Healing Dry Sensitive Skin

We’ve blogged before about our concerns of how the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the Environmental Working Group are using fear mongering to scare consumers away from beauty products that are perfectly safe to use.

Check out this post by TheBeautyBrains if you want to get fact-based information about chemicals in cosmetics. The science behind a lot of the scare stories is just not reliable, yet the stories persist and become legends whose truth is rarely examined.
Wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t turn into legislation. All we need is for Congress to use its wit and wisdom to pursue an unrealistic agenda! Watch out for the Safe Cosmetics Act, for instance.
Much more information on this topic is available via the above post, and here at PersonalCareTruth.com.

Susan starts her day by jogging to the edge of town, cutting back through a cornfield for an herbal tea at the downtown Starbucks and heading home for a shower. It sounds like a healthy morning routine, but Susan is in fact exposing herself to a rogue’s gallery of chemicals: pesticides and herbicides on the corn, plasticizers in her tea cup, and the wide array of ingredients used to perfume her soap and enhance the performance of her shampoo and moisturizer. Most of these exposures are so low as to be considered trivial, but they are not trivial at all—especially considering that Susan is six weeks pregnant.

Have you read the ingredients in the products you put onto your skin everyday – the soap, lotions, cosmetics, all of them? It is amazing how much junk is in them, and some even have chemicals that are known to be harmful to the skin. Even the most commonly prescribed cream for treating eczema contains a chemical proven to make eczema worse! It is good to see Scientific American publishing articles like this. Used to just be “health nuts” who were concerned about the spread of toxic chemicals into our everyday lives.

New research has found that if you want some of the many health benefits associated with eating broccoli or other cruciferous vegetables, you need to eat the real thing – a key phytochemical in these vegetables is poorly absorbed and of far less value if taken as a supplement.

The study, published by scientists in the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, is one of the first of its type to determine whether some of the healthy compounds found in cruciferous vegetables can be just as easily obtained through supplements.

The same thing goes for isolated compounds extracted from plants and then added into skin care products. Isolated chemicals just don’t cut it next to the whole, organic plant oils from which they are extracted!

Pomegranate health benefits are surprisingly good. The fruit has been labelled a super food because of the many uses it has. Pomegranate is full of antioxidants which help to cleanse the body of harmful toxins. This fruit is also packed full of vitamins which help with overall body function. Pomegranate juice is starting to become very popular as the array of health benefits is realised.

Here is a site dedicated to the health benefits of tumeric and pomegranates. Yum! Here is more about the anti-aging benefits of pomegranate seed oil.

From new nutricosmetic ingredients to reduce wrinkles to new research on bone health to the myriad ingredients and products promising better cognitive health as we age, everyone is trying to turn back the clock. And we thank them for their hard work.

You can have beautiful skin at any age. Anti-aging moisturizers can really help restore lustre to your complexion, no matter how old you are. I find them more effective than nutricosmetics, but there are some supplements, like evening primrose oil, that work very well whether taken internally or applied directly onto the skin.

a new study published in the Lancet found that common acne-fighting products lack proper research in documenting their effectiveness.

“The large number of products and product combinations, and the scarcity of comparative studies, has led to disparate guidelines with few recommendations being evidence-based,” lead author Hywel Williams from the Centre of Evidence-Based Dermatology at the UK’s University of Nottingham, said in a statement.

Wouldn’t it be great if the skin care business dropped its “sciency” pretentions?
Here is an article by ABC News that points out the difficulty of doing double-blind clinical trials of skin care products. Without them, there can be (according to the standards of clinical research propagated by FDA) no claim of safety or efficacy in treating diseases. But the skin care industry does not adopt that standard and hides behind phony science that is really just a form af advertising-speak. Even where genuine attempts at clinical trials are made, the data are thin and unconvincing, as this article points out.
I prefer to go with natural approaches that have stood the test of time. Nature is not full of valueless gimmicks. They just do not survive.

Cellulite affects about 90 percent of women of all shapes, sizes, and weights, so we’re not alone in our fight against lumps. The good news? A newly-developed dimple doesn’t mean it’s on your body forever. Here are five ways to smooth out the cellulite.

Here is a helpful article from Endless Beauty about cellulite. I’ve posted about my own experience of getting rid of cellulite, mainly by restricting my fat intake to coconut oil and olive oil. That is what made the long-term difference for me. There are other tips to consider at the Endless Beauty link above. The best information I’ve seen on the internet about cellulite, though, is at The Cellulite Investigation, where you will find in-depth, factual information about all of your options. The site does not promote any product line. It just provides excellent information, much of it provided by readers who share their experience of different approaches to ridding themselves of cellulite.