The Green Beauty Guide: Your Essential Resource to Organic and Natural Skin Care, Hair Care, Makeup, and Fragrances (18 page)

chapter
5

do-it-
yourself
green
beauty

T
ired of talking about natural products? Then why don’t you make one yourself? This way, you will know exactly what goes into the jar. You will know why it works; and if it doesn’t, you can learn from this experience and improve your formulation. Hundreds of brands, big and small, were conceived in a kitchen, and the best thing is you don’t need a gift for cosmetic chemistry or a professional degree to whip up a simple cucumber and clay mask. Once you come to grips with this simple process, you will realize that your homemade cosmetic products are more effective and pleasant to use than commercially available masks sold in pretty tubes and jars. Here are some other benefits of making your own skin care:

1.
Big savings.
You will be able to save up to 80 percent on an advanced antiaging cream if you boost your existing moisturizer with active ingredients that are sold separately. Most scrubs and masks cost pennies when made at home.

2.
Better value.
To put it simply, you are getting the biggest bang for your buck. You are not spending 95 percent of your money on the packaging, labeling, and advertising—so you can get a much better product for a lower cost.

3.
Unique combinations.
You can try combinations that are impossible to find on the shelves. Brands are tied to specific active ingredients (Crème de la Mer uses fermented sea kelp, while RéVive is famous for the use of epidermal growth factor), so it is impossible to find products that have active ingredients marketed by two competing brands, but you can mix them at home very easily.

4.
Custom-tailored strength.
You can adjust the concentration of an active ingredient based on the condition of your skin. By making your own cosmetics, you can be sure that the blend works for you and was not designed to suit a large number of people. If you need a little less of an ingredient, you can more easily adjust the formulation. There is no need to compromise.

5.
Freshness.
You can eschew paraben and formaldehyde preservatives by making a fresh batch of a skin cream or a cleanser at home every month.

6.
Simplicity.
You can save yourself some time and hassle by buying organic base creams and lotions that already contain all the inactive ingredients mixed up in perfect proportions. Some cosmetic products can be whipped up from scratch, but good lotions and shampoos are more complicated to make at home.

7.
Advanced formulas.
By trying new active ingredients, you can enjoy the scientific findings sooner than people who use ready-made products. Conventional beauty lines need two years to introduce new ingredients to the market due to the expense and time to develop new packaging and labels.

Choose Sustainable Packaging

I maintain my supply of reasonably priced cobalt blue jars and bottles by purchasing them by the dozen on eBay. I also reuse glass jars from old creams and masks. Mason jars make excellent containers for bath blends and salts. As the jury is out on phthalates leaching into food and water from plastic containers, and aluminum making its way into products from aluminum tubes, I made it a rule to decant all my ready-made and homemade beauty creations into glass containers. Using a pretty container for your homemade goodies is very important, because you are more likely to enjoy using herb-smelling goo from a vintage lead-free crystal jar rather than from a disposable plastic container. Glass containers can be washed, sterilized, and reused, which reduces the amount of plastic that goes to landfills.

Vintage perfume and cosmetic bottles make gorgeous frames for your cosmetic creations. Jo Wood said that luxurious containers were an important part of her organic fragrance collection. “For years I’d been searching for organic beauty products that were beautiful and smelt fabulous; it was important to me that what I put on my skin was just as natural and chemical-free as what I was putting in my body,” says Jo Wood. “When it came to packaging, I was hugely influenced by Biba and the Art Nouveau movement, which can been seen in the luxurious black packaging and gold etchings.”

Preserving Your DIY Skin Care

A rule of thumb is to prepare small batches of skin care weekly and store them in the fridge. Refreshing facial toners can be kept in a freezer to give you a quick minilift in the morning. If you use a mild natural preservative, such as my own Silver Vitamin Blend (recipe in Chapter 7) or plain grapefruit seed oil or extract, you may store your products on a bathroom shelf for up to a month. Keep a watchful eye out and discard any product that shows signs of contamination (smells spoiled, develops discolorations, or changes its texture).

While most soaps and shampoos with added parabens, phthalates, or formaldehyde preservatives usually remain fresh for up to two years from the manufacture date (who uses a soap that long, mind me asking?), the shelf life of paraben-free beauty products is much shorter. Mascara, lip balms in pots, and eye creams will remain uncontaminated for three to four months; facial and body moisturizers can last up to six months, depending on the ingredients; shampoos and mineral sunscreens have a shelf life of two years if kept in a cool, dark place; and natural alcohol-based deodorants will stay fresh for up to one year. Anything that has no water in it will remain fresh for longer, but many body oils may go rancid nine to twelve months after being opened or blended. Some essential oils act as natural preservatives, so your citrus-smelling organic products have more chances of staying fresh.

No matter whether you prepare your beauty products from scratch or buy them in a store, make sure you keep them away from direct sunlight. The ideal place to store your organic skin care is a cool, dry cabinet. A refrigerator isn’t always the best option, since cold temperatures may reduce the efficacy of certain ingredients.

Where to Buy Ingredients

Clays, witch hazel, vitamins in pill and liquid forms, herbal teas and extracts, as well as organic sugar and sea salt are available from most good health food stores. Rose and orange waters are available in better supermarkets and groceries. Many online stores sell natural ingredients such as aloe vera juice, borax, citric acid, essential oils, and almond meal for scrubs. You will find some useful resources in Appendix A.

When choosing plant ingredients, ask the seller about the origins of their extracts and juices. “When plants are grown in their ideal region, they contain the optimum amount of nutrients,” says Kristen Binder, the founder of Saffron Rouge (
www.saffronrouge.com
). “Take a cactus and try to grow it in northern Canada. The plant will struggle to survive and therefore be in life and death mode, instead of being focused on flourishing. This plant will be depleted of many vital nutrients because the soil and sunlight are not what it needs. In the same way, if you tried to grow a rose bush in the middle of the desert, the soil wouldn’t provide the rose with what it needed in order to make rich oil. I find it so hard to compare lemongrass oil from plants grown in a greenhouse to oil from lemongrass grown on the mountains of Bhutan, where this plant naturally flourishes.”

Many organic skin care brands grow their own plants for use in their products. Weleda, WALA (the maker of Dr. Hauschka), and Primavera are famous for their lavish gardens. If they need to use a plant that grows in exotic destinations, these companies support fair-trade communities that grow the plants without the use of chemical additives.

Active Ingredients: No Rocket Science

Until recently, I had to put up with quite a limited selection of antiag-ing organic beauty offerings. Most of them were gentle and soothing, but they didn’t contain any of the cutting-edge ingredients that were used in synthetic age-delaying creams and serums. Today, thanks to readily available “skin actives,” concentrated active ingredients that you can add to your favorite beauty products, I spend hours blending, revamping, and enriching my organic lotions and potions.

If you take a look at the ingredients list of any cleanser or moisturizing lotions, you will notice a long list of tongue-twisting chemical ingredients. Most of them do nothing for the health of the skin. They only serve as a base for the active ingredients, helping them dissolve properly and maintaining the stability of the formulation so that it doesn’t become too watery, too thick, or split into layers.

The process of creating high-end, high-performance skin care products is now demystified. Dr. Hannah Sivak, PhD, the scientific mind behind secretive Skin Actives labs, is as blunt as only a scientist can be: you don’t need to coat your products with a mysterious air to make them effective. “For example, sea kelp bioferment is a great active, and you do not need to play music or do a light show during fermentation,” she says, referring to the famous Crème de la Mer, which contains fermented sea kelp. “The key molecules in this active are the polysaccharides unique to sea kelp, and the music is not going to affect their structure.”

The newest active ingredients are naturally found in human bodies and plants. Some of them can be extracted from plants, but others are so rare that it is much more affordable to make them in a lab. To start with, Dr. Sivak recommends two actives, such as epidermal growth factor (EGF), as the signal that tells the skin to go ahead and renew itself, and fermented sea kelp, as a provider of building blocks for the skin to be able to follow the EGF orders. As you become more skillful in mixing, you can add more antioxidants.

Adding active ingredients is no rocket science. All it requires is a tender touch: add one active at a time and mix thoroughly, either with a spatula or a small mixer that fits inside the cream jar. With practice, you will achieve a nice texture that will be pleasant to use. Now, as your skin gets drier, you can adjust the formulation by adding a few drops of rosehip or pomegranate oil to the mix.

While it’s possible to replicate any cream or lotion at home using basic ingredients available from most health food stores, the right consistency and even texture can be hard to achieve at home, especially if you are just flexing your cosmetic chemist’s muscle. It’s more practical to buy simple, “generic” natural lotions and cleansers in stores and use them as a canvas for your own blends.