Have you 'Scrubbed' today?

Okay so lately exfoliating has become a really huge deal for me!
Mainly because I got rid of my token facial scrub by Aveeno sometime in April (I looooooved that scrub!!) One day after using it & boasting to my husband about how great it made my skin feel, he bought up the investigative question of, "What are the ingredients?" So of course, no matter how much I adored this product I couldn't let this question go...heck, even if I tried he wouldn't let it go away that easily anyways (gotta love him!) So, I looked into my beloved products' ingredients and found the following: SLS (which we discussed in "You Put WHAT on Your Skin!?"), PEG-16 Soy Sterol (which has organ system toxicity concerns attached to it), Phenoxyethanol (which acts as a preservative & fragrance. This ingredient was the scariest of all to me as it's known for cancer concerns & irritation of the eye, skin & lungs). It's also been deemed to be a great alternative to formaldehyde by Wikipedia...needless to say, this was enough for me, I didn't even need to research the rest! I guess the hubby asked a pretty beneficial question after all, huh?
So, with that disaster behind me, I was now on the search for a facial scrub that I thought would work well for my combination/oily, sensitive and acne-prone skin (in my most sarcastic tone: aren't you just jealous that you aren't me? lol) and be as 'chemical-free' as possible. Of course my first inclination was to conjure one up myself, but the face was an obstacle that I had not yet taken on; the skin on the face is just different, the cells on the top layer of skin are smaller on the face and overall that skin seems to be more sensitive than on the rest of your body. To be completely honest...with an extra-sensitive face like mine, I was a little intimidated. Then I got to thinking, sensitive skin or not, this didn't have to be a super scrub; I just needed something with very few ingredients that would help to slough that top layer of dead skin cells off of my face and aid in revealing the fresh, supple, new skin underneath! After mulling it over for 15 mins or so, it finally came to me-I ran into the kitchen, sprinkled about 1 Tbsp Raw Brown Sugar into the palm of my hand & added about 1 Tbsp of jojoba oil, along with about 4 drops of Tea Tree Oil to it. I then placed the mixture into a glass cup, took it into the bathroom where I moistened my face with warm water & proceeded to scrub (very lightly in an upward, circular motions). I rinsed the mix from my face and completed my beauty regime with cleansing and moisturizing. My face couldn't even tell the difference! It was just as bright & dewy-looking as it was when I was using the Aveeno, but now it had a bit of a fresh, tingly sensation from the tea tree oil-which was just an added bonus! I made my goal of using as few ingredients as possible and (to add a dash of accomplishment) those ingredients were better than 'chemical-free', they were All Natural!

One certainly does not have to be a chemist to come up with effective beauty products!

So, what homemade miracles have you made lately?


I recommend the following:

-If you have Oily Skin (like me) Combine:
1Tbsp Jojoba Oil
1 Tbsp (raw) brown sugar
3-5 drops of Tea Tree Oil

-If you have Dry Skin Combine:
1 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 Tbsp (raw) brown sugar
1 capsule of Vit. E (squeeze the oil out)

-If you have Sensitive Skin Combine:
1 Tbsp Light Sesame Seed Oil
1 Tbsp (raw) brown sugar


Choose the one that best suits your skins' needs and let me know how it goes!

You ARE what you eat..

In my attempt to be healthier, I've found others that share the same principles and standards as I do. And though I've found it rather easy to make the switch to natural personal care products (ie: by replacing my formerly beloved & very popular name brand baby lotion with Pure and unrefined mango and shea butters) it has been a little challenging to opt for healthier choices in the grocery stores.
It seems as if health conscience people are just a little limited. Not to mention the fact that we have to be "ingredient detectives" because we cannot simply trust the 'natural' labels on our foods! Case in point, last weekend my husband and I were in one of our favorite grocery stores; we already knew what was on our menu for the upcoming week and wanted to get the shopping out of the way. One of the meals I decided to cook was grilled turkey burgers with a fresh spinach salad. So we're going up and down the aisles looking for ketchup to help set our highly anticipated dish off (needless to say, we were really looking forward to enjoying this summertime treat)! My husband (being the health nut that he is) grabbed my favorite brand of ketchup and began reading the ingredients to ensure that we wouldn't be consuming something that didn't need to be in our bodies. While he was taking care of that task, I picked up my favorite movie theatre butter popcorn, as I was due for a guilty pleasure and popcorn is one of my vices. However, in the name of eating better I decided to go along with my husband’s train of thought & proceeded to pick apart the ingredients list. Now, at first sight the ketchup and the popcorn seemed like decent choices--to me. Ketchup is obviously comprised of tomatoes, which is chock full of lycopene; and the popcorn is a delicious & fantastic source of fiber! Cancer-fighting lycopene and fiber, sounds like nutritious choices right? Well, we found out that this is not necessarily the case.
Unfortunately, my delight quickly transformed into distaste when my husband googled 'High fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)' which was found in the ketchup and 'Tert-Butylhydroquinone (TBHQ)' which was listed in the popcorn.
These guilty ingredients are (respectively) used to sweeten and preserve products. Regrettably, underlying health concerns are synonymous with these items as well. Needless to say, these particular brands of ketchup and popcorn did not make it into our shopping cart; instead, we took our time to find an organic ketchup which simply contained: Tomatoes, Salt, Vinegar and Sugar (as opposed to HFCS) and opted to purchase kernel popping corn with some extra virgin olive oil (to pop it on the stove, old-fashioned style). It may have been a very small step for mankind, but it was a pretty big leap for me! I find myself making better and healthier choices every day, and most of this pickiness comes from educating myself. Our bodies are truly temples; and although I am nowhere near perfect, I strive for it on a daily basis.

Moral of this story: Be good to your body and it will reward you when you need it most!
Pay attention to those labels, the companies have to reveal the ingredients to us and we should take advantage of that! Take responsibility for our own health.

You Put WHAT on your skin?

You put WHAT on your skin!? This is the question that I've recently found myself asking a lot of people.
The skin is the largest organ on our bodies, yet we do all sorts of things to damage it: we expose it to too much sun without the proper protection, we cleanse with detergents so harsh that many of them include Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) as their main ingredient and then we slather on glops of so called "moisturizers", which actually contain more alcohol and water than anything else. So, since when did alcohol become a moisturizing agent?

This topic has been on my radar for some time now, but it really started to hit home when my niece (age 16) recently decided to go natural and asked me for advice on products to use. Before I dropped my natural knowledge on her, I asked to see what products she's currently using so that I could explain to her what was wrong with them rather than to just suggesting products for her to start using. I wanted her to be educated about what had been going onto her body. So needless to say, as this is indicative of most teens these days, she pulled out an arsenal of very popular hair and personal care products; all of which smelled absolutely delicious-but dont let the sweet scent fool you! We went through several containers, just looking at the top 5 ingredients (as the first few ingredients usually make up the largest percent of the product) and what our research yielded made my nieces jaw drop. ALL of her products contained some sort of seemingly harsh chemical; ranging from the very common SLS's to the very damaging diethanolamine (DEA), which is a known carcinogenic. After having her eyes opened, she promptly printed out a list of the top 10 ingredients one should avoid and asked to go to wholefoods in order to restock her once destructive products with more healthy options. Nappturality has coined the following article the '10 things to avoid putting on your hair', however, if you think about it when something goes onto your hair it is also being sucked into your scalp, simply by geological default; therefore, it's suggested that these chemicals be avoided all together-if possible.
I encourage you all to take a second look at the products that you have become accustomed to using over the years. Research the top ingredients within them; you may find that the migrain you get once every two weeks or that inexplicable rash that appears periodically may indeed be due to the combination of chemicals that is applied to your skin every single day.

So what do you think?
Is this all hog wash? Simply a way to deter people from going commericial? OR is there some validity here? Do you think that people who don't smoke (or indulge in other activities that could promote cancer) are still being plauged by illnesses simply because of the products they use?