Fiber Fool

At more than 150 pages, EcoBeauty: Scrubs, Rubs, Masks and Bath Bombs for You and Your Friends by Janice and Lauren Cox and published by Ten Speed Press, is a great introduction to making your own beauty products at home with natural ingredients. The book is broken into six sections: For the Face, For the Body, For the Mouth, For the Hands and Feet, For the Hair and Gift Giving, each containing 10-27 recipes or projects. There is also an introductory section that covers some of the common ingredients and their beneficial properties as well as sources for them and containers. The final chapter of the book is dedicated to a mix of recipes especially fun for gift giving (i.e. bath bombs and bath salts) and projects that complement the recipes in the book to help make a well-rounded homemade beauty gift. As part of the title suggests there is also some emphasis on the eco-friendliness of making your own beauty products, from reducing chemicals in our waste water to reusing containers of various shapes and forms.

The first author, Lauren, is a UCLA student and daughter of Janice, an established author of homecrafted beauty recipes. It is apparent in much of the text that this book is intended for young women from pre-teen through college age. There is a lot of emphasis on common maladies of teen skin and recipes for reducing aging of skin and hair are sparse. Though I’m in my mid-thirties I did not struggle to find recipes of interest to me, however.

Each recipe has a brief introductory paragraph describing the purpose of the recipe and sometimes highlighting specific properties of a few of the key ingredients. Most of the recipes use only 2-4 things and mix up quite quickly. Many also keep 1-3 weeks in the refrigerator and are sized appropriately for their lifespan. This makes it pretty simple to dedicate a day every other week or so to prepping your products for the coming weeks. Likely it would take no more than an hour to put together all of your products for a two week period.

So far I have tried four of the recipes - Strawberry Cleanser, Bee Happy Toner, Get-the-Red-Out Facial Mask and Tough as Nails Oil. Despite my age I struggle with acne on a regular basis (got through my early teens just fine, then after a “Glamour Shot” before my senior year in high school I broke out and have never had clear skin since) and the Strawberry Cleanser has made a huge difference in my skin. I still get sizable hormonal breakouts, but the daily smaller whiteheads have nearly disappeared entirely! The strawberries contain alpha hydroxy acids which are in many commercial cleansers to fight acne, but they also contain lots of great vitamins, plus the seeds act as gentle and natural exfoliants. I was complately unaware of honey’s anti-bacterial properties, but that makes it a common ingredient in many of the recipes in EcoBeauty. It plays a role in both the Bee Happy Toner and the Get-the-Red-Out mask which I think both work well for me in combination with the strawberry cleanser. I do find the toner to be a tad sticky so safe it for nighttime use only. The nail oil is definitely helping me in my fight to keep my fingertips and cuticles hydrated and smooth despite my handling of massive amounts of fiber, gardening and cooking and canning.

I’m sure a good share of these recipes or ones quite similar can be found pretty readily on the Internet. That said, there is something nice about knowing right where to go and finding what you are looking for so I am glad I bought this book when I saw it on the shelves at Old Firehouse Books. There are many more recipes I’m going to be exploring in the future - Oh Soy! Cleanser, Not Your Grandmother’s Toner & No More Cottage Cheese Thighs, to name just a few. There are shampoo and conditioner recipes in there too that I’m not yet quite brave enough to try. The same is true of the natural nail polish.

This may have been one of those books that I should have taken for a test drive from my local library before purchasing. This is a new genre of DIY book for me so I am not familiar with what else is out there, but a book that wasn’t so obviously targeted to the teen and early twenty-somethings may have been a better fit. That said, I love books and especially books that inspire. The photographs in here are large, clear and expertly styled and lit so give my photography bent this book does inspired in two ways and thus worth the price for me. If you are thirty or older you may wish to give this title a pass or at least peruse it fairly thoroughly before buying. If you are shopping for a DIY or ecologically-minded teen or twenty-something, I suspect this book would not disappoint. My appetite for making my own beauty products has been whetted and I think I will be looking into other books on this topic that are less skewed towards younger women.