Apologies this is woefully late but life has finally settled back to reality after the wedding!

This months beauty box is another amazing box and contained the following:-



PHB Aloe Vera Skin Heal Gel
I've always wanted to try this and I'm so glad it appeared in my box! This is a cooling and soothing gel that sinks in quickly and really does feel nourishing and soothing.

Foa Green Bath Potion 
I really like the idea of these one use bottles and this smells amazing! The peppermint and fennel scent is really invigorating but isn't for the faint hearted!

Madara SOS Instant Moisture and Radiance Hydra Mask
This is a pink mask that works to rehydrate your skin. I haven't tried this yet as my skin has been quite congested but its gone away for when winter really kicks in!

Humble Sweet Pea and Verbena Hand Cream
This sunk in really quickly and smells quite floral and delicate.

Ooh! Argan Moisture Retention Face Oil
This is a mini bottle of organ oil to help the skin retain moisture, this will be prefect for use over the next few months to combat central heating!



This was another great box from Love Lula and I'm excited to see what they come up with for next month as the past few months boxes have been heir best yet!

Today I thought I'd write about one of my favourite magazines at the moment, The Simple Things.

I take one pill a day as soon as I see people around me sniffling to hopefully get my immune system up enough to stop me getting it. If that fails, I take a dose of echinacea whenever I take conventional medicine. It makes it easy to remember and if I am needing conventional medicine, I figure I should be giving my immune system a helping hand, not just masking symptoms. 

This week has been Organic Beauty Week and beauty products made by brands who have been certified by organisations like the Soil Association have been promoted.


I've found natural products are undoubtably better for my skin and it's great that they get mainstream press one week a year but it's important to remember that these certifications are still limited and have their own pitfalls you wouldn't expect.



To be certified, brands have to meet a certain criteria for how much of the product is organically grown and then that ingredient also has its own certification to go through to certify it as organic. This is great and gives a reliable standard for consumers that we know can be trusted which is more than the spurious "natural" and "made with organic ingredients" gives us.

It's important to be aware of what this means for certain ingredients though. The main example is water. Water isn't organic and can never be certified organic. I'd still say its pretty natural and not full of anything we'd want to avoid.

The Soil Association's Health and Beauty Standards guidelines on product composition are:-

50.6.2
You may label your product as ‘organic’ if more than 95% of the ingredients are organically produced. You must calculate the organic percentage as follows:
For a formulator, this can be a nightmare if you want the product to be certified. If your product is water plus other ingredients, if you don't hit the 95%, your product isn't "organic" enough anymore which to me seems quite frankly ridiculous. To get round it, formulations use things like apple juice as a stand in for water as its relatively cheap and it can be certified organic so the product gets its certification.

To me, this seems absolutely pointless that someone had to grow apples, transport them, juice them etc just so it can be used in place of water. To me, this is a complete waste of food that could be eaten and the earth's resources.

Mineral make up also suffers the same fate. Minerals also can't be organic so unless you add more things that can be to make up the percentages, your mineral make up can't be classified as "organic". Again, theres nothing wrong with a high proportion of minerals and I cannot see a real justification for needing to add in more organic ingredients just to get a certificate if the product itself doesn't need it. Again, I see this as a complete waste of resources.


This is why it's so important to know and understand what it is you are buying, learn what these ingredients are and what these certifications mean and really think about what it means in the whole, rather than just my face cream is organic so its fine.

Its so important that you do your research on these issues and come up with your own informed opinion as to what you do and don't want to achieve, even if it goes against the grain like my ignoring organic certifications in favour of actually reading a label.

Thankfully, from 31st December 2016 this is changing and the relevant standards will be the COSMOS standards. These state that:-

By exception, for rinse-off products, non-emulsified aqueous products, and products with at least 80% minerals or ingredients of mineral origin, at least 10% of the total product must be organic. 

This is definitely a step in the right direction and a more common sense approach with these ingredients!

As I've been trying to get more Hygge in my life since January, I've noticed the movement appears to have completely exploded this summer and there's loads of books coming out on how to Hygge. 

Liz Earle's new book Skin was released a couple of weeks ago and it's a great read if you are looking for sensible, no nonsense tips on how to look after your skin. I've always loved Liz's books and I can't recommend them highly enough if you want to really understand how your skin works and how to properly look after your skin, without the nonsense the media churn out in an effort to get you to buy more products. I can honestly say that after following the advice of Liz and Caroline Hirons (read her blog here) my skin has never looked better and I've been doing less to it than I was before.

I used to really have issues with acne (especially those horrible red lingering mountains that never come to a proper head and just live on your face for weeks before disappearing) and from Liz I've learnt that actually using less in the way of products, looking at what I was eating and being careful of stress will do more than any product ever could.

The first part of the book is a 6 week plan to get you making small changes to your skincare routine gradually so you are more likely to keep on doing them.

The second half of the book then builds on the first and has some amazing recipes in it to get you feeding your skin from the inside. I can't wait to try the Cinnamon-toasted Oats with Yogurt and Summer Fruit recipe below, it looks absolutely delicious!