Archive for the ‘Body Care’ Category:
There is a new self tanner on the market that I will be reviewing soon. I’m going to try it first and let you know how I like it. It’s supposed to be formulated to look very natural. It’s a gel form, which is different than what I’m used to using personally, which are creams and sprays, so that should be interesting, and it’s supposed to also last long and be ideal for people with very pale skin.
Other than that I can’t tell you much, other than that there are a few good natural self tanners that I like to use, and some of them work better than others, so let’s hope this one is worth the price tag, which is a bit higher than some of the cheap shelf names you can get at your drug store. I’ve used everything from high end to low end, so it certainly doesn’t bother me to spend the extra money as long as I’m getting good results from a self tanning product.
It’s the middle of the winter now, but I still use self tanners as a means to improve the way I look. Self tanning makes you look thinner, makes your face look more evenly toned, healthy and vibrant, and gives you a definite pickup when you’re not feeling so attractive during these dreary, depressing winter months. I love to have a little color, it makes me look ten times better.
Heck, sometimes it makes me look like a whole different person. It’s just that I’m not willing to damage my skin to attain that color, and self tanners are perfect for those of us that look a lot better with a tan, but who don’t want to ruin our skin with ultraviolet exposure, which not only can lead to cancer but also can lead to premature aging of the skin.
I’ve become a little bit obsessed with the economical Tree Hut skin and body care line that I’ve only seen thus far at Wal-Mart. I’ve told you before how I’ve been trying to “go natural” on as many of my beauty and body care products as I can.
I’ve long converted to natural deodorant, because I believe that the heavy metal aluminum and other nasty ingredients that most commercial deodorant contains just don’t belong anywhere near my armpits, where there are several clusters of important lymph nodes that can carry them throughout my system, and I’ve also converted to all natural body lotions.
I’ve found that natural soaps and body washes also deliver great results without drying out your skin or compromising it’s safety by adding harmful, potentially toxic, chemicals to it. I thought I would hate natural lotion, but quite to the contrary, I’ll never go back to using the traditional commercial brands again. I’ve found that it is superior in it’s emollient and moisturizing capacity, and never smells harsh or perfumed, and it also helps keep my skin soft and supple, without having to reapply it a hundred times.
Tree Hut products are great, because not only are they very reasonably priced, while most naturally derived body care products are outrageously priced for the sheer fact that they are natural, or organic, or don’t have this ingredient or that ingredient in them, but they are also great products to begin with.
I’ve tried their body lotions. Right now, I am using their Hawaiin Kukui lotion, which has none of the typical artificial ingredients that you find in so many other lotions. It also has a great, almost chocolatey smell to it, but nothing that is too strong, it’s an all natural, pleasant smell that isn’t overpowering.
It’s extremely moisturizing, and it’s a great lotion to keep by the sink when you wash your hands, to replace the moisture lost after washing and keep it in there.
The other products I’ve tried are their body washes. Right now, I’m using the Coconut Lime scented one, with shea butter. This is one of the best body washes I’ve ever used. It’s very smooth, smells great without smelling offensively strong, and it does not have any parabens, sulfates, or other harmful chemicals in it, and yet it lathers up very well, without drying the skin out.
It’s PERFECT for the winter time especially, when your skin tends to dry out at the first glimpse of a drying soap or skin care product. Their body washes come in an almost 18 oz. size, which lasts forever, and they cost under five bucks, at least at my Wal-mart, they did. Very good, cheap product!
I was in our break room at work the other day, and someone always brings in the newspaper and leaves it in there, and I noticed a flyer/insert that was sitting out about a new technique to help reduce wrinkles, reduce the appearance of cellulite, and overall just rejuvenate the tissues with increased collagen production and smoothing, called the Lulum technique, or the Lulum energy treatment for body rejuvenation.
The before and after pics were pretty impressive on there, which is what made me take notice. The place that offered it out here in Ohio was in Avon called Stags Family Chiropractic/Wellness, and it was a chiropractic clinic, which it appears is the only offices that offer it so far, as the only other place I found was in Texas and it too was chiropractic practice.
They had one of a woman’s mouth before and after, it was less lined and her lips appeared a tad fuller, one of a woman’s neckline, which was more taught and smooth after, and one of a woman’s thigh with dimpled cellulite allover it before and very smooth “after first treatment”. The process is non surgical, non invasive, and there is no downtime at all, so I thought, wow, if I were rich, I’d be signing up for this! I couldn’t find the cost for the Lulum energy treatment anywhere online though. In fact, I could find very little on the treatment at all, it must be so new.
My guess is it might be kind of like microdermabrasion or most other cellulite treatments for body, maybe a hundred bucks a pop, although I don’t know how many treatments you need to maintain or even achieve results. If any practitioners read this, please leave comments with this information and your office info for interested people, that would be great.
I was able to find out how the Lulum energy treatment works though. It is a device that uses several different types of electrical currents, color therapy, and heating therapy, to deeply stimulate the tissues, which probably explains how it rejuvenates collagen production. This is probablyl also how it breaks up cellulite formation and is useful as a cellulite treatment as well. Oh, there was also a pretty amazing before and after picture of a woman with crows feet who looked very smoothed out after treatment.
This treatment, like most other rejuvenating aesthetic treatments for anti aging and body sculpting, probably requires ongoing maintenance to maintain any achieved results, but hey, if you get great results, it may be something you choose to use in your anti aging and wrinkled reduction arsenal, and also your body shaping and cellulite treatment regimen. Anyone who has experience or knowledge of the Lulum energy treatment, please comment and share. Thanks!
After the World Health Organization announced last year that it was definitively saying that the use of tanning beds significantly increases the likelihood of deadly skin cancers like melanoma, and the less dangerous but still attention-needing squamous and basal cell carcinomas, there has been increased scrutiny on the indoor tanning industry and the warnings that are displayed within them, warnings that they particularly want younger people to notice.
Why? Because in our teens it’s the cool thing to get a tan, but you’re not necessarily thinking that this can ruin your health, you’re more so thinking about how good you’re gonna look on the beach, and they want to get the point across to teens and people in their twenties that this is potentially life threatening, since there are more and more cases of early diagnosed melanomas.
You are hearing a lot of stories about girls in their twenties and teens being diagnosed with melanoma, which quite frankly should scare the hell out of regular tanners. The FDA is mulling ideas now to impose tougher restrictions on how they need to display warning signs. Right now, the warning signs are fairly evident, but they may require them to be larger, or to have stronger, more explicit wording that would be more likely to scare people off or to at least make sure they are not over using these beds to get tan.
Here’s the shock too, apparently a study was done that showed most people can get the same tan by going to a tanning salon just once a week that they get when they go three days a week, sparking further worries that people are unnecessarily overdoing it in these beds because they are addicted to them.
I for one, do believe that a little bit of UV light is actually healthy, since it produces vitamin D naturally, but you cross the line when you burn the skin or you expose yourself too much to sunlight. Experts say that even getting a light tan though is triggering the process that causes cancers to form, so even getting a tan is not supposedly safe.
You are especially at a higher risk for melanoma skin cancer if you burned a lot when you were younger, but tanning bed users risk increases by about 75% from the non-tanning population, so these statistics are quite convincing that UV exposure is bad for the skin. Stick to the self tanner, and you’ll be alright!
One of the many fat dissolving procedures that has grown in popularity and recognition over the past few years is one that originated in Europe called mesotherapy. Not only has it’s effectiveness been called into question many times, and some patients complained that it did not work at all on them, but now French researchers are questioning it’s safety and citing several instances of infections that result from the treatment that can get pretty serious.
The mesotherapy treatment consists of several stages of injections of a fluid directly into the fatty deposits that patients want to get rid of. They claim that this “all natural concoction”, which still remains unclear as to what exactly it contains, breaks up and destroys fat cells. The whole premise is that the fat cells, after they have been destroyed, are basically absorbed by or expelled by the body through natural waste elimination efforts. The areas that are treated may become noticeably smaller within either weeks or months, depending on the patient.
However, some patients end up with almost disfiguring areas of oozing and bacterial infection in the areas where they were injected, and that has caused some concern over the safety of this increasingly popular procedure that has been performed for years in Europe by practitioners. Some of the patients identified as having serious infections actually had to be opened up to drain absesses that developed because of the infections, while other were successfully treated nonsurgically.
Most of the cases identified as serious were from a specific clinic where patients were given several rounds of mesotherapy, which is now closed, so it is unclear whether this procedure is just plain dangerous no matter who performs it, or whether this one particular clinic had exceptionally high rates of infection in their patients.
Mesotherapy is still a popular option because it is often cheaper than other methods of fat removal like liposuction and Smartlipo, both of which usually use suction to get the fat out, with the latter using lasers to melt the fat first. Other methods of cellulite removal and fat removal have gained popularity amongst women who often struggle more with cellulite and fat deposits because of hormones.
Since I don’t really have long reviews for either of these products, I figured I’d combine them into one review. They are really simple products, and they are just body care, so you can only go on for so long about the nuances of such products since there’s no real visible outcome as their is with cosmetics 
The first product review is for a lip balm that is meant mostly as a protective emollient against the sun’s rays, for those days at the beach or when you’re on vacation in a sunny destination and walking around in the sun a lot. It’s by Pharmaca, that company I had talked about previously that my mom and I explored in depth when we were vacationing in Berkeley California to see my sister. It’s a natural products shop, and it has all kinds of nutritional and treatment supplements based on herbs and naturopathy, and it also has all kinds of natural beauty and self care products that are based in a non chemical formulation.
If you’re aiming to go more natural, this place was like heaven for you to shop in. One of the products I found there was a small lip balm stick, just the size of a chapstick, called ginger SPF lip balm. It was pure white, so you could see that it had zinc in it to protect your lips, but it also had soothing ginger in it which also happened to smell great if you like those kinds of more earthy scents like I do. It wasn’t the best as far as moisturization goes, since the zinc in it made it too hard to rub off on the lips, but it was a great sun protection factor for your lips. They didn’t burn or get chapped at all when I was in the sun all day.
The second review is for Body Shop Vitamin E body butter. There’s really not much to say about this product. It’s highly emollient, and it’s actually light enough to absorb into your skin. Overall, I wans’t impressed by the laundry list of chemicals I found in the ingredients, and I won’t be buying it again as I thought they tried to base their products mostly on natural ingredients. Oh well, I’ll probably still use it here and there for heavy moisturization needs, it was my free gift with purchase after all.
If you’re a fanatical self tanner as I am, then you undoubtedly have experienced that not so pleasant part of self tanning that occurs a little while after the product begins to work it’s self tanning magic and develop. You know, that smells that sort of resembles a dank smell that you can’t place, like maybe dirty socks mixed with something metallic?
Everyone has their own explanation for what it smells like and it’s never a good scent to anyone, that much I know. Well, I’ve been fortunate enough to have tried out a new product called Summer Glow by Antidote Skincare that I believe has the least smell of any self tanner I’ve ever tried. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to smell it even after it’s been developing for a few hours.
This is huge for those of us that really can’t go tanning and need to minimize our time in the sun, which by the way should be all of us since there are cancer causing UV rays that not only damage the skin and lead to early aging, but also can lead to serious and life threatening forms of skin cancer.
This product is a Godsend for those of us that rely on self tanners to make us look healthier and give us that glow we’re looking for, and yet have the common sense to achieve it the healthy way, but can’t stand the smell of ourselves after application. You know, all these products go on smelling like something good, like coconut or bananas, but they all end up in the dirty sock realm, and it’s just not fun when you can smell it wafting off of you all day long.
The company is offering you a 20% discount if you use this coupon code 09BLCSG when ordering, which is quite a nice discount for a great product. For this product, you pretty much apply it as you do any other self tanning product, but you may want to add a little bit of thin lotion, as the product is pretty thick, that just depends on your technique for application and your preference. It has an instant tint, so you can apply it for an instant tan as well, and then the color develops to give you an even deeper earthy glow later on when the natural sugars that make up DHA start to pigment your skin.
And, you don’t have to feel like you smell, to me that is the best part.
On my recent trip to California to visit my sister, I had the pleasure of wandering around several natural and botanical herbal shops that had just about everything under the sun for your health and body care that you could imagine. They had every price point, every level of organic and natural, and basically anything that you could ask for if you were looking for beauty products without certain harmful chemicals like paraben, sulfates, aluminum, formaldehyde and petroleum. Among these items I found an all natural body lotion which had ingredients that I actually read and could understand on the back label, so I picked it up.
I’ve been figuring that I should really start to watch not only what I put in my body food-wise as far as what it actually is and what it’s content is as far as chemicals and other harmful ingredients, but I should really also start trying to only put natural and healthful products ON my body as well, since everything you put on your skin does have the ability, and in fact, usually does, absorb into your blood stream. There, it can wreak havoc if it’s a chemical that can have negative consequences on any of your bodily functions.
Chemicals like the ones I talked about above have been linked to everything from cancer to alzheimers, so my line of thought is that if you can live without it in your products, and the products that don’t have it work better for you anyways, then why even bother with them, especially if you can find all natural, organic products in the same general price range.
The lotion, by a brand called Shikai, is for the hands and body. It’s very emollient so you only have to use a little bit, whereas with a cheap store brand you’d have to use a lot more to get the same level of moisture. I’ve noticed that my skin is already softer and it’s appearance is better as well. It contains as some of it’s main ingredients borage oil, shea butter and aloe, all of which are nourishing and moisturizing to the epidermis and which also contain soothing qualities if your skin is irritated. Among the other ingredients I read, it also contains wheat germ oil and avocado oil. The aloe is certified organic, so that’s an added benefit as well.
It has a great scent of yuzu, which is a Japanese citrus fruit that is known for it’s aromatic qualities, and the lotion smells great going on, not too overpowering, but definitely a noticeable, exotic scent.
I purchased the Sephora brand cellulite massager about one month ago now, and have been using it pretty regularly, at least once a day, if not several times a week after my shower before I go to bed, to help reduce the appearance of my cellulite. I use a good cellulite cream with it as well so that I can really get the most benefit out of it. Cellulite creams have a further firming effect, so using them in combination with high pressure massage is one of the best ways to reduce your cellulite in my opinion and experience.
There are a few things I really like about this Sephora cellulite massager. First off, it’s very easy to handle. It it a solid constructed product with a larger round rubber head that covers a lot of surface area, so you get a lot of area covered in a shorter amount of time. It also has a great handle that allows you to put the full pressure of your arm strength on the treated areas which is ergonomically well constructed so you can get optimum pressure without all the effort. You hold it basically as you would hold a loofah sponge, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
The pink massager part is very well constructed, and it’s not made in such a way that over time it will peel off of the handle, like a lot of other cellulite massagers do. I have used it with very high pressure for numerous days now with no signs of stress or breaking, so that’s already better compared to a lot of the other cellulite massagers I’ve used in the past.
The pink massagers are small little bumps that are contoured in such a way that they will help break up the fat deposits topically by applying pressure to them and manually forcing them apart, which is basically what cellulite is, fat deposits that are intermittently dispersed with excess water weight and therefore they look spongy.
You do have to use it with a very good, thick emollient cellulite cream, which is how most cellulite creams are made, because if you use it with a cheaper normal cream, it does not glide as easily and makes it much harder to put a lot of pressure on the areas you’re targeting. All this was less than twenty bucks on Amazon, so I consider it to be well worth the price thus far, and by the way, I have noticed a visible reduction in the appearance of my cellulite. Oh, and don’t be surprised if you notice you have a lot of little bruises at first, this is just from the pressure and you’re skin getting used to it.
Well, this is certainly no surprise, but tanning beds have been confirmed by the scientific community as being a cancer causing agent. In fact, they are saying that those that have used tanning beds before they are 30 years old may have as much as a 75% greater chances at getting skin cancer than those who did not go to tanning beds, or do not currently use tanning salons.
This is scary, especially since many people, just like me who are now in their thirties and have wised up and stopped going to tanning beds, did used to go in our youth. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m a heck of a lot more concerned about my health over my vanity now than I was when I was in my teens and just trying to get a tan to fit in with all the other girls who were doing it. One thing that has changed since then is that some states have banned young women from using tanning beds, even with parental discretion and signatures, which is definitely a controversial move, but one that some states considered important enough to enact.
Self tanners may become all that much more popular now that the “news” has come out about tanning beds being compared to arsenic and mustard gas as far as cancer causing capabilities. Not only tanning beds are cancerous, but they are saying that ultraviolet exposure of any kind causes cell mutations that often result in skin cancer.
The studies in mice confirmed that those exposed to aritficial UV rays showed genetic mutations indicative of cancer, which was all science really needed to confirm what everyone already kind of knew. Until now, the scientific community classified tanning beds as “probable carcinogens”, while the latest conclusions move them to a list of definite carcinogens, a big step.
Big enough to land this news on the front pages of all major news outlets. I hope that this news really strikes a cord with the younger ladies who are using these beds, and they ignore the propaganda that tanning can be safe when occasional use is indulged in. The problem with that mentality is that, especially if you are very fair, it doesn’t take much exposure to UV light to cause cell mutations and the beginnings of cancer.
It has been said that any skin coloration by the sun or artificial light is indicative of cell damage, so even a light tan indicates that you have damaged your skin. Like I said, all the more reason to explore what your favorite self tanner is and get started fake bronzing instead of fake baking in beds.
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