Top 3 Essential Oils to Have in Your Medicine Cabinet

Essential oils are great for a number of applications. They can be used for everything from warding off bugs to perfumery to antiseptic treatments. Below is my favorite list of essential oils to have on hand and why. 1. Lavender Oil My favorite is Hungarian lavender since its scent is more soft and floral rather than the medicinal scent of French lavender. Uses: a. Makes a great room deodorizer when mixed half and half with vodka. b. Perfect for treating shingles. Helps prevent the spread of the lesions and heal existing ones. c. Helps relieve tension and promote sleepiness if put on the bottom of feet. d. Apply neat to acne to lessen the length of the outbreak. e. Make sachets with dried flowers and a few drops of lavender oil and hang in the closet to ward of bugs and moths. 2. Eucalyptus Oil Uses: a. Apply neat to bottom of feet to relieve evening coughing and to break up phlegm in the lungs. b. You can gargle with warm water and a few drops of eucalyptus oil to treat sore throat. c. Apply neat to skin infections or abrasions as it has great germicidal properties. 3. Tea Tree Oil Uses: a. A common acne treatment, you can mix this not so great smelling oil with lavender oil to make a nice skin tonic. Add the mix to olive oil for a night time moisturizer and watch much of the acne start to fade away. Even if you have oily skin, this helps reduce the output of your pores and treats the acne with nourishing olive oil instead of the falsehood that you need to dry it out. b. Great for treating fungus, anything from athletes foot to ringworm to certain yeasts. c. Using soap with tea tree oil can help curb body odor. For more essential oil uses try visiting Netherfield.For purchasing, our favorite is Bramble Berry.

When Handmade Soap is Not Better

Hi Soaperific fans. I've been tooling around the internet on lots of soap sites checking out the awesome wares of the talented people I share the industry with. There are some really amazing soaps and soap makers out there. One thing bothered me though. Often I saw "all natural" advertised, but when I looked at the ingredient list there were chemicals like sodium laureth sulfate (not to be confused with sodium lauryl sulfoacetate)and diazolidinyl urea. The FDA deems these chemicals as GRAS (generally recognized as safe), but the EWG says they are high on the list of harmful ingredients. I don't agree with everything the EWG stands for. In fact most of the time I think they are eccentric and one sided in their view. It has been argued that all things are bad if you use too much of it. You can make your own decisions about the products you use, but consider this. Let's say, your shampoo has 20 ingredients and 19 of those ingredients are on the EWG's list of top carcinogens, you'd probably look for another brand right? People look for natural products because they don't want the garbage peddled in the main stream. So maybe its just me being...Well, me, but I really get irked when I see "all natural" on a product that contains even fragrance oil. Fragrance oil in my opinion is safe for the most part, if its phthalate free, but natural it is not. If there was one good thing the EWG is wonderful for, I would say it is the availability of Skin Deep. This site can be used by anyone to find the danger level of any one ingredient. I use it frequently when trying to decide what to use in my soap. The one thing they stink at is this campaign of trying to get everything in a soap bar listed on the label. What I mean is, if there is water in a soap (which there is) they want the water analyzed and each micro ingredient in the water listed on the label. This would make most labels so long that it would take a few pages of chatter that no one would care to read because it would be so long, but I digress. Bottom line: Read the labels...for now anyway. Make sure the basic ingredients suit your needs and don't believe someone when they say something is "all natural" when its not.

Updating The Blog

So I'm in the process of revamping the blog. If it looks weird its not your eyes. The old template worked well with the placement of certain...words, so now I'm reorganizing and in the process losing a bit of quality until I have it right. All the older posts will be wonky, but the new posts should look right.