Why You Should Not Use Lavender Essential Oil.

Researchers have discovered that lavender essential oil can cause: “cytotoxic effects on cell division in A. cepa. I. viscosa leaf extract induces the total number of chromosomal aberrations and micronuclei (MNC) formations in A. cepa root tip cells significantly when compared with control groups. Also, this paper shows for the first time the induction of cell death, ghost cells, cells with membrane damage, and binucleated cells by extract treatment. These results suggest the cytotoxic and genotoxic effects of the I. viscosa leaf extracts on A. cepa.” in vitro. Although these researchers applied the oil to the leaves of another plant, Cavanagh and Wilkinson (2005) reviewed evidence which indicated that the oil is also toxic to human skin.

Placzek, Frömel, Eberlein, Gilbertz, and Przybilla (2007) showed that lavender (and tea tree!) essential oil mimicked human female hormones after being absorbed through the skin and their effects were strong enough to cause breast development in teenage boys.

However, evidence does support the use of lavender scent for anxiety, depression, and pain reduction.

Lavender essential oil can be used as a potent antimicrobial wound treatment. However, based on available evidence, lavender essential oil should not be applied regularly to the skin.

Simple Olive Oil (Castile) Soap and Cleaning Solution Recipes with Pictures

Olive oil (true castile) soap is rumored to be the most difficult to make. Numerous people report that it takes months to harden, even longer to cure, and then “slimes” apart in the shower. That last part is true, but the others are just rumors! I’ll show you how to deal with the “sliming” in the second part of this instructional.

This was the first soap recipe I tried to make, so I am definitely not a pro with special abilities! It hardened in one day, I took it out and sliced it after two, and it cured in a month. The final product is a non-drying, gentle, yet hard-cleaning, true-castile soap!

Simple Olive Oil Soap

12.6 oz lye (pure sodium hydroxide)

30oz water

100 oz of olive oil (any kind, virgin or non)

1. Put on long shirt, pants, and gloves (and shoes!) so that no skin is exposed. Wear eye protection as well, if super paranoid, or just wanting to freak out the neighbors.

2. Measure all ingredients on a food scale. When measuring the lye, measure it out into a plastic storage container with a lid that you can press on top of it after it’s been measured. Remember to tare the scale!

3. Take the lye and water outside. Pour the lye into the water and stir with a heat resistant plastic or wooden spoon.

4. Wait until the lye water is under 150 degrees Fahrenheit and then pour slowly while stirring into the container with your olive oil (a huge soup pan works well for this).

5. Stir with an electric hand blender until it starts to resemble pudding and holds a trace.

6. Pour into plastic (or plastic-lined) containers, seal, and cover with towels.

7.  After 3 days, remove from the containers, cut into pieces, and set onto racks in your closet to cure for about a month.

8. When you can lick the soap without your tongue tingling, it is done! Test it out by washing your hands with it.

The recipe makes about thirty bars this big. I made mine of variable sizes (some much larger), so I ended up with 20 bars. The cost, using bulk olive oil and regular lye purchased in a small amount was a little bit less than $20, so that’s less than $1 a bar- a true savings compared to Dr. Bronner’s castile soap bars which go for $4. In addition, Dr. Bronner uses mainly coconut oil in his soaps, which is very sudsy, but also dries out your skin even more than regular dish detergent. This bar is obviously pure olive oil and is not even slightly drying.

Olive Oil (castile) Soap Cleaning Solution (and body wash!)

Because it does slime in the shower, some people may prefer to turn the soap into a cleaning solution, which you can also put into a hand-dispenser and use in the shower as a gentle, effective body wash. If you want to add scent, play around with essential oils. Keep in mind that certain ones will tingle in the shower and may contribute to dry skin (tea tree oil, peppermint, etc). I prefer unscented, due to its gentleness.

1. Grate 8oz of soap with a cheese grater. It will look a lot like cheese. Resist the urge to eat it.

2. Boil 2 liters of water and stir the grated soap into it.

3. Turn the heat off when it’s melted, stir, and pour into containers.

4. For a thicker solution, add two tablespoons of liquid glycerin and allow to set for 8 hours before pouring into containers.

You can use this as handsoap, dish soap, body wash, or a general cleaning solution.

Cleaning Power

I wanted to see how effective this gentle, olive oil soap could possibly be. Here, you can see the results of my boyfriend trying to cook three burgers in a pan followed by stir fry. Yeah.

I put the cleaning solution in an empty, rinsed out clorox spray bottle and sprayed a good layer of it onto the stove top.

After letting it sit for a little bit, I began to wipe. It cut through the grease as well as regular dish soap! I was surprised, given how non-drying this soap is.

As you can see, the olive old castile soap cleaning solution worked as well for cutting the grease as regular dish soap! It did not shine the surface as well, but that could probably be solved with a vinegar solution, which would also disinfect the surface.

3 Coconut Oil Body Care Myths

Coconut oil is now recommended for everything from improving endurance to replacing soap as a face cleanser. As a long-time fitness buff and natural-remedy experimenter, I can’t avoid this oil. However, I have to say that I have often been disappointed by the results I’ve achieved by following natural-remedy advice that uses it as the solution. Here are some things to keep in mind when incorporating coconut oil into your life:

1. It does not work well as a facial cleanser. The argument goes that your face produces oils and so the best way to clean it is to dissolve those oils with a new oil. This is flawed logic, because there is no way of completely removing either the first oil or the oil you are trying to use to remove it, with the wet, warm cloth typically recommended by popular sites. Water and oil do not mix, so when you rub a new oil into your skin and try to wipe it off with a wet cloth, most of the oil will not come off with the cloth (either your natural face oil, or the coconut oil). What you are left with is twice as much oil on your skin as you originally had, which generally makes you break out more than before due to extra-clogged pores and disrupted skin pH levels.

Sites that recommend this try to argue that the breakouts just about everyone will experience when trying to use the oil face cleaning method is a “detox phase”. This is complete crap! What is really happening is that your pores are now sitting under twice as much oil as they were before. Maybe they will adjust over time, but in my experience, they did not.

So what gets rid of oil? Soap! I’m serious! You may have completely forgotten about this, but soap breaks up grease and allows it to be washed away by water. Read more about the chemistry behind that process here. That’s right, regular soap is much better at dissolving oil and removing oil from your skin than coconut oil! Don’t be fooled by this one!

My experience: All the oil facial cleansing method gave me was two giant zits, which took much longer than normal to get rid of.

2. Coconut oil does not work great as a skin moisturizer/lotion. This has slightly more truth to it than #1, but like #1, expect more clogged pores if you follow this advice. In addition, expect certain areas of your skin to feel more dry than normal because coconut oil prevents your skin from absorbing moisture from the surrounding environment. Thus, while the oil will clog some pores, it will also prevent your skin from achieving as much hydration as normal because water cannot penetrate it as easily due to the oil barrier.

That said, coconut oil does do two things very well: it evens your skin tone and it greatly softens the skin to the touch. I have found that it works well if you use it about twice a week, in addition to, as opposed to instead of, regular lotion.

My experience: Using coconut oil as a skin moisturizer gave me the smoothest skin of my life, which felt dry and itchy in certain areas and broke out slightly in others. These problems disappeared when I stopped using it like a lotion and instead used it like a treatment.

3. Coconut oil does not work great as a lip balm. Using coconut oil as a lip balm will result in the same issue as detailed in #2: your lips will be soft, but they will not be as moisturized as you are used to.

However, coconut oil does a good job of plumping the lips and mixing with lipsticks and liners to create a more natural, beautiful-looking lip color. Therefore, I highly recommend using it every morning as a base or over freshly applied color. Just make sure to have a chap-stick handy to put on as soon as it is quickly absorbed and your lips start feeling dry.

My experience: It failed to moisturize my lips on its own as much as I prefer, but it did a superb job of mixing with colors and plumping my lips under my normal lip gloss.

About the business which provides this blog service

Mission Statement

Biessence LLC will provide provide its customers with effective, natural, sustainably-sourced, organic personal care products and will educate the public regarding the alarming health risks currently posed by other personal care products.

Consumer Problem

The High Risks and Low Effectiveness of Current Deodorant Products

As of today, there is no deodorant product on the market that is effective and does not contain either cancer-linked aluminum or detrimental chemicals, such as the pesticide triclosan (associated with liver toxicity), propylene glycol (can damage the central nervous system), phthalates (linked to birth defects), and parabens (linked to cancer). Many “all-natural” deodorant products exist, but in every case they either utilize deceptive ingredient wording to sell toxic chemicals to unwitting consumers or simply do not work.  For example, the popular, “all-natural”, “aluminum chlorohydrate-free” Crystal® deodorant brand contains Ammonium Alum. Alum is an abbreviation for aluminum, which has been linked to cancer by a study that noted especially high risk when the metal was applied to broken skin (Darbe, 2006). Likewise, the purported all-natural Arm and Hammer® Essentials Natural Deodorant  contains the pesticide triclosan. Even the homemade, all-natural products on the market contain phytoestrogens due to their use of herbal oils, which imitate estrogen in the human body and have been known to negatively alter the development of teenage human males. Finally, the deodorant products which manage to avoid these safety pitfalls fail to remedy the odor problem they claim to solve. As a result, these products do not stand the test of time and are unsuccessful at obtaining consistently high consumer ratings. Thus, deodorant consumers must currently choose between toxicity dangers or embarrassing underarm scent.

Product

Our Effective, Natural, and Affordable Deodorant Product

Biessence LLC’s deodorant product will ward off all underarm odor for a day, contain inexpensive compounds, and be both environmentally friendly and cost-effective to produce on a large scale. We are confident in our ability to achieve this seemingly-impossible feat for the following reasons:
1.We have identified a product base which: does not trap heat; sticks to and is slightly absorbed by the skin; is not currently being used by any other deodorant product; and confers no health risks according to current literature searches performed by the developers. In addition, this base has been used for thousands of years on human skin without reports of iatrogenic effects.
1.All compounds in the product are currently produced en masse for numerous industries at affordable prices.
1.According to current product testers, the deodorant has proven more effective than aluminum containing natural products, such as the Crystal® deodorant brand and health risk-free products, such as Toms of Maine. Thus, even at its initial stages of development, the product is safer and more effective than the leading brands.

Acne Solution ~ 8 Steps and a Sample Diet ~ The only thing that really works, but most people wont do because dieting is hard

Before I start, I want to warn you that you may find yourself questioning this advice because I’m not charging you $75 a bottle or $25 a book for it. I’m also not going to claim that you’re dying of a disease or that “toxins” (the internet’s favorite useless word for the science-illiterate masses) are the cause of your skin problems. What is recommended here costs no money, is promoted for general health by the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association, and has worked so well for me that I went from layering cover-up and foundation over giant, month-long boils, to wearing no foundation, and people barely being able to see the scars left by those boils (see the picture of me to the left. It was taken after about a year of following the advice below. That said, you should see great improvement within the first week of starting the diet). This will work for any skin problem and is backed by plenty of science.

 

Steps to Perfect Skin

First of all, the root of all skin problems is inflammation in your body. What I recommend are evidence-based ways of lowering the inflammation levels in your body by a great deal. This wont just give you healthy, beautiful skin; it will help you lose weight, lower your insulin levels, and prevent you from getting diabetes and heart disease! There is nothing not to love about this!

1. Eat a diet that consists of carbohydrates that are below 55 on the glycemic index. The glycemic index is a rating system for foods which is based on how large of an insulin response the food triggers and how quickly it raises your blood sugar. A list of low-glycemic carbohydrates and some other foods can be found here. In general, while you shouldn’t cut carbohydrates completely out of your diet, eating less carbohydrates per meal and balancing them out with a healthy fat and a large amount of protein (20+ grams of protein per serving!), will go a long way toward reducing the blood sugar spike responsible for skin problems. An example one-day meal plan is detailed at the bottom of this post.

2. Only wash your face once per day and do not scrub anything into it! I use one squirt Dr. Bonner’s castile soap into my hands, rub them together, and lightly touch them around the outside of my face near my hairline. Then I fill my soapy hands with water and splash it onto my face until the soap has been washed off. At no point do I rub soap all over my face; I touch the soap to the skin near the edges of my face and only rinse until the soap is gone. Doing more than this will dry out your skin. Do not use any other chemicals, such as vinegar, baking soda, or toners on your face! The truth is that most of the bacteria on your skin are healthy and you need to stop killing them off constantly by washing too many times a day and/or with chemicals that change the pH of your skin.

3. Put lotion on your body and then pat your hands, which still have a thin coating of lotion on them, over the sections of your face that tend to dry out. Do no use drying agents, such as tea tree oil!

4. Always use sunscreen.

5. Take 4-5 high quality fish oil pills per day. Fish oil is incredibly anti-inflammatory and will speed up the effects of everything else on this list. In addition, fish oil promotes brain and heart health and is a natural pain reducer.

6. Drink only water and green tea (and drink those in high amounts!) Coffee, alcohol, fruit juices, milks, and all varieties of fake, sugar-filled drinks will increase inflammation levels throughout your body and and contribute to break outs.

7. Get plenty of sleep. I didn’t realize how important this was until I entered graduate school and started missing more hours of sleep than I had since I was a teen. Suddenly, I started getting little break-outs again. One long night of sleep is all it takes to make these little flare-ups disappear.

8. Add some of these activities into your life. They have been shown to reduce your cortisol levels, which is the main hormone responsible for overall inflammation in the human body. Your skin will thank you.

Clear Skin Sample Diet

The idea here is to show you how to match proteins, fats, vegetables, and low-glycemic carbohydrates into a healthy meal. Basically, you should eat 20 grams of protein, a small portion of carbohydrates, a large portion of vegetables, and enough fat to make you feel full. On that note: do not ever try to eliminate fat from your diet. You need it to metabolize half of the vitamins in your body and it helps you feel full.

Meal One.

Spinach-Stuffed Chicken (as much as you want)

1 cup or less of Three Bean Salad minus the sugar (do not put the sugar in this recipe into your bean salad!)

Raw vegetable of your choice with lemon juice, salt, and olive oil dressing (as much as you want)

Green Tea and Mint Tea (this is a great tasting drink. Just pop a mint tea bag into the cup with your green tea and enjoy a calming drink that’s almost sweet without using a grain of sugar.)

Meal Two.

Chicken Curry Burgers.

Green Tea and lemon juice.

This is a complete meal. If you don’t want to buy ground chicken, just put whatever cut of chicken you normally get in the food processor with the spices.

Meal Three.

Cilantro Shrimp with Green Beans.

Cheesy Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes.

Water with lemon slices.

 

I guarantee you that if you stick to this list and low-glycemic recipes, such as the sample one, for a week, your acne will disappear!