Here’s a very simple, easy to make skin care product: body butter sticks and bars. All you need is oil and wax! For the winter, my favorite recipe uses 15% (by weight) beeswax and 85% coconut oil. Note that coconut oil has a room temperature melting point of about 75 °F, so [...]

Posts in this series on microbes: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
And now, I’m going to explain why I brought up the subject of microbes.
A large portion of my posts are dedicated to homemade, do-it-yourself crafts and necessities. I do it mostly to save money without sacrificing quality, the trade-off [...]

Preservatives, like disinfectants, inhibit microbrial growth. But their main purpose is to extend a product’s shelf life. In our fast-paced, industrialized world where we as consumers expect to get what we want and when we want with minimal effort, it seems reasonable that so many of our products contain preservatives. But just [...]

Green tea is a powerful anti-oxidant with many health benefits. Over the last decade, various forms of green tea have become increasingly popular in skin care products due to its healing properties. You see it in many anti-aging, damaged, and mature skin care products.
Green tea lotion is very easy to make, [...]

Common Sense Sun Care and Homemade Sunscreens – Now Available! Click here to purchase and automatically download the PDF. $18.
Year after year, new research and technologies unveil the latest findings related to sunscreen use and UV effects. Physicians, government regulators, manufacturers, and environmental groups all weigh in on the latest sunscreen debate. [...]

Knowing that regular zinc oxide was used as a sunscreen many decades ago just isn’t convincing enough to many people that it is an effective sunscreen. You want research, data, proof. I get it. Plain zinc oxide is not currently marketed as a sunscreen so there are no current data or research [...]

Before we talk about uva testing, let’s examine why we think uva protection is important and how that relates to sunscreen use.
UVA rays penetrate deeper into the skin layer than UVB rays. Excess exposure to UVA rays may cause premature skin aging, wrinkling, and cell damage and to a lesser degree than [...]

Update: Common Sense Sun Care and Homemade Sunscreens – Now Available! Click here to purchase and automatically download the PDF. $18.

A slight delay in launching the sunscreen report to answer an important question. I’m sure you are wondering…
How do you know your homemade sunscreen is effective if there are no testing and [...]

I’m working hard to complete my in-depth report on sunscreen. Lots of good stuff including recipes and sun care tips. And, it will cost much less than you’d spend on sunscreen this year. So, I won’t be posting much here until I finish, hopefully before the end of this month! There I [...]

Your first line of sun protection should not be sunscreen. It should be protective clothing. In recent years, we have seen an explosion of expensive high UPF rated sunwear. If you have minimum sewing skills, you can easily make your own rash guard.
Rash guard UV protective shirts are simply regular t-shirts or [...]