Love Your Skin

1 Cup Powdered Milk Or Powedered Goats Milk 4-5 Drops Lavender Essential Oil 2-3 Drops Clary Sage Essential Oil

Lavender Buds

Start your bath water running. When it’s about 1/2 full, pour in the ingredients above and swish them around. Slip in and RELAX! The milk is sooooo soothing and leaves your skin smooth like a baby, and the Lavender and Clary Sage just might put you to sleep! This is a great treat at bedtime, or if you awake in the night and have difficulty going back to sleep - give it a try. If you have restless little ones that are a challenge to get calmed down at bedtime, you may be amazed at how well this simple concoction works. Enjoy!

Nearly everyone has to combat this, year after year. As the cold weather moves in, our fingers become sensitive, cracked, and dry. Try as we may, most off the shelf lotions just don’t do the trick. They may leave your skin soft for a short time, but wear off quickly and certainly don’t last all day long.

Wouldn’t you love to have soft, supple hands and fingers all winter long with no cracking, chapping, peeling or pain? You can!

What is needed is a tough solution to this tough problem! I admit here to plugging my own product - but I’ve tried them all and this 100% natural lotion bar is the ONLY solution I’ve found that WORKS! It is available in tons of great scents, and also UNSCENTED, which many men appreciate.

As soon as the cool weather starts, I start using this every morning. I take a lotion bar and run it across my nail beds and lightly over my palms. Then, I massage it into my hands thoroughly. Thats it! It takes less than 2 minutes to protect your hands for the whole day. The rest of the day (ALL DAY LONG), my hands have locked in moisture and stay supple - even after multiple hand washings! This is a thick, concentrated product, and only a small amount is needed to get you through the whole day. The best way to describe it is like a big chapstick that you roll out as you need it (although it is SOOO much nicer than chapstick!!) I used to have peeling, chapping, painful fingers every winter, but NO MORE. I hope you’ll give this a try and would love to know how it works for you:


Jeannie’s Lotion Bars

This is an easy and cost effective way to make your own body splash -suited to your own favorite scents - right in your home. You’ll save money and yo’ll know exactly what is going into your body. Here’s the recipe:

1 Cup Water
2 Teaspons Essential Oils*
1 Tablespoon Witch Hazel

Ok, for the Essential Oils you can use whatever your favorites are. You can use both teaspoons of the same oil, or one teaspoon each of 2 different Essential Oils. Here are my favorites - but don’t be limited by this list - use your own favorites and experiment!

2 Teaspoons Lavender - My alltime favorite: Relaxing with a capital ‘R’
1 Teaspoon Lavender, 1 Teaspoon Clary Sage - Earthy version of Relaxing with a capital ‘R’
1 Teaspoon Grapefruit, 1 Teaspoon Litsea - Can you say UPLIFTING - This will do the trick
1 Teaspoon Sandalwood, 1 Teaspoon Patchouli - EARTHY, and guys like to use this one too
1 Teaspoon Rose, 1 Teaspoon Geranium - Floral and Uplifting
1 Teaspoon Peppermint (no 2nd teaspoon) - Festive and Uplifting
2 Teaspoons Patchouli - Takes you back to 1965

Witch Hazel sounds hard to find but isn’t. You can usually find it anywhere you buy rubbing alchohol, right next to it on the shelf.

Mix everyting together and store in a trigger spray bottle. After a bath or shower, shake well before spritzing over your body.

You don’t have to spend a fortune on those expensive department store products to thoroughly remove all of your make-up, mascara included. All you need is some natural Sweet Almond Oil and Cotton balls. Put a llitle bit of the oil on a cotton ball and gently wipe outward to remove the make-up. Sweet Almond oil has the added benefit of moisturizing your eye area, and also saves you from putting any PETROLEUM based product on your eye. Most commercial eye-makeup removers have some amount of PETROLEUM in them, and that’s the last thing I would want soaking into the delicate skin around my eyes. Stick with Sweet Almond Oil and you won’t regret it!

Here are some quick tricks for dealing with puffy, tired eyes. You can use Tea Bags (the new round ones are perfect), Cotton soaked in Witch Hazel (squeeze out the excess!), Cool Cucumber Rounds, or Cool Potato slices.

Take your weapon of choice and place one over each (closed eye), and lie quietly in a dimly lit room for 15 minutes. You’ll be amazed at how uplifting the experience is, and how quickly your puffy, tired eyes respond to such a simple procedure.

My guess is that you have at least one of these already available in your house right now - so there’s really no excuse - GO TRY IT! I’d love to hear your comments about how this works for you.

This is a simple trick from my friend Beverly.  Take your favorite moisturizer and slather it all over your feet at bedtime, when you are sitting on the side of the bed, just before crawling in for the night. Really pile it on! The more the better. It will have plenty of time to absorb while you are asleep.

Then take a pair of cotton socks and put them on.  Now don’t walk around - this will cause too much of the moisturizer to seep into the socks, instead of into your feet.  Climb right on into bed and go to sleep.  In the morning, take off your socks and you will be amazed at how soft and supple your feet are!  I personally like to do this in the Winter, because it makes me too hot in the Summer, plus my feet get really dried and cracked in the Winter.  You can pick a commercial product like Nivea, Palmer’s Coco Butter, Bag Balm, or some people even use Vaseline (I personally don’t, because it is a petroleum based product.  What you are putting on your skin is absorbing INTO your body as you sleep, and I don’t want petroleum doing that!).  Another awesome product you can use is Jeannie’s Foot Therapy Lotion .

No matter which moisturizer you use, I promise you’ll be happy with the results in the morning!

Where did soap come from?  Actually, it was developed accidetentally.  Yes, thats right - this wonderful, aromatic, bubbling delacicy that we mostly take for granted today was derived quite by accident in ancient times.Â

To boil it down to the simplest explanation, it went something like this:  Rainwater washed through the ashes of old fires, and mixed with fat drippings from whatever animals had been cooked on the fires.  This mixture drained to the lowest point around, which was quite often a river or stream in which women washed clothes and other items. 

Women begain to notice that a ‘bubbling’ or ‘lather’ was present in the areas in which this odd mixture gathered.  And this odd mixture was SOAP.  Soap, at its simplest level, is a mixture of a powerful base(pH) (Lye is typically used today), and some type of fat.  The rainwater in the ashes formed the necessary  base (pH), and the fats mixed with it to yeild soap.  The ‘accidental soap’ of yesteryear must have been very inconsistent, and in many cases too harsh (to much base), or too greasy (too much fat).  Nowdays, we use high quality, carefully manufactured Lye and precise measurements of fats and oils so that a consistent product that is kind to the skin results.

Welcome to Love Your Skin!  This blog is all about - you guessed it - taking care of your skin.  Your skin is the larged organ of your body and your protection against toxins, and anything else out there in the world that shouldn’t get inside your body.  Take care of your skin & enjoy the process.  Healthy skin doesn’t happen by accident - it is created from the inside out.  We must first take care of our bodies on the inside, then maintain our healthy skin with natural products, and finally we can enjoy the clean, glowing skin we were born to have.