Skin and Hair Care
The beauty products industry can dazzle with packaging and seduce with slick advertising. Perfect skin and hair is its promise, but what it is really selling is hope. The fancy ingredients in most conventional products make them look, feel and smell tremendously appealing—that is, until you read the labels! Chances are you will need a chemical dictionary to decipher them. Chemically altered emulsifiers and synthetic waxes assure that the product will not separate no matter how much heat, cold or shaking that it endures during the long journey from factory to your beauty table. The result is a product that is semi-natural or semi-synthetic, depending on how you look at it. In addition, most cosmetics are scented with artificial fragrances derived from petroleum products.
In the long run, these cosmetics may be doing your complexion more harm than good. Since your skin does not discriminate when absorbing lotions, creams and the like, potentially harmful chemicals are accepted as readily as the helpful ingredients. Like a growing number of people, you probably are becoming wary about living in a chemical-filled environment. Some cosmetics companies are catching on to this trend toward safer, more natural ingredients and turning to the age-old beauty secrets offered by herbalism. Even so, no matter how natural a product may look, check the label. Some products that claim to be "all natural" contain ingredients that should have stayed in the chemist's lab!
It is no surprise that herbs have caught the attention of the cosmetics industry. Throughout history, herbs have been used to clear complexions, soften hands and make hair lush and silky. Consider some of history's legendary beauties. The Egyptian queen Cleopatra bathed in milk and herbs, anointed herself with costly herbal cosmetics and even owned her own natural cosmetic factory. According to legend, hundreds of years ago, the 80-year-old queen of Hungary bought a secret formula from an herbalist that made her skin so youthful that a young prince fell in love with her. (The main ingredient in this secret formula was rosemary, which is still a popular complexion herb today.) The famous seventeenth-century French beauty Ninon de L'Enclos washed her face daily in chervil water to prevent wrinkles.