99% Food, 1% Skin

Category archives: Skin

Soap and Soap Pump for Cooking

This rare skin post is highly related to food!

Liquid hand soap and dispenser.

At home, I prefer to use bar soaps since the ingredients in making bar soaps are generally cleaner and often times better.

I used to have dry skin feeling all the time regardless of how much lotion I used.

Until one day, my friend told me that some ingredients in liquid soap and sometimes bar soap too, would strip moisture away from our body.

Chemicals such as propylene glycol would dehydrate our skin.

As a result, researching ingredients in the soap became important.

She recommended me to use these soaps that were made with natural ingredients, oil and essential oils, and the soaps would be moisturizing .

I then had the lucky opportunity to attend a soap making session with my friends.

All we used was good natural oils (shea butter, olive or coconut oil), essential oils and lye, which was sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide.

Lye was needed for saponification, the process of making soap, converting oil into soap.

Since I tried the good soap with simple and good ingredients, I had never turn back.

No more dry skin.

I bought my bar soaps from art fairs or farmers markets.

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Body Lotion and more Sun Protection

Niks

Finally used up Avalon Organics – Hand & Body Lotion Lavender (EWG rating of 5).  I made a mistake buying this without checking EWG (believing it was a recognized brand and “organic” that it could not go wrong), and was disappointed later when I discovered it had a moderate hazard rating.  I have learnt over time that not only I have to check each new product I intend to purchase with EWG, I have to check EWG every time I repurchase products I am already using.  Companies constantly reformulate.  A new formulation sometimes increases or decreases a product’s hazardous level.

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Sunscreen – First Skin Post!

Niks

Every time I had to buy new skincare product, I ended up spending huge amount of time researching for products that did not contain harmful chemicals and would not break my bank.   My information largely comes from the non-profit Environmental Work Group.  They have tremendous amount of information on many consumer products.  Products are rated from a scale of 0-9.  0-2 products are low hazard, 3-6 is moderate and 7-9 is high hazard.  I used them to understand the toxicity of consumer products and then compare many online vendors for pricing and product reviews.

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