Going Coconuts

It seems like coconut oil is the new coconut water which was the new acai which was the new pomegranate which was the new green tea which was the old kombucha...

Anyway, whenever there's a new "health" food trend, I tend to be skeptical. My approach to diet tends to be eat ALL the things (in moderate amounts. generally), and I think saturating your meals with any one thing is a little silly.

I am, however, loving this coconut oil craze, mostly because it smells amazing!

Food-wise, I've been kind of hesitant to try it in anything savory, but it's great on toast/waffles/pancakes in lieu of butter. I did try subbing it for butter in mac and cheese but it kept boiling when I was trying to make roux, even at the lowest heat...
The unprocessed/"virgin" variety of coconut oil is solid at room temperature, but has a low melting point. I'm hoping this will make it easier to work with in baking than butter, especially since it doesn't have to be refrigerated. I also don't use butter much for anything other than baking-- it's a pain either having it take up room in the fridge or running out to buy it every time I have a sweets-making whim. I'll update after I try making some coconut oil frosting ♥

I've also tried it topically:
· On hair, while it's still damp from washing. Just a teeny dab, let it melt in my palms, then rub through hair. I have to be reeeeaaaally careful, though, or my hair ends up kinda stringy (it's super baby fine in texture).

· For the body, I've added it to my bath and applied it all over, mixed with Cetaphil lotion. It leaves skin crazy soft and makes you smell like a Sno-ball-- pretty awesome. · It fared well as a makeup remover, but I wasn't wearing any stubborn eyemake when I tried it. I'll put it to the test against eyelash glue residue and then we'll see how it really works. · I tried it just a little on my face. It's supposedly noncomedogenic and has antibacterial properties, but I'm reeeaaally acne-prone so only time will tell. Jojoba oil doesn't break me out, though, so maybe neither will coconut?

first post

Hesitantly trying to get back into blogging. There's a lot that's been on my mind on and off before starting this, things that have been holding me back from picking the habit back up.

• I've really only had very personal blogs before. Most of my posts from, say, my LiveJournal back in the day were very stream of consciousness, full of fandom-related content, netspeak, keymashing. The only posts of interest were pictures (which now I have Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr for) or hyper-emotional super-personal things I really don't want floating around on the internet.
• Which leads me to my second concern, keeping a good balance of personal and web presence persona, so to speak. If anyone decides to read this, I want them to have a sense of who I am, but at the same time I can't say I'm comfortable sharing a lot of details about my life to complete stranger.
• Content-wise, I'm not entirely sure what to blog about, even! Cosplay? Beauty products? Food? A little of everything?  I hope no one will mind.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, stuck over thinking things before anything even happens. It's a bad habit, so even if it's just a blog, I'd like to start taking a little more action here and there.

So hello, here's me!

I posted a more heavily filtered version of this to my Instagram, but I decided I like this one better, actually. This was me getting made up to try out new lower lashes, which are still quite tricky for me. I had a lot of trouble with falsies when I first started using them, but by now I'm pretty used to the application process... so hopefully it'll be the same case with the lower ones as well.

Now that I look at my selfies again, though, the lower lashes aren't even visible in most of the pictures I took! Seems like every time I get new lower lashes, I tend to err on the side of too natural. At least at $1.50 a pop from DAISO, I can afford to try again.