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So, you’ve given up smoking,
are getting five fruit and vegetables a day, and are struggling to drink
eight glasses of water by bedtime. You want to look radiantly beautiful and
healthy and you don’t even take the elevator anymore—but have you thought
about what you are using on your skin?
It’s just as important to think
about what we put on our bodies, as what goes inside. Many commercial
skin and hair “care” products can have just the opposite effect—upsetting
the natural balance of skin and stripping hair of it’s protection. And we’ve
all heard the horror stories of carcinogenic shampoo and asthma-inducing
face cream.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to
know exactly what is in your cosmetics – because you put it there?
The good news is that making
your own cosmetics at home is easy. You can make a preparation to use right
away with ingredients in your kitchen cupboard very quickly - like the
honey and oat mask. Or with a little more trouble, you can make a very
professional looking eye cream that will keep for ages and impress
everybody! Either way, the ingredients are totally natural and the results
very effective. As well as being able to use
natural ingredients and saving money on your beauty needs, one reason that
making your own cosmetics is particularly effective is that with a little
knowledge, you can alter what goes in it to suit you and your skin-type
perfectly. For example,
when making the body butter, you will find there are a lot of different oils
to choose from to use. Each oil has different properties. You can use
avocado oil, which is great for dry skin. Jojoba is a balancing oil, so if
you have either very oily, or very dry skin, it will help to normalize it.
It helps dissolve clogged pores and has a healing effect. Sweet almond oil
is very slippery, so it’s great if you want to use the balm to massage with.
It also has a more neutral smell, so you can add aromatherapy oils to it,
too. Normal olive oil is easy to get hold of and relatively cheap, while
still being very nutritious to the skin—but be warned, the smell is not
exactly sexy!
If you do want to scent your
lip balm or body butter, the essential oil that you choose will have
different effects on your skin too. Basically, lavender is healing,
peppermint antibacterial and refreshing (think feet!), rose is moisturizing
and orange is exfoliating.
You can buy all ingredients
that you need at either the supermarket, health food store, drugstore, art
shop, or online (one example is
MotherNature.com). A good tip for buying rosewater
and orange flowerwater is to go to the Asian shops, where they sell it more
cheaply for use in cooking.
Now, let's get started. Here
are five easy recipes that show you just how simple it is to create your own
natural beauty products right at home.
Body Butter
3 tablespoons beeswax pearls
¼ cup oil
¼ cup rosewater
essential oil as required
Melt the beeswax. This can be
done on top of a double boiler or in the microwave. Blend with the oil. Warm
the rosewater a little and, stirring continuously, drizzle in. If you are
using a microwave, you might have to re-melt the wax occasionally. Keep on
stirring as the mixture cools. When it becomes thick and creamy, stir in
your essential oil, if using.
When the mixture is completely
cooled, transfer to jars and seal tightly.
Can be used as a massage balm
or on lips, too.
Sweet Almond Eye Cream
It’s important to very careful
about what you put on the skin of the eye area, but rosewater and sweet
almond oil make this light and smooth and subtly fragrant—and helps
eliminate bags under your eyes.
¼ cup sweet almond oil
2 tablespoons grated beeswax
3 tablespoons rosewater
6 drops vitamin E
4 drops rose otto
4 drops sandalwood essential oil
2 drops lavender essential oil
Melt beeswax into oil and blend
well. Stirring continuously, drizzle in rosewater. Continue to stir
vigorously as mixture thickens and when cool, add essential oil and vitamin
E. Keeps for six months in a cool dark place. Honey and Oat Mask
Honey is an ancient beauty
treatment, a great all rounder and this combination gently unblocks pores
and improves skin texture. This is a make it and use it
recipe—the quicker the better!
½ cup plain oatmeal, cooked and
cooled
¼ cup honey
Combine together and blend to a
sticky paste. Apply thickly to the skin, avoiding eye area, leave 20 minutes
and rinse off.
Lip Balm
This is going to make a hard
mixture, which you can put into either small open
jars or special lipsalve tubes. Experiment with varying proportions of oil
and wax but basically, you need one third beeswax, and two thirds oil.
Add different scents in the form of essential oil.
Using about 1 tablespoon of wax
and 2 tablespoons of oil plus 5 drops of, for example, rose essential oil
will yield about 16 lip balm tubes.
Milk Bath
Mmmm…
½ cup powdered buttermilk
½ cup Epsom salts
½ cup skimmed powdered milk
½ cup fine sea salt
¼ cup coarse kosher salt
1 teaspoon powdered lavender
1 teaspoon powdered rosemary
Blend all together well. Keeps for one month
in a cool dry place, and enough for six or seven baths.
Genevieve Barnott Jones
has been helping people’s skin problems for over four years using natural
cosmetics. She is the author of the book Amazing Natural Beauty
and can be reached through her
website.
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