Magickal Realism

To Sleep, Perchance to Smell?  By Serena GordonHealthDay Reporter  — Can the smell of rotten eggs or roses change the type of dream you have? Quite possibly, new research suggests. German researchers are reporting that when people smelled the scent of rotten eggs while sleeping, the nature of their dreams turned decidedly negative, while those who got a whiff of the scent of roses had more positive dreams.

To Sleep, Perchance to Smell? - healthfinder.gov

I would love to test this out - I’ve done years of dream journaling and tracking, and since a lot of magical lore associates sulfur with negative visitations and roses with angels, it would be interesting to see how consistently these are linked even in a casual, totally non-scientific collection of anecdotes.

Tags: science, olfaction, dreams

Should I ever be a rich eccentric I may follow Dale Carnegie’s library path. The above book, a perfuming standby, is available at my public library. It gives a reasonable overview of the perfume industry, and while the industry itself evolves rapidly, it at least gives you the feeling that someone out there has some idea of what’s going on in the big picture.

There are a lot of reasons I’m opposed to the opposition to cloning, one of which is the possibilities it would have in cosmetics testing not to mention organ donation. It’s possible to clone specific tissues: grow a fresh liver, say, or a canvas of skin to test cosmetics on. Yes, it’s still a little bit macabre, but much better than torturing living beings to see whether that lipstick may cause a rash, death, or dismemberment. I know that science fiction has had us scared for years over the implications, but that’s what science fiction is supposed to do. On its better days, science reality removes the scary or at least puts it to good use.

So Engadget’s post about the coming use of robots over rabbits intrigues me. The National Institute of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency have come together to fund and guide this plan. According to the Guardian UK, this may also have implications for the EU’s reach legislation which right now requires such testing of all synthetic chemicals.¹

This has potential to replace the ex vivo testing model where pig skin is used from animals slaughtered for food use, which while slightly better than using live animals, still violates the principles of many vegans and some vegetarians.²

1. US to replace animals with robots in toxic chemical tests Alok Jha. The Guardian. London (UK): Feb 15, 2008. pg. 15 [↩]
2. Ex Vivo Animal Testing Alternative Introduced. Global Cosmetic Industry (1523-9470) 1/1/2008. Vol.176,Iss.1;p.8-8 [↩]

Estee Lauder buys Aveda. Then there’s that whole thing with lead in red lipsticks. And now, Clorox buys out Burt’s Bees. Rather than actually going green, a lot of companies really are just out-and-out green raiding, keeping the green cache built by the original brand and sooner or later completely abandoning the ingredients and standards that made the brand environmentally positive in the first place.

((image by worstdecember on flickr))

So Treehuger raises an interesting point: is Lush the last big green cosmetics supplier standing? Is it that easy to sell out? Is it that hard not to? Is success and sustainability together so hard to sustain, that one or the other must eventually go by the wayside?

At this point, I’m in no danger of becoming a “big green.” I’m a tiny, little green, and given that I have an endangered plant or two in my stock, I have to face the fact that I’m a green with a bit of brown on my leaf. Sandalwood is in serious danger. Frankincense ain’t doin’ so well either. While the amount I use is unlikely to risk an entire forest, my small part contributes to the millions of small legitimate parts, plant piracies, and bad farming practices that make up the great big damaging whole.

The endangered materials were gifted to me in the first place, but now I’m running low, and they are really popular among my customers. So I have to face a serious choice: continue with wherever I can get it, drop them from stock, or send out feelers for a sustainable supplier? I operate on a narrow budget (bootSTRAP, baby). So stuff like this is a truly tough decision for me.

So contemplating what would happen if I became a large producer? Yikes.