The Green Beauty Guide: Your Essential Resource to Organic and Natural Skin Care, Hair Care, Makeup, and Fragrances (38 page)

Dr. Hauschka Sunscreen Cream SPF30
is an extremely green and versatile product, and the only sunscreen we use in our family. And as with any family member, we have learned how to live with its shortcomings. Shortcomings? Any mineral sunscreen may leave a whitish cast if you apply it thickly or frequently. Newer, micronized zinc sunscreens are not as heavy and may not leave a white film. Any mineral may cause you to break out (if you can’t stand zinc oxide, try titanium oxide, and vice versa). Spread it well and top it off with mineral foundation powder to set it up.

Final Thought

There’s just one reliable formula for sunscreen, and I found it in
Alive
magazine. All the rest are variations, and mine is no exception. You can easily tailor it to your skin’s needs: greasier skins should use sweet almond oil alone; sensitive types will be better off with a drop of chamomile oil instead. Please note that chamomile is mildly lightening, so use with caution. Mature, drier skins would benefit from a drop or three of rose hip or evening primrose oil in addition to sweet almond oil.

Skin-feeding
Sunscreen

3 ounces sesame oil

2 ounces sweet almond oil

½ ounce pure beeswax

4 ounces distilled water

2 tablespoons zinc oxide

Optional:

5 drops rose hip oil

5 drops chamomile essential oil

5 drops evening primrose oil

Yield
:
4 ounces

1. Melt the sesame and sweet almond oils and beeswax in a double boiler over medium heat.

2. Remove from the heat, add the water, and blend with a stick blender until uniform.

3. Allow the mixture to cool. Add the zinc oxide and other essential oils of your choice, if using. Blend some more.

4. Transfer the mixture into a glass jar. You can store this sunscreen cream for up to six months.

“Natural beauty to me is loving acceptance and celebration of who you are as an individual. When you have that loving acceptance and celebrate your life, it leads to sustainable choices that support yourself, the community, and the earth. Natural beauty is a woman going in her own unique, beautiful way.”

—Susan West Kurtz,
President of Hauschka Skincare

I think it’s unhealthy to treat the sun as an enemy. The sun has always been with us and is involved in delicate, complex mechanisms in our bodies. By artificially blocking the sun, we may be shutting down more than vitamin D production. It’s just not natural.

All of nature’s gifts can become poisonous when overdone. Take red wine. If you drink one small glass a day, red wine provides cancer-fighting chemicals and may protect against heart disease. If you drink a bottle of red wine a day, you are damaging your liver and increasing your risk of certain cancers. Another example is olive oil. When you pour a tablespoon over your green salad, you are reaping the goodness of antioxidants and skin-benefiting fatty acids. But when you load everything with oil, you will likely soon gain weight, become obese, and suffer the dreadful health consequences that come with excess weight, from diabetes to cancer. Moderation is the key, whether you are dealing with red wine, olive oil, or the sun.

chapter
11

green
body
care

c
all it body discrimination, but not all areas of our skin receive the same attention. Smooth, dewy skin epitomizes youth, beauty, and health, yet many of us concentrate our efforts on the skin from the neck up. We would happily spend ten minutes washing, scrubbing, and nurturing our face and styling our hair, but all we do for the major portion of our skin—that is, the skin covering our arms, legs, and torso—is slapping on some moisturizer, with some occasional scrubbing with a loofah or exfoliating shower cream.

To truly pamper yourself, you should give as much thought to your body care as you do to your face. There is absolutely no excuse for you to neglect any part of your body: in health food stores, drugstores, and glittering counters of department stores, not to mention online, you will find a scrub, toner, and lotion for every nook and cranny. But how much thought do we put into buying them? Do we buy them for real results, or are we swayed by the airbrushed advertising? As you read the next few pages, you will learn how to choose the best products to use during a shower, a soothing and relaxing bath, cellulite massage treatments, hair removal, and nail care sessions, and they should be part of your green beauty routine.

Body care products are perhaps the most populated area of the green beauty industry. On a good day inWhole Foods Market or in your local health food store, you will find shower gels and soaps in every imaginable scent, and endless varieties of body lotions, scrubs, and massage oils. These days, many spas are offering toluene- and formaldehyde-free manicures and organic wax hair removals. Many conventional cosmetic manufacturers are reformulating their body products, removing sodium laureth/lauryl sulfates, ethoxylated ingredients, and synthetic fragrances. Sadly, the makers of many “natural” beauty products too often cut corners by adding chemical junk to their products. We gladly buy them to soak, scrub, moisturize, fight unsightly dimples, and wash away our emotional woes. So how do you make informed decisions and buy green beauty products that truly deliver results? Read on!

Green Shower

Body cleansers, no matter if they are packed in an elegant glass bottle or a minimalist tube made of corn, all function in a very simple way. They cleanse the skin using surfactants, chemicals that lift up the oil, dead skin cells, and daily body grime, and then mix with water and wash away. Some cleansers leave a faint layer of oil on the skin. Some have antibacterial properties. Some contain vitamins, amino acids, fruit acids, plant extracts, and exfoliating granules. All these ingredients may offer excellent benefits in a face or body lotion, but they have little chance to make any difference when used in a body wash. They are simply washed off too quickly. All you want to pay for in a body wash, green or not, is a surfactant mix and some gentle emollients. Save your money for a decent body moisturizer, and let the body wash do its job, which is cleansing your body.

A green cleanser should use plant-derived cleansing agents, derived from olives, coconuts, or sugar beets without the use of sulfates. Many so-called natural shower gels still use sodium myreth sulfate and lauramide MEA (JASON Organics), sodium laureth sulfate (Bain de-luxe, Korres Natural Products), sodium lauryl sulfate, cocoamide MEA, paraben preservatives (Kiss My Face), or polyethylene glycols and tromethamine (Nature’s Gate Organics) and therefore cannot be recommended due to their contamination with the carcinogen 1,4-Dioxane (refer to Chapter 2). To “offset” the use of toxic and irritating detergents, many “organic” manufacturers stuff their shower gels with plant extracts, which are of little use because they are quickly washed off.

Green Cleansing 101

All cleansing products, whether they are meant for use on the face, body, or hair, are based on one of three types of cleansing agents: detergents, soaps, or saponins.

Detergents
are the most ubiquitous type of cleansers. Essentially, all soaps work as detergents because they all allow oil and water to mix so that oily grime can be removed during rinsing. But in the cosmetic industry, detergents refer to anionic and nonionic surfactants: one side of a molecule prefers water (hydrophilic) and another side prefers oils and fats (hydrophobic). The hydrophilic side attaches to water molecules, and the hydrophobic side attaches to oil molecules, allowing them to be washed away. Detergents include
nonionic surfactants
like polyethylene glycol esters (PEGs),
anionic surfactants
ammonium laureth or lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth or lauryl sulfate, and gentler yet still derived from petrochemicals
amphoteric
surfactants such as cocoamidopropyl betaine and lauryl glucoside.

Natural plant
soaps
are made by saponifying olive, jojoba, or coconut oils with an alkali (potassium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide, wood ashes, or the ashes of other plants). Soaps are classified as anionic surfactants. While there are many wonderfully informative books on soap making, I’ve never ventured into cooking my own soap at home because I prefer the convenience of certified organic, ready-made castile soap base. For my own cosmetic products, I use liquid soap made of certified organic olive oil.

Saponins
are plant glycosides that derive their name from their soap-like properties. They occur in a great many plant species, including soapwort (
Saponaria officinalis
), soap lily (
Chlorogalum pomeridianum
), and soap berry tree (
Sapindus mukorossi
), whose dried nuts make a wonderful all-natural laundry detergent.

Personally, I feel that my skin is cleanest after bar soap. Your bar cleanser shouldn’t be the typical, heavy-scented, animal tallow–based bar soap that is blasted by all beauty experts. Plant-based, naturally scented bar soaps are very effective body cleansers. On the downside, soap bars tend to get slushy when left in a shower for long, so if you buy a good olive bar soap or receive a fancy box of exotic soaps as a gift, keep them out of steamy showers and treat them to a nice soap dish. I once spent untold money on an elegant plastic designer container for a soap (okay, it was Chanel) and then used it for my humble organic glycerin bar. Finding a really good soap dish with a lid is not that easy, but you can find a real jewel on Ebay or in a local thrift store.

Green Product Guide: Shower Gels

Trying to concoct a shower gel at the kitchen sink is just not worth the effort. Here are some really good body cleansers to consider. As always, those with three leaves are my favorite.

Tom’s of Maine Natural Moisturizing Body Wash
is one of the few truly green products from this mainstay of health food stores. This basic, no-nonsense body cleanser is very gentle and soothing and not overly moisturizing—just right for summertime use. The light scent makes this shower gel a good choice if you are sensitive to essential oil fragrances. It is reasonably priced, too.

Dr. Hauschka Rose Body Wash
is a rich, creamy shower gel with a relaxing, sensual aroma of jasmine, lilac, and rose. It’s very good for use in wintertime thanks to its highly emollient base of nonsulfate surfactants, jojoba oil, shea butter, and soothing propolis. However, it may not be suitable for sensitive skins because of the high content of essential oils, and the price is a little steep for a tube that is usually finished in ten days.