Fashion repurposing has gotten out of hand recently.
A woman once went viral for using yeast from her yeast infection to bake bread, then a fashion student went viral for making clothes out of discarded fish skin for her graduate collection.
And now, as if things couldn’t get any weirder, a woman started making jewelry out of her own bacteria!
But first, a little bit more about that food blogger who used yeast from her yeast infection to bake bread.
That’s not something you mention and then just gloss over. We HAVE to talk about it. This home “baker’s” name is Zoe Stavri.
She basically took the internet by storm when she revealed her recipe in 2015.
“Waking up on Saturday with the familiar itchy burny fanny, I giggled to myself, ‘Maybe I could make bread with that,’” the outspoken feminist, Zoe, wrote on her blog, Another Angry Woman .
“And that ticked into, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to try making my own sourdough anyway,’ and then a ‘[expletive], would that even work?’
It gets even more interesting: “And then I got curious, and the next thing that happened was I was scraping white goop off of a dildo into a bowl of flour mixed with water.”
After Zoe proudly showed off her creation online, the internet exploded with reactions.
Many branded her actions as “unhygienic and unsanitary.” Zoe, however, defended her choice, saying that, well, yeast is yeast. You can get it at the store or from your vagina, she contested.
“The biggest risk with using candida albicans for bread making is that it won’t rise,” she stated.
She also called the internet’s disgust an example of misogyny. “It probably doesn’t matter that my sourdough may or may not contain any actual vaginal yeast,” she wrote. “The very idea of it seems to horrify people more than enough.”
If your stomach is doing okay, move right along to this next story!
Chloe Fitzpatrick is a design graduate of the University of Dundee.
She’s gone viral, racking up millions of views, for creating jewelry from her own bacteria and the bacteria of plants.
She created the unique pieces in a collaboration with the school’s life sciences department.
“I wanted to help people appreciate bacteria,” Chloe told STV News . “It’s all around us – inside and on our bodies, on plants, everything we touch. I wanted to help people acknowledge it, as a piece of nature and as a piece of art,” she said.
The process of making jewelry out of bacteria is pretty intense.
She starts by collecting the bacteria and culturing it using agar plates. This allows the pieces to grow separately. After the colonies have multiplied, they form into colors, and then she uses UV resin to create shapes.
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Chloe has been documenting her process on TikTok, which includes showing where the bacteria from her body come from.
In one shot, she took a sample from her armpit and then her ribs. She even made jewelry out of her butt.
Chloe’s videos have received plenty of reactions online, ranging from impressed to pretty grossed out.
“I find this fascinating,” one wrote. “we love a woman in STEM,” added a second.
Meanwhile, some weren’t too enthralled. “This makes me EXTREMELY uncomfy,” one wrote. “Shower,” added another.
Chloe’s dream is to create jewelry for buyers made on the bacteria that they send in.
“It would be really interesting,” she said. “Everyone’s bacteria would be a different colour – white, orange, pink – I’d quite like to expand the technique into wearable pieces, since at this point it is solely art.”
