The contestants on “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here,” will be asked to do some pretty gross things in the name of charity, but they (and you) might not know some of the gross things we all do in the name of beauty.

 

photoMost people probably know about things like ambergris and musk. Essentially sperm whale vomit, ambergris has been used as a fixative for perfumes for centuries. Then again, today you’d only find it in the most expensive perfumes, and after all, you were just eating honey. Musk, an extract from a gland found in musk deer, has been used since ancient times, but you can’t even really get it anymore. A potentially unpleasant item, but in the end it probably isn’t that much more disgusting than eating the deer.

Those long-time favorites may be out of circulation, and somehow not completely disgusting anyway, but those in search of beauty have no shortage of options when it comes to products that might make most of us nauseous. If you want to put up the right amount of money, and find the right salons, you can get nightingale poop facials, bull semen hair treatments, and face creams with placenta. Making the rounds recently, and not even that pricey, is a range of products containing snail slime. Oh, they’re all quite popular.

“Yeah, those wacky rich and famous people,” you’re thinking, and admittedly those willy-inducing ingredients are a bit removed from the mainstream, but you aren’t safe yet. While you’re unlikely to accidentally buy a product and discover it contains bird poop only after you’ve got it on your face, there are some weird things rolling out in your average products. A quick perusal of a couple of cosmetics counters found innumerable items with carmine and ferric oxide.

Carmine, also known as – Crimson Lake, Cochineal, Natural Red 4, or E150, is basically boiled, crushed bugs… well, with the bug sort of removed in the process. Ferric oxide is rust, and though the story might be that it’s made in a lab and therefore all sanitary or such, rust is rust. One or the other is in practically everything red.

Different people are naturally going to have different things that set off their gag reflex. I’m not sure that a little shot of deer gland secretion mixed in a pretty fragrance bother me all that much actually, but the thought of kissing (and let’s face it, eating) rust in a wax base doesn’t do my stomach any favors.

So, when you’re getting freaked out watching the celebrities submit to those gross tasks, just keep in mind some of the things that might be on (or in) your body.

 

 

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