Green beauty

Is is possible to be green and beautiful? Well, OK beautiful might be stretching matters a bit on the personal front, but there is the issue of all the products we tend to use to make ourselves look better. I am by no means obsessive about grooming - I have never set foot in a beauty salon, but like most other people I sometimes feel the need to improve things slightly.

Several months ago I started changing my creams, shampoo and other stuff for primarily organic versions (surprisingly it is not necessarily more expensive), but even then the lists of ingredients can look a bit scary sometimes. So the other day I decided to have a look for something even more natural.

It turned out that making your own is not completely straight forward. Some things like body lotions require you to have a base of some sort either beeswax or various other options that you can get from a pharmacy - but not really anything you are likely to have hanging about the house. That immediately put a dampener on my spirits - I didn't really want to go out spending loads of money on this experiment.

Thankfully the web is filled with weird and wonderful ideas, so there were still several things for me to try:

Some were a bit strange, like make your own lipstick by mixing Vaseline with food colouring. I can see the fun side of this, you could have blue or yellow lips, but considering what is normally in food colouring, that didn't seem like a chemical free option to me.

Or how about this recipe for gorgeous hair:
1 mango, 1 apricot, 2 tbsp olive oil, 1 small pot of natural yogurt, 1 tbsp of sugar free muesli.
Blend together, apply to your hair in a thick layer, leave for 30 mins, rinse out.
I am sorry, but sitting around with a breakfast smoothie in my hair just doesn't sound appealing - I would rather have it in my tummy.

But other things I did give a go.

Like the egg and beer hair treatment. To be fair I am probably not the best person to try hair treatments, my hair is short and no amount of eggs will turn it into long luscious locks, but hey, we all like the idea of lovely shiny hair. For this I beat 1 egg (the suggestion was 2, beaten separately and then mixed, but as mentioned my hair is short) and rubbed it gently in my hair. It was a slightly funny feeling and the egg is rather slippery, but not horrible. This then needs rinsed with tepid water. Beware tepid is the key here, apparently if the water is too hot you will end up with a scrambled egg hairdo... Finish off rinsing with either lemon juice or beer.I did consider lemon juice, but when I started thinking about how many lemons I would need to squeeze to have enough juice to rinse my hair I opted for the beer suggestion. Funnily enough I remember as a teenager my mum talking about rinsing her hair in beer and me as a typical teenage chemical lover finding this disgusting. Anyway I managed to sneak a beer past my husband and happily poured it over my hair (word of warning - avoid beers straight out of the fridge, it freezes your brain...). The instructions didn't say anything about rinsing your hair again in water, but the smell of pub was so strong I simply had to. Was it worth it? Well, even the following day my hair was surprisingly soft and had more volume than normal, so not a bad result.

Then there was the tea bag treatment for dark circles round your eyes. Very simple - stick your used teabags in the fridge over night, when you wake up in the morning feeling all puffy eyed - place the cold teabags over your eyes for a bit and hey presto all is better. It was OK, my eyes possibly looked better, but I have to admit that having to go downstairs to get the stuff out of the fridge before then having to lie down again was a bit off putting - I certainly wouldn't do that every morning. Too much effort!
It did remind me however of another trick I learned when I was younger and still able to party later than midnight: Take some cotton wool, wet it with cold water (tap water is fine, it gets pretty cold) and then wipe underneath your eyes. It always worked for me, if nothing else it wakes you up and it kind of shocks the body and makes the skin freeze up for a bit...

My favourite experiment was the body scrub. According to beauty experts you really should exfoliate regularly, but for some reason it is one of those things I always forget to buy. Now I can make my own: 1 part oil mixed with one part sugar, stir it round, scrub your body with it and rinse off - all done. Fab! Apparently it is best to use sweet almond oil or grape seed oil or any massage kind of oil, but stay clear of olive oil unless you want to smell like a Mediterranean salad... You can also use salt instead of sugar, but sugar is supposedly kinder to the skin. My only comment is that you might want to wash with soap afterwards as it can be a bit greasy.

There was one final thing I wanted to try, but just haven't got round to yet. Apparently oats are very good for all sorts of things, and seemingly you can moisturise your face by soaking oats in cold water for 30min, sieve and squeeze the oats and then apply the white liquid with cotton wool. I will keep you posted if I manage to try it.

Throughout it all one thing kept popping into my head: is this really a good use of resources? Should I be using perfectly good eggs to fluff my hair, when I could have been eating them? What kind of carbon footprint is attached to a sugar and sweet almond oil mixture? Actually my question probably should be whether beauty products are a good use of resources all together?
And the answer: it is a pointless question.

I doubt anybody would give up on their looks solely for the reason of being green? And in that case I believe it is greener (and more fun) to use an egg in your hair rather than some chemical concoction. Mixing stuff and pulling things out of cupboards certainly made me much more aware of what we are actually doing for the sake of our vanity.

So I will continue my search for natural beauty, you never know what hidden qualities there might be in potatoes or brussel sprouts. Or maybe this is where I am supposed to say that real beauty comes from within...