Posts Tagged ‘healthy’

Posted on March 3, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

3 Easy Tips to Try Aromatherapy At Home

We’ve touched on what aromatherapy can do for your body.  So let’s look at what amazing aromatherapy can do for your home.

Aromatherapy is the use of pure essential oils to enhance our physical and mental well-being. Essential oils are highly concentrated distilled essences of plants that smell truly delightful. They are diluted either by water or with a ‘carrier oil,’ depending on the intended use of the essential oil.

Organic lavender essential oil – our personal fave – has the ability to evoke and increase the release of serotonin, thus producing a calming effect.¹

Try these simple at-home tips and bring the soothing power of aromatherapy to your abode!

1. Create a Simmering Scent

To freshen air inside your home, drip some of our favorite scent into a pot of water and simmer mixture on the stove top for several hours.

2. Try Tug-Worthy Toilet Paper

To ensure there’s always a fresh scent in the bathroom, add a few drops of essential oil onto the cardboard roll that holds the toilet paper. The fragrance will release with each pull. Remember to repeat with each new roll you hang.

3. Reinvent the Room Deodorizer

Conventional so-called room deodorizers are just chemical-filled band-aids used to mask odors. Make your own with ease: add 25 drops of your favorite essential oil to 16 ounces of water, put in a spray bottle, and voila – fresh, pure, natural smelling indoor air!

And don’t forget about hydrosol - it’s less concentrated than essential oil, but equally aromatherapeutic!

Our sense of smell impacts our daily perceptions and our reactions to what’s going on around us – physically, emotionally and mentally. Infusing your home with healing scents is a great way to boost your mood and keep you centered.  Now take one big beautiful breath, and enjoy!

1Perscription for or Nutritional Healing, Phyllis A. Balch, CNC

Posted on February 20, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

Teens and Personal Care: A Cautionary Tale

The average woman uses 12 personal care products a day…and the ever-enthusiastic teenage girl? More like 17.

As we’ve shared with you, many conventional personal care products carry a heavy chemical load for all of us.  But teenagers are especially at risk: they’re at a period of accelerated development, physically, that makes them particularly vulnerable.

A 2008 Environmental Research Group study backed up these concerns.

The study took samples from 20 teen girls, age 14-19. Harrowing highlights include:

• They found 16 chemicals from 4 chemical families – phthalates, triclosan, parabens, and musks – in blood and urine samples in the 20 girls tested.

• Studies link these chemicals to potential health effects including cancer and hormone disruption.

• These tests feature first-ever exposure data for parabens, a common cosmetic preservative.  It indicated that young women are widely exposed to parabens, with 2 parabens – methylparaben and propylparaben – detected in every single girl tested.

Purchasing non-toxic personal care products is step one to a lower chemical count for teens. Turning teens on to what their peers are doing to make healthier, greener choices is another step.  Check out Teens Turning Green, a national program of engaged kids working towards a more non-toxic world, from personal care to school to lobbying Washington.  Yucky pink hand soap loaded with suspected carcinogen Cocamide DEA, a suspected carcinogen? Not in a Teens Turning Green School!

You can also turn your teen on to Skin Deep, the Environmental Working Group’s amazing database of thousands of personal care products, and help them take control of the buying choices they make as they grow.

Last but not least, why not surprise them with a treat from Napa Valley Bath: all of our products are non-toxic, all-natural, pure and mostly organic.

Posted on December 8, 2009 - by Leslie Billera

Holiday Gift Giving: 2 DIY Perfume Recipes

I saw a White Diamonds perfume commercial on TV the other day – featuring a 1992 air-brushed Liz Taylor – and I thought I’d been sucked into a time travel vortex.

In addition to the post-collegiate flashback (in which ‘I’m Too Sexy for My Shirt’ topped the charts), the dated perfume commercial reflects the sea change I’ve undergone when it comes to the simple term ‘fragrance.’

A typical perfume contains a mixture of between 50 and 100 fragrance chemicals including, but not limited to:

• Coal tar distillates
• Petroleum distillates
• Benzene derivatives
• Aldehydes
• Phenols
• Phthalates (banned in cosmetics in the European Union since 2003 – see more in the ‘jargon alert,’ below )

Today, science makes it possible to dissect any natural scent and recreate it using synthetic fragrances.  Smelling machines, or ‘electronic noses’ use chemical sensors to produce a fingerprint of any scent. ¹

Doesn’t your special someone deserve something a bit more personal this holiday?

Try your hand at either one of these all-natural elixirs, and let us know how they turn out!

DIY Perfume

by Heidi Hill via www.MNN.com

Basic supplies for making perfume:

• 1 1/2 cups chopped flowers (we recommend lavender of course!)
• Cheesecloth
• Medium-size bowl with lid
• 2 cups distilled water
• Small saucepan
• Washed and sterilized vanilla extract bottle, or another small colored bottle with a lid or an airtight stopper

Instructions for making perfume:

1. Wash the flower petals. Gently clean off any dirt and sediment with water.

2. Soak the flowers. Put cheesecloth inside a bowl with edges overlapping the bowl. Put the flowers into the cheesecloth-lined bowl and pour the water over them, covering the flowers. Cover the bowl with the lid and let the flowers soak overnight.

3. Heat the flower-scented water. The next day, remove the lid from the bowl and gently bring the four corners of the cheesecloth together, lifting the flower pouch out of the water. Squeeze the pouch over a small saucepan, extracting the flower-scented water. Simmer over low heat until you have about a teaspoon of liquid.

4. Bottle the perfume. Pour the cooled water into the bottle and cap it. The perfume will last for up to a month if stored in a cool, dark place.

Green Eau de Toilette

by Julie Gabriel, The Green Beauty Guide

Basic Eau de Toilette Supplies

• 1 ounce vodka
• 4-10 drops essential oil of your choice
• 2 tablespoons distilled water

Instructions for making Eau de Toilette:

1. Pour the vodka into a small glass measuring cup (that has a spout) and add the essential oil, stirring slowly until the oil is fully mixed in. Pour mixture into a small, dark, lidded bottle and leave in a dark place (such as a closet) for two days so that the oil can fully blend with the vodka.

2. Slowly add the distilled water, shaking well. Again, let the mixture sit for two days (or more I you want a more potent mix). Now the perfume is ready. If you like, you can transfer it into a pretty spray bottle.

Homemade scents educate the gift recipient on why we can’t always trust what’s in our bath and beauty products. Plus, they earn serious brownie points for being hand-crafted. And most importantly, homemade scents are the healthiest way to smell great – naturally!

Top either DIY scent with a coupon for a relaxing Lavender Oil Massage, and you’ll win the award for best holiday gift, hands-down.

¹ The Green Beauty Guide, Julie Gabriel

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Jargon Alert: Phthalates

Phthalates (pronounced ˈtha-ˌlāt) are found in perfume, soap, shampoo, nail polish, hair spray, mascara and more.  Listed in ingredient labels as dibutylphthalate, DPB, DEHP, DHP. Phthalates are not listed when used in fragrance. May cause developmental and reproductive problems. It is used to make materials more pliable, prevent cracking, and retain scents by ‘fixing’ perfumes to reduce evaporation

Posted on October 27, 2009 - by Leslie Billera

Scare Away Scaley Skin!

Halloween means cooler temps lurking around every corner.  Don’t be haunted by dry skin – give it the extra TLC it deserves.

Napa Valley Bath delivers the decadent moisturizing you need this fall and winter with our Lavender Body Butter. Developed specifically to treat cracked, callused and parched skin, it treats your dry dermis to the nutrition and care it craves in cooler temps.

Highlights from this skin-tastic salve include:

• Aloe Vera Leaf Juice:   Used extensively in skin care and in health care to soothe and protect, aloe vera is also used to treat a variety of skin care disorders as well as burns.

• Safflower Seed Oil: This oil boosts the skin’s firmness, makes it smooth, toned and gives it more elasticity.

• Shea butter: Extracted from shea nuts, shea butter is a great moisturizer and emollient  (something that softens and soothes) with anti-inflammatory properties. Ours is from Uganda, where shea trees grow in abundance naturally.

• Lavender Hydrosol: We’re big fans of lavender hydrosol, the lesser-known and less concentrated sibling to lavender essential oil.  It tones, cleans and delights as only lavender floral waters can.

• Beeswax & Propolis Cera: Busy bees supply us with this natural wax rich in moisturizing fatty acid esters and propolis cera, the waxy component of the resinous material found in beehives.

• Orange Peel Wax: Orange is a natural skin refresher rich in vitamins.

• Wheat Germ Oil: Plant-based oils are the green alternative to toxic chemicals; wheat germ oil contains Vitamin E and essential fatty acids such as linoleic, oleic, palmitic and stearic fatty acids.

• Comfrey Root Extract: Used to repair damaged tissues, comfrey boasts a long list of nutrients including Vitamin C, Vitamin A, Vitamin, B complex vitamins, calcium and more.

• Lavender: As you know, we love our lavender. We use both lavandula angustifolia flower oil and Lavandula grosso (lavandin) flower oil for their soothing, healing qualities.

Feed your skin this beauty brew of goodness and keep spooky skin away all year long!

Posted on October 14, 2009 - by Leslie Billera

Beyond Luxury: Why Organic Soap is Just Plain Healthier

Your skin is an organ – your body’s largest one in fact.

Skin ingests pretty much everything you put on it. Ingredients travel straight into your bloodstream, which then carries them to your organs. In fact, research shows that skin can absorb as much as 60% of whatever is applied on it.

Soap, a skincare product you use every single day, typically hosts chemical culprits that lurk behind pleasantly packaged bars and bottles. Consider these ‘conventional’ soap ingredients…

1,4-Dioxane

This petrochemical is considered a probable human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In spite of its toxicity, you won’t find 1,4 Dioxane on ingredient lists since it’s actually a byproduct caused by the manufacturing of other ingredients. If a product has ingredients with an ‘eth’ in their name – sodium laureth sulphate, polyethylene glycol, oleth, myreth, ceneareth – most likely, the product will test positive for 1,4 Dioxane.

Diethanolamine

DEA is a surfactant that helps to stabilize foams and is a potential carcinogen. It is readily absorbed through the skin and has been linked with stomach, esophagus, liver and bladder cancers according to the Cancer Prevention Coalition. Beware of synthetic, “natural” ingredients like cocamide DEA

Parabens

A known endocrine disruptor, parabens interfere with the body’s natural hormones. According to the Environmental Working Group and many other sources, parabens are also linked to cancer. On labels, they can be found as methylparaben, ethylparaben, butylparaben and propylparaben.

There’s many more, but you get the point…it turns out that getting clean can be a dirty business. That’s why organic soap isn’t just a luxury…when it comes to your health, it’s a necessity.