We are just over a week into November and Christmas is just around the corner. Since I have been doing this blog, I have decided to make some Christmas presents for people. I shall start my search tomorrow to source out all the ingredients and accoutrement. I was looking online yesterday but I want to do a test batch first before I order a bunch of things that I am not sure I will need.
So what is it that I am reading that has gotten me convinced to make homemade creams and potions for my family? I have found a fantastic book called The Green Beauty Guide, by Julie Gabriel former beauty editor and registered nutrition specialist. It's a great read. She is very thorough explaining all the things we should be avoiding when we buy our cosmetic and why. She includes lots of scientific research and references. Also in her book is recipes and a whole chapter on baby care. The best part about about his book is, even though Julie clearly is a smart cookie and has done her research, her tone in the book is very approachable. She has produced a very positive guide, providing us with plenty of information to make good choices. She writes, "If you choose to pick just one piece of information from this book, make it this: anything you apply to your skin ends up inside your body just as if you had ingested it. So whenever you put something on your skin think: would I really want to eat this?" Bottom line is it's important to learn how to read the labels of the cosmetics we are using. I have been interested in this stuff for a while now, and even I find all those long words intimidating. Unless you are a chemistry major. Or, I know I will read the label and know something is bad but I couldn't exactly tell you why. So if you are like me and have no memory for those crazy chemical names then I highly recommend going to the ewg (environmental working group) cosmetic database http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ . Here you can look up every body care item in your bathroom. Each one is rated on a scale from 0-10. 0 being as natural as you can get and 10 being toxic waste (simile).
Here is another link to an article I found, it's worth a read. It's titled, '10 ways to if a product is (or isn't) natural', from the Huffington Post  http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fbeth-greer%2Fnatural-products-labels_b_1024143.html&h=zAQEG-KafAQExhxeEgQ6pTlgI0vfUrecQw0ayvwUtIx72uA
Stay tuned for my test batch pictures.

Happy (belated) Halloween! Hands down the best time of year. We get to play with costumes and eat candy...no matter what age. This is also the only day of the year where I would put mascara on my 2 and a half year old. She has strawberry blond hair so her beautiful long lashes are barely visible.  Even as I go to do it I pause, just for a moment. I am fairly conscious about my choice of cosmetics, so I know the ingredients in the mascara are natural, it has just been in my makeup kit for about a year now, which for cosmetics (I am learning) is too long.
Oh well, cuteness and convenience trumps possibly blinding my daughter with some bacterial infection. Sounds dramatic ...especially because us moms really do make these types of choices at least a hundred times a day. I want to be as informed as possible as I make these choices in the future and this is one of the million reasons I am writing this blog.