Make Buy Skip: Shampoo

Welcome to another installment of Make Buy Skip!

A lot of people out there are searching for less toxic shampoos, so that's our topic for today.

Conventional shampoos are full of toxic ingredients like sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate (a topic for another post) and numerous others.

Even big-name natural companies like Burt's Bees and Jason have their shampoos rated at 3 and above on the Skin Deep Database.

So without further ado, in the Make category...
Toxic ingredients with a hefty dose of Pinterest-fueled DIY has led a lot of people, including me, to try to make their own shampoo.

The best recipe I've been able to find is this one from Jillee at One Good Thing.  It's based on coconut milk and Dr. Bronner's liquid castile soap.  I've tried it, and it actually works great!  There are two catches: 1) If you are a vinegar-rinse kind of person (as I am), do NOT do it after this shampoo!!!  Vinegar mixed with castile soap has got to be one of the vilest things I've ever experienced in my entire life.  It's slimy, you can't rinse it off, and it STINKS!!  Trust me on this one.  2) Coconut milk spoils quickly, so this needs to be made in small quantities, and preferably refrigerated.  I'm not really one to massage cold liquids onto my scalp, so this is not a good option for me.

Buy...
I've mentioned before that I have a greywater system, and as usual, this was a driver for me to seek a less-toxic shampoo.  The problem with almost all natural shampoos on the market, even the really good ones, is that they have some form of sodium on the ingredients list.  Sodium in some forms isn't inherently bad for you, and is pretty easy for municipal water systems to deal with, but I just can't be salting the earth in my garden with my shampoo.  Fortunately, Miessence shampoos don't contain sodium in any form, so I don't have to worry!

Skip...
You can tell from my photo that I'm a Curly Girl.  Those of us with curls often experience perpetually dry hair, and there is a very large contingent of curlies (and even some non-curlies!) who advocate the "no-poo" method, meaning they don't use shampoo.  Generally they still use something to clean their hair, it just doesn't have a shampoo label on it.  Baking soda is one method, but can be incredibly drying to the scalp.  I did it once and my hair took an entire month to recover.  More common is a method known as co-washing, which stands for "conditioner only."  The idea here is to find a light conditioner as close to natural as possible, and use it to massage the scalp.  I did this for about a year, and it was okay, but not great, and I can say with some certainty that this would not be a good choice for somebody with oilier hair/scalp.

However!  Even though I've been using actual shampoo again for maybe 2 years, I've had an interesting observation.  Since I started using hair care products that don't contain junk that leaves a residue, I find that I actually don't NEED to use shampoo very often.  These days, I honestly only wash my hair 3-4 times a month!

Now, hair care is an intensely personal decision, and I say that not to put more gravitas on it than it deserves but just to acknowledge the great variety among us in hair care needs.  I encourage you to experiment to find what works for you, and to do so using safe products that don't contain products that are toxic to your family and the environment.

If you are looking for natural shampoos, Miessence has two choices for you.

For dry hair & scalp, Desert Flower is very mild and doesn't dry out hair.  This is the one that I use, and coincidentally, so does my dog.  It leaves her (and me!) smelling fresh, without any skin irritation, so I can bathe her as often as she decides to roll in something stinky.

For oilier hair & scalp, there is also the Lemon Myrtle shampoo.  The scent is invigoratingly clean, and helps to control the oil very well.

Both are made almost entirely with certified organic ingredients, smell delicious, are safe and effective for the whole family.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you're interested in trying out some samples!

Lemon Myrtle Shampoo (for normal to oily hair)

Desert Flower Shampoo (for normal to dry hair)

Introducing Miessence Superfoods Vitality Challenge!

Miessence has had a line of superfoods for a while now.  These four products are an amazing way to boost your overall health using food-based supplements with no nasty chemicals, but many people have felt that the price was a little bit steep to dive into getting all at once.  Today, all that changes, with the introduction of the Superfoods Vitality Challenge Pack!

First, let me introduce you to the superfoods themselves and then I'll tell you about the Vitality Challenge Pack.

Berry Radical Antioxidant Superfood is a potent blend of nine different high-antioxidant foods.  Antioxidants are measured in ORAC units--oxygen radical absorbance capacity.  Seven servings of fruits and vegetables have a total of about 3500 ORAC units, while a single teaspoon serving of Berry Radical has over 4000!  Now this is not to say to replace your fruits and veggies with Berry Radical, but this IS a great way to boost the nutrition going into your body. 

Berry Radical is very easy to use, as well!  It makes a great hot beverage, and you can treat it just like your morning coffee--with (or without) cream and sugar.  It's also a wonderful addition to smoothies.

Deep Green Alkalising Superfood is a powerful detoxifier. Poor diet and other system stressors can lead to an overly acidic system, which in turn is associated with conditions ranging from arthritis to kidney stones.  Lots and lots of green leafy vegetables help to restore the balance needed for proper mineral absorption and protein metabolism.  Deep Green gives you a boost of those green leafy vegetables and their juices.

There are many green powders on the market out there, but what really sets Deep Green apart from the competition is that it is made from freeze-dried juices rather than just pulverized grass.  Most others grind up wheatgrass, barley grass, and other grasses, and package that itself.  These powders aren't BAD for you, but when the idea is to really get the nutrients, why would you want to make your body go through the extra work of breaking down the cell walls of the grasses?  Deep Green uses the actual juice of these greens that has been freeze-dried, making the nutrients easily accessible to your body.

Personally, I find Deep Green to have a slightly sweet taste, but that may take some time for your taste buds to identify.  The easiest way to take it is just to drop a teaspoon into a smoothie or mix it in some juice.  It also makes a great addition to salad dressings!

You may have heard a lot about probiotics lately.  I myself am an ardent fan of the little critters!  Probiotics help maintain proper gut health, which leads to a stronger immune system and increased ability to assimilate all the nutrients in the foods you consume.  InLiven Probiotic Superfood is a dairy-free powder that uses a superbreed of Lactobacilli that will set up and strengthen a healthy colony of friendly bacteria in your gut.  It may sound strange to intentionally introduce bacteria to your system, but you do not want to be without these guys.

Like the others, just add a teaspoon daily to a smoothie or juice and you'll be on your way to improved gut health!

Although it is dairy-free, InLiven is not gluten free, as it is made with wheat and other grains that contain gluten.  Fast Tract is a gluten-free alternative probiotic liquid that offers the same probiotic benefits in just 25mL a day.

Each of these superfoods have previously only come packaged in 30-day supplies, and so a person would need to spend about $200 to be able to try all three.  This has all changed now!

Now, you can take the Vitality Challenge, which is a 10-day supply of each of the superfood powders*, as well as a 20-page Vitality Challenge book including self-assessment guide, detox guide, and bonus smoothie recipes.  There's also a wealth of information on the Vitality Challenge mini website about improvements to your health you can expect to see in just 10 days, as well as with longer-term use.  Best of all, rather than committing $200 to a set of supplements you aren't sure will work for you, the Vitality Challenge Pack can be purchased for just $85.  It's a small price to pay for the difference you will feel in your own health.

*Unfortunately, due to shipping constraints, Fast Tract probiotic liquid is not available as part of the Vitality Challenge.

Are you ready to get started?

Crafting a Life You Love

Happy New Year!  How is everybody doing with their resolutions?  I don't usually make resolutions per se, but I have been working on a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG for short.  I don't make this stuff up!) of my own for a while now: designing my life.

I'm interested in A LOT of things.  This makes me a pretty well-rounded person, but also makes me feel like I have a bit of adult ADD at times, as my interests shift all over the place in a relatively short period of time.  Sometime last year, I decided to finally try to turn this into a strength by capitalizing on my various interests to devise a life that is better suited to my personality than something more traditional involving a 9-5 job.

One of my first steps towards this BHAG was to start Red Porch Co.  As I get older, I find myself wanting more and more to be in control of my own circumstances.  I don't really expect to ever not have to work for somebody else, at least not until my student loans are paid off, but this small little business gives me my own platform to try out new things, learn new things, and sink or swim based on my own efforts.  There is something incredibly empowering about that!  Contact me if you're interested in the possibility of your own small businesses and we can talk about if it's right for you.

So that was my first step, but I didn't have much of a plan for the next, and I realized I needed to be more deliberate in my choices than I have been in the past.  THEN it occurred to me that being deliberate requires deliberation.  In other words, a whole lot of really tough thought!

I've enlisted a few tools as I guide myself through this process and thought I'd share them with you.  =)


First, a failsafe.  

All this deliberation and thinking about moving on in life requires a little something to bring me back into the moment.  My dog is huge for this.  Dogs are masterful at living in the moment! Sure they have memories and build associations (positive and negative), but mostly they are perfectly content to just enjoy life as it comes to them.  She is my role model.

I found another idea to help with staying in the moment on Pinterest: the 5-year journal.  There are printed/bound versions for sale at your local bookshop, or on Amazon, but I just opened a Word document.  For reflective sorts of things I generally prefer to get myself a nice pen and write by hand, but I want the opportunity to keep it going for more than 5 years, so a Word doc seemed to make more sense.  This is not pour-out-your-heart journaling.  Simply jot down something of note from that day, and move on.  I miss a day here and there but just fill in as I go.  I've been mostly consistent about it, and I look forward to being able to see the same date a few years in retrospect.


Now, the tools.

A website I'm loving right now is Be More With Less, and the associated Project 333.  These help to re-focus on what's important (hint: it's not stuff).

I'm also making my way through the Unraveling the Year Ahead 2013 Workbook.  I'm taking much longer than the recommended hour with it but one of my personal lessons learned is to take things at my own pace, so I'm okay with that.

A friend just sent me this NYT article while I was in the process of writing this.  Self-reflection is the secret ingredient to success.


Then, the influence.

As I get older, I'm learning more and more how important it is to surround myself with positive people. This doesn't mean your friends aren't allowed to tell you about the awful day they had, but overall, I'm trying to have more positive people around me.

The flipside of this is to also attempt to BE a positive influence!

Some bloggers and their blogs I've found helpful include:
Cassie at Back to Her Roots (Loosely a healthy lifestyle blog, but pretty hard to categorize.)
Carol and Kathryn at In Pursuit of Pretty Things (These lovely ladies went to my high school before my time, so we are acquaintances in real life, but I think I'd like them even if that weren't the case. They manage to strike a difficult balance between writing about fashion and similar forms of expression while being wonderfully intelligent and thoughtful about the big picture in the process.)
Kimberly at Poor Girl Eats Well (I like to eat, and she's got budget-friendly recipes that taste great and are often in smaller single-person-worthy portions (read: not a 6 quart crock pot recipe, not that there's anything wrong with that).  She's also had her fair share of ups and downs but (at least publicly) seems to always manage to land on her feet.)

And don't forget TED talks!  If you haven't before, do yourself a favor and set aside an hour or so, and watch a few of these.  They're typically 15-20 minutes long, but they are pretty much like Lays potato chips and you can't watch just one.  Whatever you're interested in, it's here.  You will walk away inspired, I promise.


Finally, the action.

Ah yes, action.  This is the part I really struggle with.  I get so excited and have so many ideas that I don't even know where to start.  I've always been prone to analysis paralysis, but all this deliberation is really kicking it into high gear.  The only thing that seems to help me is to take a break from looking at the big picture and just do ONE thing to move forward.  I just keep reminding myself that one thing every day has a snowball effect towards my goals.

So that's what I'm working on in 2013.  =)  What about you?  What have you found to be especially helpful or inspirational in achieving your goals and resolutions?

Multi-purpose Barrier Balm

I'm having what I hope to be "just" a serious allergy attack today and not a cold, so a quick post...

Since today's sneeze-fest caught me off guard while I was out and about, I was forced to use restaurant napkins and bathroom paper towels instead of much softer tissue.  Suffice it to say, my nose is a wreck!  No picture necessary, you know what I'm talking about...

Fortunately, I have Certified Organic Barrier Balm on hand!

Barrier Balm has many uses

This stuff was designed to protect baby's bum from diaper rash, but it is really so much more.  I personally bought it to help with any chafing and blisters from running.  Turns out, it is just what the doctor ordered when I got home today with a raw nose!

What items to you keep around the house that serve multiple purposes?

Christmas is coming!

WOW!  I blinked and the holidays are upon us!  I've been focusing on spreading the word about Miessence offline and I almost forgot to tell you all about a great product Miessence has especially for the Christmas season: Certified Organic Darling Salt Glow!

Those of us in the USA may think, "Darling Salt Glow, what a 'darling' name for the holidays!" but this product is actually named for an important geographic feature in Miessence's home turf of Australia.  The Murray-Darling Basin contains saline aquifers that have been dormant for thousands of years.  This product is produced using salt harvested from the Murray-Darling Basin, thus reducing massive salinity problems that have arisen over the years.  This problem for Australia's environment and economy cannot be understated, and by purchasing this product you are helping alleviate excess salinity.

So that's the good news...the bad news is that you only have a short time left to order this product, which is in very limited quantities and any others you may plan to give as gifts!  Due to the way the weekends fall this year, you actually need to order by TOMORROW, December 7th, 2012, in order to be guaranteed delivery by Christmas!  Of course, there is the possibility that by ordering later, you'll get your gifts in time, but you know how things go this time of year!  

But there's actually more good news...coming early next year we will see the launch of the Miessence Foundation.  The foundation will focus on environmental causes.  Stay tuned for more details!

A brief note on reading ingredient labels.

Remember this?

While Breyer's was certainly on to something, I do want to point out that simply not being able to pronounce an ingredient is not immediate cause for avoiding it.  Particularly when reading labels for products that contain many herbal ingredients, you're going to be seeing a lot of Latin that you may not understand.  And that's (usually) okay.

Take my favorite Miessence product, the Rejuvenating Skin Conditioner, for example.  If the label didn't list the herbal ingredients by their English names as well, the only things I would understand are Aloe and Aqua.  Many toothpastes and deodorants, both traditional formulations and more natural ones, include sodium bicarbonate, often listed as bicarb (of) soda in Commonwealth countries, but this is just plain old baking soda.  Sometimes a little biology or chemistry is required to understand the labels, and that's okay.

It is VERY important to be an informed consumer.  If you don't know what something is that is in one of your products, whether it is food, skin care, hair care, or anything else, look it up!  We are all busy people, I know, but the Internet has made this SO easy that there's really almost no excuse anymore.  A simple search will give a good sense of whether an ingredient is generally considered safe or not.  It takes about 15 seconds to get an idea, and if you are interested you can spend more time delving into the details.  Consumers becoming informed and knowledgeable is also what leads to businesses pushing for better, safer products. 

And if you aren't sure, ask me!  I can't promise that I will know the answer right away, but I would be honored if you would trust me to look into a specific ingredient for you.  We're all in this together, right?

Hall of Shame: Propylene Glycol

Our lead off Hall of Shame baddie ingredient is one that's going to sort of ease us into it.  I don't want to scare you all off SO badly right off the bat, and propylene glycol is a toxic ingredient that is a little bit "less" toxic than some others.

Propylene glycol is found in SO MANY personal care products.  Most commonly deodorant, but also hair colorants, moisturizers, anti-aging treatments, pharmaceuticals, and artificial smoke/fog, to name a few.  The Environmental Working Groups has over 5500 products listed that include propylene glycol.

What is this stuff?  Well, like any other chemical ending in "ol," it is an alcohol, which is an organic compound (a molecule containing carbon, not a large farm with a bunch of compost piles) that contains a "hydroxyl functional group" (an oxygen atom bound to a hydrogen atom, or -OH).  Aren't you glad you skipped organic chemistry?  It is used a humectant, meaning that it draws moisture to itself, and thus whatever surface it is applied to.  It is also known as a "penetration enhancer," and not in a good way!  This is where propylene glycol's safety rating on the Skin Deep Database gets a little confusing...in and of itself, it's really not that bad, so it gets a 3.  But it paves the way for other chemicals to more easily get through your skin's barrier and into your bloodstream.  It's the gateway drug of cosmetic ingredients, if you will.

Propylene glycol isn't going to give you cancer (that we know of).  It's direct safety issues are pretty minimal, and are mostly related to being an irritant, but it can also cause some internal organ problems with your kidneys or liver (the organs that clean and filter your insides).  Some people are allergic to it.  The question arises when wondering what else it is letting into your system. 

There are many scholarly articles online about propylene glycol and its safety.  Unfortunately, most of them are .pdf links and are therefore difficult for me to link you to, but I've gone ahead and done the search for you here.

Oh, one other use of propylene glycol is as a viscosity stabilizer.  It keeps products a constant viscosity at a wide range of temperatures.  This property also comes in handy in it's main non-cosmetic use--a "less toxic" form of antifreeze.  Food for thought.

Non-toxic alternative ingredients to propylene glycol range far and wide.  This is because of the many different uses.  For example, if propylene glycol is used as a solid deodorant base, one might look for a roll-on that does not require a solid base.  If it is used as an emollient, you might see jojoba oil, almond oil, or glycerin instead.  Having said that, the average consumer is probably not likely to know what purpose the inclusion of propylene glycol in a product's formulation serves.  I say, just avoid the stuff entirely and cross it off your list of things to worry about!