Eyes Right?

How are the windows of YOUR soul doing?

Are they looking bright or feeling jaded? All this time we spend looking at screens can make your eyes feel tired, so what they need is a little TLC

Something you can do at your desk is called palming. Just put your elbows on the desk, with your hands upright (might be an idea to wash them beforehand, as you’ll be touching your face).

Now let your head sink down and let your palms (bit of a giveaway, that name, eh?) cover your eyes. This should block out all light so your eyes can just rest for a few moments.
 
Don’t stare into the darkness, - keep blinking – so your eye muscles relax.

Do this for 30 seconds to 3 minutes and your eyes will feel refreshed, and so will you.

If you need a little more relaxation, and not just for your eyes message me to book something more intensive, to get yourself all bright eyed and bushytailed.

#selfcareisnotselfish #selfcaretips #deskselfcare 

#theorganicbeautician #loveyoureyes

What's in your skin care?

What's in your skin care?

And, is it beneficial or detrimental?

All those long Latin or Greek names. Are they natural or not?

Do you need to be a cosmetic chemist to make sense of it all?

Take alcohol for instance

Bad for the liver and the skin, isn’t it?

Or is it?

If you’re as old as me, you might remember the luridly-fluorescent toners teenage girls bought in the 1980s. They stripped every last drop of oil from your skin, which then responded by overproducing oil, so you used more toner. (Great sales model, but not so fab for your face) 

And that cycle repeated, ad infinitum.

So, if you’re reading an ingredient label, and you see alcohol listed, don’t just assume that the product will be drying, as it’s not always the case.

Because, alcohol (as you might already know) comes in many different forms. And I don’t just mean tequila or vodka.

Some sorts of alcohol are great to have in your skin care

They’re usually called fatty alcohols and include ingredients like cetyl, cetearyl or stearyl alcohol, and guess what? they're derived from fats. (The name is a bit of a giveaway, there, isn’t it?)

They are also called esters, and Beeswax, for instance, contains about 50 percent monoester, while carnauba wax is roughly 85 percent ester. And both those ingredients are generally considered good for your skin, not drying.

Then there’s something you might recognise - Tocopherol. (The -ol ending shows it’s also an alcohol.) α-Tocopherol is also known as Vitamin E, which is generally considered beneficial for the skin, and not at all drying. In fact, fatty alcohols have an ability to lock moisture into the skin to form a protective barrier.

That sounds ok, doesn’t it?

The type of alcohol you want to avoid like the (current) plague, at least on your face, is SD40 (AKA isopropyl alcohol). This is great for sterilising surfaces and is often in cheap hand sanitisers, which is why your hands might feel mega dry, if you use the ones supplied in shop entrances, rather than carry your own.

Ingredients lists can be a bit of a minefield, so you may need some help decoding what’s good for your skin, what’s not and how you can look younger for longer.

Rather than turning to drink, at the thought of how complicated it is, why not get some help from a professional?

Message jane@theorganicbeautician.com to book yourself a consultation with an expert

 

Selfcare is NOT selfish

     

   Today - being Friday - is one of only two days ruled by a female Deity.

   Lucky to get two, really, weren't we?

   So, let’s not moan, because at 28.5%, it’s a better percentage than many parliaments around the world.

   Anyway, who has time to complain? Most of the women I meet and treat hardly have time to sleep, what with a job, trying to run a household, juggling animals and children (not necessarily in that order) and attempting to fit in cooking healthy meals and a spot of exercise.

     But finding time for you is important.

     Let something drop, and step off the treadmill, before you fall off it, drooping with exhaustion.

     Sometimes stopping everything for a little time out can be so energising that you get more done after the break. And selfcare is not selfish, it’s a necessity.

     As most women don’t have sheds, they need to escape to salons for a little P&Q. If you really can’t find time even for that, then carve out some time at home and do your own pamper session.

     Too tired to think of what to do? Maybe you need a little nudge?

     Every Friday I send out a Pamper Mission with suggestions on how you can treat yourself at home.

     Want to get those? Sign up HERE

Marilyn Monroe, who was a lot cleverer than she was given credit for once said 

“I want to grow old without facelifts. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made.”

But she died in her 30s, well before Botox was anything other than a life-threatening disease carried by over-ripe sausages, and fillers were something you chose to put in a sandwich, so didn’t have the chance to try either. 

Would she have done? Who knows?

And should we take beauty advice from film stars anyway? So, what’s the best thing to do? That's what I'm regularly asked.

Make your own decision, I think. 

After some detailed research, of course.

If you want to try something like Botox, and feel it will improve your life, that’s up to you. It’s doubtful that it will improve your life, but it’s your face, after all. 

Never have been one to follow the herd, and really having a severe antipathy to needles, I’m going to stick to the old fashioned route of ageing, but as Dylan Thomas said I will

“…not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

(Or the incipient wrinkles, if you're a hit shallower - that would be me, then.) 

Not that I’m into rage, really, sensible action is more my preference. Which is why I’ll be eschewing needles and practicing Facial exercises. 

Want to know more? Message me and we can chat. 

 

Parched limbs?

 So, a week of lovely weather, and suddenly the earth in the garden is looking parched.

From wearing wellies on my daily walk, it's suddenly sandal weather. And are my limbs ready for the sudden exposure?

That would be a 'no' from me.

I look like 'Nausicaa of the white arms', but considerably less glamorous. (Or Ancient Greek.)  
Way back when, Nausicaa and her maidens went down to the riverbank to bathe and do the washing, there being a dearth of domestic white goods in Greece at that point. They met Odysseus and kindly gave him clean clothes, and some oil to rub on his sea-drenched limbs.

He eventually repaid them with the Odyssey.

Which in those days was the equivalent of binge-watching Game of Thrones, presumably.

(Never watched it myself, as my son-in law lent me book 1, and that was sufficiently blood-drenched to put me off)

Anyway, the point of this massive tragic digression was the oil.

Because now is a jolly good time to start treating your arms and legs with some oil or body lotion.

Oiled legs

Your choice, but the best time to do this is when you emerge, like Aphrodite from the waves.

Failing that, the shower will do just fine.

By applying oil or lotion while the skin is damp, you trap moisture, which helps keep skin hydrated. Natty eh?

So that's your pamper mission. Lavish some love (and oil) on your limbs.

If you want to do something luscious for your face, however, you could take a peep at THIS. I have just two spaces left for the next few weeks, so delaying might cost you.

Want more info? Text the Pamper line on 07961224560

Recently I've been getting quite a few questions about ingredients, especially when they sound "chemical". 

So here is the answer to one...

"Why are there added essential oils in the Dr Hauschka products? I thought they used whole plant ingredients?"

Fair point, and you're right in that assumption - they DO use whole plants, but there's rules and regulations that govern these things even more strictly than a Government minister's Dominatrix.

Generally speaking, it can be safer to use whole plants, and often more beneficial, because although loads of things have been analysed to the nth atom, there may still be other - as yet unfound - ingredients.

And there's this thing called synergy, which is what happens when ingredients work together as a whole.

The whole is frequently greater than the broken up constituent parts.

For instance, take willow bark: one of the main ingredient in that is salicylic acid.

Which is commonly found in aspirin.

Yep, one of the commonest drugs on this planet was originally synthesised from Willow bark. In fact the name salicylic comes from its Latin name: Salix (meaning willow)

Willow bark contains salicin, a compound that can be metabolised in the body to create salicylic acid, and is a precursor to aspirin.

It's been used in Folk medicine for yonks, to relieve pain, calm inflammation, and reduce fever. However, because it was used in its whole (or wholistic) form, all of the other constituents probably played a part in the healing properties.

Once you extract one ingredient, things can get out of balance, and the body doesn't always recognise it.

The same thing with essential oils. You can buy 'fragrance' oils which are lab synthesised, so don't contain all the complexity of a natural oil. (And they can be toxic...)

Rose oil, for instance, is unbelievably complex, and contains more than 300 known compounds. However, you can list some of them separately and get things like

• citronellol
  
• phenyl ethanol
  
• geraniol
  
• nerol
  
• farnesol
  
• nonanol
  
• linalool,
  
• nonanal
  
• phenyl acetaldehyde
  
• citral
  
• carvone
  
• 2-phenylmenthyl acetate
  
• methyl eugenol
  
• eugenol 
  
  

Some of which sound well dodgy, don't they?

I mean, if you saw 2-phenylmenthyl acetate on a bottle you'd be sensible to assume it was created in a lab, wouldn't you?

Can you imagine Juliet going round saying -
 
"2-phenylmenthyl acetate, 2-phenylmenthyl acetate,
Wherefore art thou 2-phenylmenthyl acetate?"

No. No poetry in that. A rose really might not smell as sweet, if that's what it was called.

However, poetry is not for chemistry lessons, although if you ask nicely I'll tell you one we used to sing at school.* 

Now, as I mentioned yesterday, there's this thing called INCI which stands for International Nomenclature Cosmetic Ingredient. (Isn't nomenclature a fab word? Back to Latin again, you see, can't escape - well, it is Hallowe'en)

You can see why they shorten it to INCI, can't you?

This deals with the systematic names which are "internationally recognised to identify cosmetic ingredients (i.e, plant extracts, oils, chemicals)." 

These names are developed by the International Nomenclature Committee (INC) and published in the International Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary and Handbook.

Sounds like a helluva read, that.

The regulations go further - like Tax legislation - and certain ingredients must be listed separately, even if they are present as a whole plant ingredient.

So that, in an enormously gargantuan nutshell, is why you'll see things like Citral, Farnesol, Benzyl Alcohol and Eugenol listed on your Rose Day Cream.

Not because they're added in to make it smell nice, although they do contribute to that, but because they are integral parts of the ingredients used to give you radiant skin. 

Have a Radiant day! 

And if you want a daily Beauty Bulletin, sign up HERE

*It was a ditty set to music and went like this:
Poor old Brown is dead and gone,
His face you'll see no more,
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4...

The Daddy of Handwashing

Okay, you've seen the loo roll wars, and now know what panic looks like, but imagine going into hospital and knowing that you had roughly a 13% chance of surviving if you turned left, not right?

That puts the loo roll wars into perspective doesn't it?

But that is precisely what pregnant women faced in 19th century Vienna.

In 1847, a chap named Ignaz Semmelweis was an obstetrician working in Vienna, looking after two separate maternity wards, and he noticed - as you would - that the women in one ward died in droves, while in the other, the majority survived. 

Ignaz Semmelwiess portrait
from Britannica.com

How could that be? He wondered and investigated, to find that in one ward, the women in labour were looked after by midwives, while in the other one - just across the corridor - they were in the care of (male) doctors.

Now, at that point, the medical profession assumed the people died from “miasmas” which were poisonous, invisible, airborne gases. But Professor Semmelweiss thought that this couldn't be the case, because air moves, and would certainly blow from room to room.

Then he then noted the difference in staff: midwives in one room, and, in the other, doctors, who were also performing post mortems and autopsies. (If not at the same time…)

Obviously, the women were not allowed anywhere near the autopsy room, whereas the doctors would go straight from performing an autopsy to assist a woman in labour. Yep. Really.

History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
Courtesy of Pan American Health Organization,
circa 1960s, Bolivia. Photographer: Dana Downie

You can see where this went, can’t you?

Yes. The doctors (like many modern visitors to the men’s room) were not washing their hands! 

The Midwives never went into the post-mortem room and never handled dead bodies, while doctors would perform an autopsy and then go straight to the maternity ward next door to deliver a baby. Nice.

Anyhow, clever old Semmelweiss assumed there was a correlation between this, which was confirmed when one of his colleagues got septicaemia: Dr Kolletschka cut himself while doing an autopsy, developed blood poisoning, and died.

When he attended his chum’s autopsy (as you do?) Dr Semmelweis noticed that lesions on his colleague's body matched the lesions on the body of the autopsy patient. This - he thought - meant that the SCALPEL had transferred the miasma, not the air!

Scrupulous and vigorous hand-washing was instigated at his command, and the death rate on both wards subsequently dropped dramatically.

Which was great for all concerned, except poor old Semmelweiss. 

Because, you’d have thought that the medical profession would have lauded him as a hero, but no.

When he presented his findings, even though he could show that a simple hygiene measure - hand washing - was saving the lives of neonates and their mothers, he was utterly mocked and ridiculed.

It took many years and many more deaths before the medical profession got to grips with this. Which is one reason why surgeons wear bow ties – they can’t drip into things they shouldn’t (and I don’t mean their soup!)

Semmelweiss was sacked and ended his life in an asylum. Poor chap. Because, he was a hygiene hero.

How do I know all this? I heard a play on the radio many years ago and was horrified by this tale. So, I then went and read all about him. Recently the Google doodle was commemorating him quite rightly, as we all know about hand washing now, so credit where it’s due.

So wash your hands scrupulously and frequently, but if all that hand washing is taking its toll, you know where you can get hand cream don’t you?

That’s right. Text the Pamper line and I’ll post you some. 07961224560 will do the trick. You can sanitise the screen afterwards.  

Stay well and have a radiant day!

Love, x Jane x