Strole - Homemade Beauty: 150 Simple Beauty Recipes Made from All-Natural Ingredients

A PERIGEE BOOK

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HOMEMADE BEAUTY

Copyright 2014 by Annie Strole

A Hollan Publishing Inc. Concept

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ISBN: 978-0-698-16289-1

An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

First edition: December 2014

Illustrations by Rita Carroll

The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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Version_1

For Paul and Silas

Contents

Introduction

Welcome to your guide to all-natural, toxin-free beauty products that you can create easily at home. This may sound daunting to some, but making your own products is one of the most empowering ways to take your beauty and health into your own hands. Just because the beauty products in stores contain tons of ingredients with extremely long and complicated names doesnt make all those chemicals necessarydont let them overwhelm you. Making beauty products is a lot easier than youd think.

Some of those ingredients can even be harmful. Pthalates, sodium lauryl and sodium laureth sulfate, propylene glycol, polyethylene glycol and the infamous parabens are just a few common beauty product ingredients that have been reported to cause irritation, cancer, organ abnormalities, hormone disruption and sterility.

Now that thats out of the way, for the majority of the book I want to focus on the enjoyable aspects of natural beauty rather than the disease-causing aspects of the unnatural variety. Hand-crafting your own all-natural beauty products is extremely satisfying and fun. If you love DIY, then Im certain that youll enjoy creating some handmade beauty products. Additionally, making homemade beauty products is also a cost-effective and super thoughtful way of making gifts for friends and loved ones.

From the stance of a beauty professional, creating your own personalized homemade beauty products is a fantastic way to find solutions to problematic skin without blasting your face, hair and body with chemicals that may be detrimental down the line. I speak from experience.

After moving to New York from Texas, my skin had never looked worse. Stress, change of climate, change of water, pollution and who knows what else were clearly taking their toll, and my skin exacted its revenge with tons of huge, angry, inflamed zits. Of course, my first course of action was to evaluate my diet, up my water intake and be sure to be active and sleep well, but then I took a look at what I was putting on my skin. After some research I discovered my ordinary store-bought cleanser was mostly petroleum-based, preservative-filled garbage. I began researching more natural brands, and as I did that, I realized a lot of their active and most effective ingredients were those found in my kitchen. As a makeup artist and beauty addict, Id always been interested in skin care, but once I embarked upon my natural skincare sleuthing, my interest turned to an obsession.

For my imbalanced, acned condition, a friend suggested I use raw apple cider vinegar as a toner after cleansing. I began seeing drastic improvement in my complexion, and started trusting all-natural ingredients to care for my skin. I also began using tea tree oil to zap away zits, and a lemon and honey concoction to decongest my pores (you can find the recipe for that in the Detoxifying section of the Skin chapter!). Day by day my skin was improving and eventually returned to a state of homeostasis.

I began to wonder what natural ingredients could do for my dry hair and body. Natural oils, fruits, yogurt and a number of other items found in my very own kitchen did a fantastic job of nourishing and hydrating my hair and skin. At this point I was hooked on educating myself about, and randomly slathering on, all types of edible ingredients.

Of course I had to spread the love, and I began posting a few recipes on Lovelyish.com, where I work as a contributing editor. I also started making all-natural recipe recommendations to friends, family and even clients. Through this process, not only did I educate others but I learned a great deal about how certain ingredients affect and benefit skin types other than mine (in addition to receiving quite a few recommendations myself).

The recipes that youll find in this book are a collection of ones I happened upon myself, in addition to personal adaptations of recipes that were recommended to me. As you read this book and hand-craft your own products, I encourage you to be creative and trust your instincts to adapt these recipes to best fit your needs. You may notice that these recipes are translated in cups, tablespoons, drops, squeezes and handfulsif you were mass-producing products for continuity or working with chemicals, this wouldnt fly. But thats the beauty of these recipes: Perfection isnt required. Sure, it may be ideal to create some of these products by measuring weight in ounces, but Im assuming most of you dont have a kitchen scale at home (but if you do, fantastic!). A teaspoon over or 1/8 of a cup under what the recipe calls for certainly wont ruin your recipe... in fact, you may find that tweaking ingredients benefits your skin! Everyones skin is different; therefore, what works for you might be completely different than what works for me. You have to experiment!