These small works are based in research on urban fruit trees growing in soils polluted by heavy metals. I employ polymer clay and wax to paint small “cameos,” using hair collected from women artists to explore ideas of beauty and danger. Paints, like cosmetics, often obtain their beautiful colors from heavy metals, including lead white, cadmium yellow, orange, red and cobalt blue. Here, the heavy metal pigments are bound with beeswax, using charcoal, and complemented by algebraic equations—buried in the wax—which are “solving for unknown quantities.”