted her song "Born This Way" on the same Mugler runway, taps Genest to appear in the video. Genest is then hired to appear on the small and big screens, including a cameo in "47 Ronin," a forthcoming Keanu Reeves film. Offered more work in fashion, Genest explains, "To set the record straight, it was never my intention to become a model."

Future:
Genest would like to have the whites of his eyes tattooed, his teeth filed into points, his tongue split. and his ears removed.

Thanks to my brother-in-law Nicholas for bringing this to my attention.

Follow-ups

Parade floats 1/2/10 A comment about this post mentioned the "Dirty Jobs" episode in which Mike Rowe helps dismantle parade floats. You can see a clip here at the 2-minute mark.

Marijuana and embalming fluid 12/28/09 Gamblers in South Africa are driving vultures to extinction because they believe that inhaling the smoke of the bird's brain confers the gift of premonition.

Bushmeat 12/27/09 National Geographic reports that many "zoos" in China are illegal fronts for the raising of tigers for their meat.

A Christmas Carol 12/24/09 A Turkish archaeologist is seeking the return of the relics of St. Nicholas (270-346) from Italy.

Happy Thanksgiving! 11/26/09 I decided against doing a post on artist Méret Oppenheim (1913-1985), but see 2 more of her great Surrealist works here (scroll down to the 2nd image) and here.

Stone/house 11/19/09 I just learned about the work of Mexican architect Javier Senosian, whose houses have a very organic style.

Taxidermy furniture 11/!6/09 A patron of a New York City restaurant has sued the owner for negligence after a 150lb moose head with antlers 3' wide fell off the wall and gave her a concussion. Meanwhile, in Florida, someone has combined an alligator and a motorcycle. Here is an article about taxidermy as a decor trend, and another artist using dead animals in her work. Lastly, check out the shoes here and here from the Virtual Shoe Museum!

World's heaviest insects 8/28/09 Owners of tarantulas are warned to protect their eyes after a man in Leeds, England, suffered spider hairs in his cornea when cleaning the cage.

Museum behind the scenes 7/25/09 The failure of the U.S. Department of the Interior to properly curate the objects under their stewardship conjures up images of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Birthing and hoarding bunnies 6/18/09 More than 500 animals - most of them dead, including deer, cobras, and monkeys - were found in and around a home in Feltonville, Pennsylvania; they were collected not by a hoarder, but by practitioners of animal sacrifice.

"Seven Pounds" 6/14/09 The winner of a contest to have the "Best Job in the World" was stung by the extremely venomous Irukandjii jellyfish on the beach of his temporary home on Australia's Hamilton Island.

Giraffe evolution 5/15/09 A baby giraffe (pictured above) has been born - weighing 150lbs, standing 6' tall, and standing within an hour of birth - at the Niabi Zoo in Coal Valley, Illinois.

Mastectomy tattoos 4/27/09 After years of associating Susan G. Komen (1943-1980) with breast cancer, I wondered who she was.

Double-muscled dog 1/30/09 The tongue of a dog in Paisley, Scotland, swelled to 4 times normal after some pork membrane cut off the blood supply at its base.

Eye news

Today I offer for your consideration a long list of weird news about eyes. When I first filled out an organ donor card, I excluded my eyes because it gives me the willies to think of them being removed, but I feel so strongly about restoring sight, if possible, that I no longer make that exception. What follows are stories about curing blindness and causing blindness, the weird things people do with and to their eyes, and eyes in archaeology and on the cutting edge. I have prefaced each headline with an adjective to help you decide if you want to go to the link to read/see more.

Promising: Scientists in the U.S. were developing a microchip that could be surgically implanted in the eye to stimulate the cells around the retina and restore sight.

Ironic: The U.K.'s National Health Service sent a letter inviting a woman from north Wales to have the ophthalmic surgery she needed - 18 years after she had died.

Painful: An 81-year-old monk on Thailand mistook a tube of superglue for eyedrops, but was fine after doctors unglued one eye.

Diabolical: A man from Dundee, Scotland, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for gouging out his ex-girlfriend's eye and attempting to throw her off an 8th-floor balcony.

Surprising: American woman Jalisa Thompson's claim to fame is her eye-popping ability.

Disturbing: A 70-year-old Swedish woman undergoing cataract surgery was mistaken for another patient and had an unneeded operation on her eyelid last month.

Miraculous: A 60-year-old American woman from Mississippi has regained her sight after doctors implanted a tooth in her eye to anchor a tiny prosthetic lens.

Unforgivable: Under the influence of PCP, a Bakersfield, California, man mutilated both eyes of his 4-year-old son, blinding him.

Strange: The eyes of a young woman in Melbourne, Australia, clamp shut for 3 days at a time, blinding her, then open for the next 3 days, then clamp shut again - a baffling affliction she has lived with for 4 years.

Remarkable: A 5,000-year-old artificial discovered at a site near Zabol, Iran, is believed to be the oldest prosthetic in the world.

Horrifying: Doctors in Kragujevac, Serbia, removed an 11cm parasitic worm from a 37-year-old woman's eye socket.

Questionable: Photos and a firsthand account of one of the first eyeball tattoos.

Insane: A 25-year-old death row inmate in Texas, who has a history of mental problems, pulled out his remaining eye and ingested it, having mutilated the other eye 3 years earlier while on trial.

Unfortunate: A drunken blind man stumbled into the wrong house in Houston, Texas, and was injured by birdshot fired by the homeowner when the man refused to leave.

Defensible: A blind man in Inkster, Michigan, shot at 2 men trying to rob him, hitting one of them in the chest.

Undetermined: Snopes has no information on the authenticity of this photograph showing a man pulling his eyeballs down to cheek level.

Unbelievable: The Texas Commission for the blind violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by discriminating against 2 employees who have impaired vision.

Daring: A legally blind man climbed both Mt. Hood in Oregon and Mt. Whitney in California, setting world records each time.

Creepy: This unnamed man has quite a range of motion when rolling his eyes around in his head.

Squid ink

Another incredible fossil find, this time by the British Geological Survey at a site in Wiltshire, England, that produced vast quantities of well-preserved specimens during the Victorian era. They discovered the 150 million-year-old fossil of a squid with a perfectly preserved ink sac! Astonished paleontologists attribute this to the "Medusa Effect," an extremely quick process of fossilization. To mark the discovery, they reliquified some of the ink with an ammonia solution and used it to draw the specimen and write its Latin name, Belemnotheutis antiquus, beneath it. Some of the ink has been sent to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, for chemical analysis, and lead researcher Dr. Phil Wilby explains, "It's very valuable material so we won't be using up any more of it now we've done the first test." Contemporary squid ink, on the other hand, is pricey, but available on-line. Or if you are more adventurous, you may choose to harvest it yourself, as demonstrated here. I was familiar with the use of squid ink for cooking, but not for printing, and when I looked it up, I found this video - hilariously well-done, no?! Here's how the stuff is produced in the wild. I also wondered if tattoo artists used squid ink, but its seems that the answer is no, despite the number of studios called "Squid Ink Tattoo." Time to try some squid ink pasta...

Mastectomy tattoos

Some women have chosen tattoos over reconstruction of the breast(s) after radical mastectomy. This is their way of reclaiming their body, making something beautiful out of an ugly scar, changing their chest into an aesthetic display rather than the medical display it had been. I learned about this in a video that my classmate Karen made in graduate school - she gave me permission to include it here, but I can't get it loaded. Instead, I've included quotes and links to some examples:

"It took me ages to pluck up the courage....I'm quite proud of my 'war wound' and wanted to make it a bit prettier. People tell me it is lively and some people even think it's sexy - which is quite nice." ~Sally Arnold

.

“The entire process was wonderful. Lizards have always had a special meaning for me and I wanted to use that symbol, with all its rich, very personal and empowering energy my sense of wholeness, not a shame based ‘cover up’ or to try to make a terrible experience more tolerable, but to claim my selfhood and the empowerment that gave me." ~Jane Fox

.

"Getting my tattoo was the culmination of a three year dance with Breast Cancer. The tattoo changed my mastectomy scar into my shield." ~Pam Huntley

.

"I wanted to know that I had survived. I wanted to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and know I had honored my journey." ~Jackie Floyd

.

"There was a fine red line across my chest where a knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart." ~Deena Metzger

Art of Scott Campbell

Scott Campbell is a tattoo artist who also works in other media. His art - including these laser-etched stacks of $1 bills - are currently being shown at O.H.W.O.W. Gallery in Miami, Florida.

Plague doctor

Yesterday I had this image of a plague doctor in my head, so I found it this morning and only now have noticed at the end of his stick--a winged hourglass!

Tempest fugit

The winged hourglass occasionally depicted on Colonial gravemarkers is the visual equivalent of the saying, "Tempest fugit [Time flies]." It supposedly graces the gravestone of Lt. John Parker in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, who died in 1763 (or 1774). Without having seen that stone or a photograph of it, just a rubbing, I decided on September 11, 2002, that I needed that image etched on my arm, so I got a tattoo. Just now, I searched again, hoping to find a photo of the Parker gravestone. Instead, I found this beautiful, award-winning quilt with images from New England stones, including the winged hourglass. Artist Judy Coates Perez was just finishing the quilt on September 11, 2001, and was so unsettled that she was unable to show it for a year.