September 14, 2006

A Shitty Job

After a yummy sushi meal with the girls downtown the other night, my friend Carly presented us with a most unusual fact. I don’t remember how this fact was brought up, because I have to believe it is not something that would be shouted without provocation, Carly told us that mascara is made from bat poop. Being somewhat of a skeptic, I decided to look into this.

Typing in the search words “bat poop mascara” in Google, I got quite a few hits. I clicked on a lot of the links but found a lot were discussion boards or links that no longer worked. I did find a few that mentioned “guano” (AKA bat poop) which has been rumored to be in mascara. The idea is that mascara was made of coal and petroleum jelly at some point. When mining the coal from caves, sometimes workers would collect bad droppings from caves to be used in mascara. I couldn’t find much of anything definitive. I tried typing “guano and mascara” in Google and didn’t get that much more variety of to my responses. I found this Web site which I considered my best authority and it mentions nothing of bat poop.

I’m kind of glad this was the conclusion of my research. If I discovered this was most certainly true, I’d probably been a little hesitant while applying my mascara the following day. On the other hand, had I found Web site after Web site saying bat poop was a main ingredient of mascara, my next line of research would have included if it were possible to work at say L’Oreal Paris and have the title of bat poop collector.

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