Best Kept Green Beauty Secrets

With the rat race to keep up with the newest products, we're not only wasting hard earned dollars, but vacuum through an enormous amount of products that wreak havoc on our skin and environment. Yet, all the products and spa treatments in the world don’t beat the basic things we can do to keep ourselves looking our best.

Sleep

There’s a reason it’s called beauty sleep. Not sleeping enough is a sure fire way to wake up looking like you’re ready for Halloween. But if you can’t catch up on your zzz’s, make sure you have a few tricks up your sleeve.

The most fast-acting cheapest trick is to use a bit of rose water on a cotton ball, and dab it on your eyes. This is an instant pick me up, smells great, and costs next to nothing! Rose water even works great as a toner, acting as an antibacterial cleaner minus alcohol.

Sun-Exposure

Everyone knows that excessive sun exposure is one of the worst things you can do for your skin, but we all still covet that Hollywood orange (I mean, “golden”) glow. Tanning beds are no better. Neither are chemically saturated self tanning lotions. But turmeric, a dark yellow spice native to India, has been used for centuries by Indian women to provide a natural glow.

Mix half a teaspoon of turmeric with whole milk to get a paste, and leave it on a facial mask for five minutes. After you wash it away, you’ll notice a soft golden glow without the use of chemicals or plastics – and you’ll have done something great for your skin.

Aside from making skin soft and supple, turmeric has immense healing properties including getting rid of acne and discoloration. This mustard colored spice can also be mixed in larger amounts and used anywhere on your body to reveal your inner golden goddess. Best of all, you only need to travel as far as your local grocer to pick it up.

But if you want it at pennies on the dollar, and want to support local mom and pop stores, skip large scale commercial grocers and pay a visit to any Middle Eastern or South Asian supermarket. While you're there, pick up a bottle of rose water too, and save yourself the shipping cost plus the wasted paper and energy of mailing.

Mind and Body

Creating more stress in your life is a fantastic way to invite all kinds of diseases to attack the body. Equally as bad, stress is reflected on your face the minute you experience it.

When you're chronically stressed, the adrenal glands are forced to work overtime and eventually exhaust themselves, inhibiting the immune system and triggering a number of health complications.

One of the best stress fighters is exercise – but there’s one problem with a routine trip to the gym. The constant noise of bad gym music and weight stacks falling abruptly is hardly a recipe for de-stressing. Point being, the gym offers an opportunity to train the body, but not the mind.

A great alternative is yoga. These simple stretching exercises have been used by civilizations for over thousands of years and far surpass the manic hustle and bustle of corporate health clubs.

A switch to yoga effectively trains both mind and body and keeps you away from wasting money on health clubs, which not only deplete resources but are proven breeding grounds for illness.

Oxygen

All living things need oxygen, and our skin is no exception. The trick is finding the right way to harness a natural free element that’s already around you.

There are two ways to deliver oxygen to your face. The first is an oxygen facial. For about $500 a treatment, you can get oxygen blasted directly at your face. This is a favorite of Madonna, who loves it so much that she dropped $7,000 to have her own unit at home. Oxygen calms inflammation, treats acne, kills bacteria, drives antioxidants and vitamins into the skin, and makes your skin younger looking by providing oxygen to the skin cells. ¹

The second way revolves around the hype of beauty products that claim to tote O2 in their product. Oxygen is a gas. There is no way to put that into a cream, keep it there, and then have it released when it hits your skin. Even if creams did provide some extra oxygen to the skin, the effects would last only minutes at best.

But cost conscious beauty whizzes have wisened up to the smart cost-effective way to get a similar treatment for far less. The buzz has already been hovering around the idea of using high quality air purifiers, such as Blueair Air Purifiers, Austin Air Air Filters, and IQAir Air Cleaners.

The air purifiers filter the air and create an optimal clean air environment rich with pure O2. For added benefit, regardless of beauty objectives, it's advised to have one in your room while you sleep. With the average person sleeping for about 6 hours a night, you're guaranteed a long fresh O2 session by the time you wake up. Oxygen’s also become the must have for the dressing room of any beauty maven, regardless of whether you’re a natural beauty or a glamazon.

Reprinted in Beauty Forever Network and Global Goddess Beauty