Beauty tips

Engineers get a bad rep. People think we are too concerned about, I don’t know, math or seomthing, to be interested in our appearances. But this is an unfair generalization. As you will soon learn, we engineers can be just as shallow as anyone. (Physicists, though, are a group of people who let things go.)

Take The Doktah, for example. The Doktah had beatiful long red hair, but it didn’t get to be beautiful by accident. Every morning, The Doktah would arrive at lab promptly at ten-ish, her hair still damp and pinned up in a chignon. She never wasted time; she always got right to business by checking her email. But once that was taken care of she would pull open The Drawer.

Now, as a person with hair so thin I have to hurry to use the hair dryer before it dries on its own, I found it difficult to relate to The Doktah’s habit of washing her hair at home and waiting until she got to work to do it. But The Doktah’s hair was lovely and thick, and it took too long to dry it right after the shower. So she set up a mirror by an outlet in the cave, and kept her hair stuff at work.

The bottom right drawer of The Doktah’s desk was chock full of hair products, hair brushes, and hair appliances. She had hairwax, pomade, hairspray, silicone drops, curl enhancer, hair straightener, mousse, a hairdryer, a diffuser, a curling iron, two or three round brushes, and large-toothed comb. At least.

But, to be fair, The Doktah’s hair always looked fantastic. She became so famous for good hair that when my sister said she was thinking about getting some Aveda hair products, I said, “The Doktah doesn’t like Aveda,” and that settled that. My sister doesn’t even know The Doktah; she’s just heard tell of her.

The Doktah wasn’t the only beauty expert in the lab. One lunchtime, The Doktah, The Fashion Plate and I were chatting in the cave. The topic turned to beauty tips, and it turned out that The Fashion Plate had a million of them. She said that she, her sister, and her mother used to give themselves facials with oatmeal, and that cucumbers are good for the eyes and salad oil and coconut oil do wonders for your hair. She added that bananas are great too, but she didn’t say what to do with them. We asked her.

“No, you eat the banana,” she told us.