Recipes for Natural Beauty

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Amazon rating of 3.5 out of 5, Amazon sales rank: 224448

Recipes for Natural Beauty provides step-by-step instructions for making the most of nature's bounty. Here, women will learn how to improve skin tone, erase wrinkles, and bring out healthy, shiny hair, all with homemade recipes using natural ingredients that can be found at the local supermarket. What's more, these recipes cost a fraction of the price of commercial cosmetics.

Recipes for Natural Beauty is ideal for anyone who has allergies or very sensitive skin, or for anyone who prefers using pure and natural products. Ingredients such as avocados, cucumbers, lemons, honey, and oatmeal give women absolute control over what they use on their bodies.

At-a-glance charts detail the contents of each easy-to-prepare recipe and provide suggestions for alternative ingredients. This valuable reference also contains useful daily and weekly planners to help readers maintain their beauty regimen. From head to toe, Recipes for Natural Beauty will help any woman feel better about herself and the environment.

Reader Reviews:

The only reason I keep from making this a 5 star is that many of the recipes call for a base shampoo or base lotion, rather than giving ingredients all from scratch - and in the case of the lotions, they provide no alternative to lanolin (I'm vegetarian and have ethical issues using slaughterhouse by-products). But, apart from those minor tid-bits - the rest of the book is fabulous! Very detailed instructions on how to put everything together, as well as providing information on What parts of the ingredients act as a natural preservative. Also had some good info for the storing of items. All in all, I am very pleased with this book and cannot wait to try out some of the recipes. (I'd tried some recipes for natural hair care I'd found online, but was disappointed with the results - from the looks of the info in here I don't think I will be with these!)
Another good thing about the book - is it makes it clear that these are guidelines, and you can experiment around with the amounts of ingredients as well as the ingredients themselves - so, with a little research I should be able to find a substitute for lanolin so I can make my own lotions. (Their recipe for a moisture bar is pretty awesome - and should work well in place of lotion anyway!)


I live in the Chicago-land area & many of these ingredients are very difficult to find. Unless you are prepared to send away to Canada or Britain to aquire some of the ingredients, give this a pass. The vast majority of recipes contain at least 1 item that I cannot purchase locally. When I did gather the items together, the recipes are very easy to work & have been very pleasant to use. I have found that the ingredients & recipes in Jeanne Rose's "Kitchen Cosmetics" easier to aquire & just as easy to assemble & use.I liked reading the recipes in this book. Many of the ingredients are not too difficult to find.

The reason I only gave this book a 3 however is that it is not specific enough on storage. There is a little blurb on page 12 that talks about preferred message of storage. However, I wanted more specific details on storage and shelf life to be included with each recipe. This kind of thing is important for novices to know so they know how much of certain ingredients is "safe" to purchase at any given time.The recipes for which I was able to find the ingredients: lotion, nail care cream, exfoliator were absolutely supreme--wonderful for my very dry skin. Some of the recipes call for tintures and flowers which I couldn't find in my local health food store. It would have been helpful if the book had given Internet or mail-order sources for some of the ingredients. Instead, the recipes say to use the ingredient if you can find it--not much help--and they don't say what to do it you can't. But given my sucess with what I have so far I will continue to search out other ingredients.This book is absolutly fabulous its really informative with lots of colored photos. With lots of solutions to your beauty problems like tired eyes and perfumes, hair etc.. I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in beauty.
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