parabens

Cooking Good!

by Leslie Billera on September 21, 2010 · 0 comments

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Combine your love of culinary arts with your concern for toxin-free personal care and you’ve got The Green Beauty Recipe Book.

Julie Gabriel – green beauty aficionado and resource for many DIY recipes we’ve posted using organic lavender – is at it again. Her newest tome is a hands-on how-to devoted to homemade bath and beauty that will help you keep both gorgeous and green.

A Cookbook with a Catch

If you’re ready to craft all-natural and organic lotions and potions from your very own kitchen, this is the book for you. The catch? Less ka-ching at the beauty counter – more pure goodness at your finger tips (and on your face, neck, arms, etc.).

With The Green Beauty Recipe book at your side, you will:

  • Get guidance on formulating your own cosmetic products to minimize the risk of irritation and achieve maximum benefits for your skin condition
  • Learn the (dirty) secrets of the cosmetic industry
  • Create your own beauty products without chemicals using only natural ingredients
  • Discover which vegetable oils, herbs, floral waters, essential oils, plant-based emulsifiers, and natural preservatives to use
  • Push the envelope by packing and labeling your very own beauty products
  • Get tips for safe storage
  • Choose from over 250 recipes based on your own personal beauty desires and dilemmas – and learn how to combine all natural ingredients for best results
  • Purge phthalates, parabens, and other toxic chemicals from your bath and beauty routine forever
  • Learn about active botanicals, vitamins, minerals, and other formerly mysterious ingredients that are perfect for your homemade beauty products.

Whether you’re a curious first-time DIY-er, or an experienced beauty practitioner, Julie’s new book (available from her website)  has something in it for you.

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Skin Detox 101

by Leslie Billera on May 22, 2010 · 0 comments

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It’s time to tell your skin whose in charge…

  • Out and off, dead skin cells!
  • Open up, clogged pores!
  • Brighten up, skin!

After all, when it comes to your skin, you’re the boss!

A is for Antioxidants

Antioxidants are essential for detoxifying your skin. They sop up the free radicals that are implicated in aging and skin damage, so antioxidant-rich care is critical.

Napa Valley Bath’s Lavender Sea Salt Scrub is rich in antioxidants like vitamin E from our home-grown extra virgin Sevillano olive oil.   The dead sea salts in this magical concoction slough away dry skin, opens up pores, and restores luminosity to your skin.

Increase your antioxidant intake with these ingredients:

  • Ascorbic acid (vitamin C)
  • Green tea
  • Idebenone
  • Coffeeberry
  • Coenzyme Q10

Healthy Body, Healthy Skin!

Luckily, our skin is highly regenerative. It’s your liver, kidneys, and digestive system that work hard to remove waste and toxins from your body. When these three waste removal systems become overloaded, your skin picks up the slack.

Avoid sun and watch what you eat and drink; these three things will help keep skin toxin-free in the first place.

Be Your Skin’s Advocate

Being a smart consumer is critical to finding the purist personal care products and keeping your skin in permanent detox mode. Read labels and ask questions:  you have to be your own advocate when seeking out toxin-free personal care products you can fully trust.

The Environmental Working Group’s top ingredients to avoid as seen on their handy Shopper’s Guide to Safe Cosmetics include:

  • DMDM hydantoin and imidazolidinyl urea
  • Fragrance and dyes
  • Methylchloroisothiazolinone and Methylisothiazolinone
  • Parabens or “-paraben”
  • “PEG” and “-eth”
  • Sodium lauryl or laureth sulfate
  • Triclosan and triclocarban
  • Triethanolamine (TEA)

Bottom line: skin detox starts by treating your skin right in the first place. Use simpler, fewer products overall, and opt for all organic when possible.

Now go and glow!

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Avoid Junk Food Skingredients!

by Leslie Billera on May 13, 2010 · 0 comments

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The food we eat, the air we breathe: these tend to be our internal focal points when it comes to making healthy decisions and avoiding toxic ingredients.

Too often, skin care tends to lag behind…especially when high-end skin care products are so expensive. After all, how could there possibly be anything bad in a moisturizer that costs $50 for a tiny tube?

Big Organ, Big Appetite

Your body’s largest organ, skin can soak up contaminants in much larger quantities than intestines or lungs.

Amazingly, our skin can absorbs up to 60% of substances applied to its surface. Good news for the water, vitamins, minerals and oxygen that it ingests. Bad news for cancer-causing ingredients – or what I like to call ‘ junk food skingredients’ – that are so common in skin care products

Chemical substances spread seamlessly throughout the body using skin as a super-efficient conduit. Consider the myriad drugs that are delivered via skin ‘patches’ to help people do everything from stopping smoking to taking birth control to inhibiting motion sickness.

When a potentially toxic substance worms its way past your skin’s barrier, here’s what happens:

  • Blood vessels and lymph ducts, located in the epidermis and dermis layers of your skin, absorb them
  • Lymph, a colorless fluid made of plasma, carries chemicals across the body
  • Many of the chemicals are filtered out by your liver and flushed out by your kidneys
  • Some substances remain inside the body, contributing to what’s called your ‘body burden’ – which can remain for decades

“Eat” Right

Be smart when it comes to feeding your skin. Avoid bath and beauty products – even the most expensive ones – that contain junk food skingredients like…

  • Phthalates
  • Formaldehyde
  • Phenols
  • Sodium laureth sulfate
  • Coal tar
  • Toxic dyes
  • Synthetic fragrances

Opt instead for organic and all-natural bath and beauty goodness from companies like Napa Valley Bath.

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How Green is Your Beauty Salon?

by Leslie Billera on May 4, 2010 · 0 comments

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What is your favorite beauty salon doing to provide you with greener, healthier beauty solutions? After all, you’re paying a pretty penny for salon treatments: shouldn’t they be good for you, both inside and out?

With competition fierce in the beauty biz, offering eco-friendly, super healthy green beauty care benefits everyone…so let your salon know you give a hoot when it comes to the ingredients in your treatments, from hair to skincare to nails and beyond!

Seek Out Synthetic-Free Beauty

Ideally, a beauty salon should use products that contain natural botanical extracts, essential oils, vitamins, minerals and substances derived from natural sources.

To Dye For

Non-toxic hair dye may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it does exist. PureOlogy, for example, is a 100% vegan line of sulfate-free hair color used by discerning eco salons.

According to a live chat I had recently with an Aveda consultant, Aveda uses “coloring services that are 97% naturally derived – which is healthy for your hair – leaving it essentially damage-free.   It’s infused with conditioning plant oils for shinier, healthy-looking color.” Even if you don’t go to an Aveda salon, inquire about the toxicity factor of the hair dye that they are using.

Natural Nails Now!

Nail polish lines like Zoya offer safer, more natural nail polish options – a nice departure given that conventional nail polishes are typically chock full of  toxins like toluene and formaldehyde. Salons like Priti in NYC make an amazing soy-based nail-polish remover: see ya later acetone and ethyl acetate! If the place where your favorite mani/pedi technician works doesn’t offer these products, buy them yourself and bring them along on your next appointment!

Putting Your Face On

Feather light mineral makeup allows your skin to breathe – in stark contrast to most other paraben-laden, conventional makeup brands. Dr. Hauschka makeup, for example, is made from botanicals and natural minerals, some of which sounds good enough to eat, like their Translucent Makeup made with an avocado and jojoba infusion. Other green and healthy makeup brands include Jane Iredale and Zuzu Luxe by Gabriel Cosmetics

Sustainable Structure

Amazing green salons like the Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Design)-certified Nusta Spa in Washington D.C. not only make spa services super green and healthy, the spa itself is a study in eco-love.  Using LED and florescent lighting, implementing a strict recycling policy, and using energy star appliances are all ways you can tell how your salon measures up on planetary pay-back.

Remember: the more people ask about product toxins, the more salon-owners will realize that this is something consumers care about!  Do you know a green salon you’d like to tell fellow readers about? Let us know, here!

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Give Your Beauty Shopping List a Makeover

by Leslie Billera on April 13, 2010 · 0 comments

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Step one to being a consumer of healthier products is honing your expertise at reading ingredient labels. Use these lists as a guide when buying ‘conventional’ (non-organic) bath and beauty products and get smart while you beautify!

Cleansers

It’s great to reward your face at the end of a long day with a fantastic cleanser. Go at it the green way.

Common Cleanser Ingredients to Avoid:

  • Amphoteric 2, 5 or 29
  • Cocamido betaine
  • Cocamidopropyl betaine
  • Sorbitan laurate
  • Sorbitan palmitate
  • Sorbitan stearate

Opt for These Ingredients in Your Cleanser:

  • Alfalfa extract
  • Flaxseed
  • Honeysuckle oil
  • Oatmeal
  • Quillaya bark
  • Yucca Root for Green

Moisturizers

A good moisturizer is a crucial part of your personal care repertoire.

Common Moisturizer Ingredients to Avoid:

  • Mineral oil
  • Petroleum jelly
  • Propylene glycol

Opt for These Natural Ingredients in Your Moisturizer:

  • Aloe vera
  • Avocado
  • Beeswax
  • Bluebottle (cornflower)
  • Candelilla wax
  • Cocao butter
  • Jojoba oil
  • Macademia nut oil
  • Pycnogenol from pine trees
  • Rice bran oil
  • Shea butter
  • Sunflower oil
  • Sweet almond oil
  • Vitamins A, C and E

Preservatives

We need preservatives in our personal care products to stop fungi bacteria, fungi, microbes and oxidation. But chemical preservatives can be irritating – and the long-term effects of them on our health are not yet known.

Avoid these common chemical-based preservatives when buying any beauty and bath product:

  • Imidazolidinyl urea and diazolidinyl urea, often disguised as Germall 115 and Germall II

All parabens, including:

  • Esters
  • Para-hydroxybenzoic acid
  • Methylparaben
  • Propylparaben
  • Butylparaben
  • Benzoic acid
  • Isobutyl p-hydroxybenzoate
  • P-methoxycarbonylphenol

In addition to buying ‘paraben-free,’ opt for safer preservatives like:

  • Seed extract
  • Phenozyethanol
  • Potassium sorbate
  • Vitamin A (retinyl or retinoic acid)
  • Vitamin E (tocopherol)
  • Citric acid
  • Pycnogenol

These intimidating words might remind us of high school chemistry (which in my case, I didn’t fare too well at…). But the more you opt for better ingredients – and avoid the more dangerous ones – you’ll be able to craft a beauty routine you can truly trust

You can find many of these ‘good’ ingredients in Napa Valley Bath products. And as always, if you have any questions about any of them, just let us know!

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Keep Truly Clean with 100% Organic

by Leslie Billera on October 15, 2009 · 0 comments

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Last time, we profiled several synthetic ingredients found in ‘conventional’ bar and liquid soap including 1,4 Dioxane, Diethanolamine (DEA), Parabens: this is the stuff that’s supposed to keep us clean?

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘Not me! I use ‘organic’ beauty care products!’

It’s time to face the myth of organic when it comes to personal care products thanks to an unfortunate technique known as ‘greenwashing.’

Greenwashing is Just Plain Dirty

Slapping the word ‘organic’ onto a product is an addiction for big beauty manufacturers.

The sad truth is, it’s misused, abused and often completely wrong. The abuse is so egregious that the researchers the Environmental Working have created a special database to help consumers get a grip on what’s really green and healthy – and what’s not.

Using one drop of organic essential oil in a beauty product is one of the most common greenwashing techniques in the cosmetic industry.  Companies regularly get away with declaring their products organic as a whole, when in truth, only a small percentage is.

Other popular greenwashing terms that often come in tandem with ‘natural’ style packaging – include:

  • Made with organic essential oils
  • Contains organic ingredients
  • Made with nontoxic ingredients
  • 100% natural
  • Essentially nontoxic
  • Earth-friendly
  • Environmentally Safer

Look closely at the ingredients list, be a vigilant shopper, and treat yourself to organic products that you can trust.

What is Organic, Really?

We know – it gets confusing. Here’s a simplified guide:

  • The farmer or producer must avoid synthetic chemical additives, including fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, genetically modified organisms and sewage sludge
  • Farmland must be free of chemicals for more than three years, depending on the country
  • All the production stages must be transparent, open for audit and take part in frequent inspections.

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Hairway to Heaven: Two DIY Recipes

by Leslie Billera on October 6, 2009 · 0 comments

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Your hair is the accessory you wear every day. So treat it right.

Forget pricey concoctions that contain chemical-laden fragrance, irritant-inducing parabens and endocrine disrupting octoxynol-9. Opt instead for ingredients you may already have in your kitchen cabinet.

Extra-virgin olive oil is very similar in composition to our sebum, which is our body’s natural oil. It absorbs readily, locking in moisture, and is especially effective for dry skin or hair. Plus, it’s rich in antioxidants.

Here are two DIY recipes: one is super quick, and the other a bit more complex. Use a combination of both and discover the power of your luxurious green locks!

Quick Hot Oil Treatment for Dry Hair

1. Put one-half cup of extra-virgin olive oil in a glass jar.

2. Run the closed jar under hot water for 30-60 seconds to heat the oil.

3. Open the jar and place a little olive oil on your palms and fingers

4. Massage gently through dry hair, paying special attention to your ends and any bristle portions.

5. Wrap your hair in plastic wrap or wear a shower cap for 15-30 minutes (or overnight for a more intense treatment)

6. Rinse out thoroughly in the shower with a gentle shampoo

Source: style, naturally, by Summer Rayne Oakes

Hair Butter Mask

Use daily before shampooing for maximum results. The below will last for one week of daily treatments.

3 tablespoons organic extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons avocado oil

2 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

1 teaspoon organic spirulina extract

10,000 IU vitamin E

2 drops lavender essential oil

2 drops bergamot essential oil

2 drops chamomile essential oil

1. Blend all ingredients in a small bowl, making sure the essential oils spread evenly.

2. Massage one tablespoon of the treatment into wet hair and scalp, concentrating on split ends and areas of itchiness. Leave on for ten minutes for intensive conditioning.

3. Rinse thoroughly and shampoo as usual.

Source: The Green Beauty Guide, by Julie Gabriel

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Jargon Alert:Extra Virgin Olive Oil

When olive oil is extra virgin, it means that the olives are only pressed once, oleic acid (a monostaturated fatty acid) content is under .8%, and there are no defects found in the taste of the oil.

Learn more about olive oil from our sister company St. Helena Olive Oil Co.

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