Natural skin care doesn't exist.
Sorry to break it to you, but I don't see cleansers and moisturizers bubbling up from the ground, nor do flowers dripping skin astringents any time soon.
How can anything be natural when it doesn't come from nature?
Let's do a quick comparison:
A tomato that you forget about it for a week on the kitchen counter, it will not surprise you to find that it's rotten, squishy, and covered in mold. In only one week your perfectly ripe, sandwich ready tomato has become irreversibly reclaimed by nature.
Let's compare my tomato to the average bottle of "natural" face cleanser.
When you purchase said a cleanser bottle from a store, you have no idea how old this cleanser is. It could have been created and bottled years ago because, unlike food brands, skin care products don't come packaged with a "born-on" date stamped to the bottom.
So you bring home the bottle and set it just as proudly on your bathroom counter, and proceed to forget about this bottle for one year.
A year later, cleaning out your cabinets and you come across that dusty bottle of natural face cleanser and wonder how old it could possibly be. You open it, it smells fine, you guess you can use it.
But something feels wrong about this.
Deep down inside when we bring something into our home that's stuck around for a year (even though it could actually be much older), the idea of using it is just repulsive.
So this is a pretty good, general definition of something natural – it rots.
And as we all know, skin care products and cosmetics don't rot.
Why would they?
Companies fill them with so many preservatives they'll probably still be around even when we aren't. Extending shelf life is the cornerstone of our industrial age. Produce the product fast and cheap, then make sure it'll last long enough for someone to buy it.
And with skin care this can take a long time.
We're human beings: we like things that rot and distrust things that don't (or at least we should).
What is Real Natural Skin Care?
Now the one exception to my rule of "natural skin care doesn't exist" is homemade skin care.
Homemade skin care is very natural because it's a concoction you create yourself in the kitchen using natural and organic materials.
Skin can do funny things, and homemade skin care will be much more potent and concentrated than any products you buy in a store.
Just make sure you never use ingredients in your homemade products that you're allergic to. It's just not a good idea to be messing around with peanuts on your skin if you already have a known peanut allergy.
Use common sense with everything you try and if your skin doesn't seem to like it, try a different recipe.
I know many people are really intrigued by homemade skin care and eager to try something new. If totally, 100% natural skin care is what you want, then making your skin care products from scratch is going to be your only option.
Totally natural skin care can't come from a company in a bottle because they have to have some preservatives and stabilizers in them to extend shelf life.
I know homemade skin care might not appeal to everyone. Most of use just don't have the time to whip up a cleanser, toner, and moisturizer.
So for those of you that want natural skin care, but don't want to make it yourself, you're going to have to compromise. You need to start reading ingredient labels, comparing products, and purchasing skin care that is natural enough for you based on the concentrations of bad ingredients verses the good.
Soapconscious has many eBooks with
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Happy Natural Cosmetics Making!
Save your skin and your money!
Marlene Daniels
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