Calling those with Combination Skin

After doing a specific write-up for those with seriously dry skin, it seems only fair that we roll out a series of posts about the provisions we have for other skin types – ageing, oily, sensitive, but firstly  (drumroll please) combination skin.

I find that choosing a cream for combination skin can be a lucky dip, as some manufacturers see ‘combination’ as a license to make any kind of product they feel like. I have nonetheless persevered, and whittled two products out of the woodwork that are perfectly tailored to combination skin.

I should save the best until last, but I can’t wait, I’m putting it in here first – Lavera Mattifying Balance Cream with Organic Calendula andOrganic Ginger. It is The Winner. Calendula is an ages-old skin tonic, balancing and regenerating, and ginger is … well… usually it’s just my favourite flavour of tea, but here it brings its vitamin-rich zing to purify and stabilise your unstable skin. Advertised for ‘normal and combination skin’, this cream is pretty robust. You know you’ve used moisturiser, but it isn’t sticky on your skin, the texture is full and creamy but not rich or too thick. The perfect balance for a balancing cream. The scent is also good - fresh and natural, but not herby, minty, or rosy, as most of these things seem to be!

Next, a lovely niche product for sensitive combination skin. It can be so tricky if you tick two boxes to find a product tailored to you, but oh-so-thoughtful Weleda has, as ever, provided. Their Almond SoothingFacial Lotion (not to be confused with their cream of a similar name) is fragrance free and Natrue certified, so very gentle on delicate skin. It also stabilises the lipid mantle (i.e. sorts out the combination issues of combination skin) and, meanwhile, moisturises. If this matches your skin type, look no further.

That’s all for today, folks, but watch this space with baited breath if you have ageing, oily, or sensitive skin – you’re next!

(And if you just can’t wait, have a look for yourself at the moisturisers on our website, and drop me any questions about your skincare here.)

Super-intense moisturisers for seriously dry skin

Finding just the right moisturiser for your skin type is a real triumph, and one that makes a daily difference to how you look and feel. For those with skin prone to extreme dryness (particularly as we get older, and as the wintery winds approach to nip at our faces) this choice is even more important. I have lined up a few of our most powerful deep moisturising treatments to see how they compare.

 First in line is an oil treatment beloved by natural skin care purists. Rosa Mosqueta Rose Hip Seed Oil  is just what it says, 100% pure oil with nothing added. It is a really intense dose of skin nutrients for exceptionally dry skin, for use alongside your usual moisturiser (well, they say you should use it alongside their usual moisturiser, which is lovely and quite rich – Aubrey Organics Rose Moisturising Cream). As a bonus, you can warm the rosehip oil up and use it as a hair treatment. Lovely and natural and intense – simple is best!

If you find that your day cream is too light but you don’t want to be using your night cream all day, have a look at this Soil-Association-Certified Organic Avocado Replenishing Cream by Essential Care. The superfoody goodness of avocado is cold pressed with olives and shea butter into a veritable salad of nutritional delights for starving skin,  and dressed with sweet essential oils, into a cream that is anti-oxidant rich. This is the lightest of these creams - for dry skin, but not the driest. 

The crème de la crème of the face-crèmes is, in fact, not a crème at all, but rather a blend of oils – Organic Argan and Vitamin E Nourishing Serum. Oils are usually the most direct way to give your dry skin a good drenching. Here, organic argan oil is blended with sweet almond oil (my personal favourite for skin treatments, as I may have mentioned before…), and a healthy dose of Vitamin E, which has long reigned queen of the skin supplements. This oil smells delightful (I take secret sniffs of it from my desk as I write) and does wonders for the skin, however dry it may be.

A final tip - our real wonder-cream for dry skin all over the body (including the face) is Essential Care's Ultra Rich. This balm was originally formulated for those with eczema and dry skin conditions, so if you need something that really goes the extra mile, and is not just for the face, try this blend of shea butter, beeswax, and olive oil.

In conclusion – creams are all well and good for dry skin, even quite dry or pretty dry skin. But if you have really dry skin, or mature skin that needs something extra, then oils are the way to go. And if these ones don’t float your boat, you can see a few more here, or ask us about them here.

Finally, Shampoos for a Sensitive Soul (and Scalp)

It’s easy enough nowadays to find skincare products for sensitive skin – Logona FREE, Essential Care, but for some reason still hard to get hold of a good scalp-sensitive shampoo. I am presenting here a few that we have managed to find, which really clean your hair, really leave it feeling lovely, and are really sensitive to irritable skin.

A classic tactic for the more delicate-headed among us is to use a baby shampoo, so I have found the very best of these, an eco-friendly Baby Shampoo & Body Wash by Weleda. This, and their other baby products, are made with calendula, a traditional skin-soothing flower. It contains no synthetic fragrances, colours, or preservatives, so you can be pretty sure it won’t get your allergies tingling. Best of all, the very third ingredient is sweet almond oil, my personal favourite for gentle skin moisturising, so it softens your hair and skin as well as cleaning.

Lavera also do a Baby & Kinder Neutral shampoo. It doesn’t have the essential oil scents that Weleda use, but then that suits some people fine. It is BDIH certified (i.e. super incredibly extra pure). It’s a stripped-down simple product that gently and thoroughly gets the job done without any flowery fuss.

Next we have a product that is for not only delicate but ‘Extremelydry and sensitive skin’ – it is Barefoot SOS from Barefoot Botanicals – a range specially crafted to rescue you from dermatological emergencies. Their treatment shampoo packs a powerful punch – willow and chamomile botanical extracts soothe the scalp, while jojoba and evening primrose oil nourish it (double whammy). Just in case that doesn’t do the trick, they’ve poured vitamins A, E and B5 to give your hair and scalp a strengthening nutrient boost. It’s also scented with zingy rosemary and sweet lavender essential oils, and has a sister-product conditioner that is equally excellent. I am lost for words. This shampoo does everything.

Before you get too excited about Barefoot’s scalp-saving SOS shampoo, we have a final contender. Handmade in Suffolk, this shampoo was the very first one ever to receive Soil Association Organic Certification - it's Essential Care's Gentle Herb Shampoo. It comprises some botanicals that are found more in remedies than cosmetics, which heal and soothe a delicate scalp – aloe, nettle, chamomile, and horsetail. Lesser known in the world of shampoos, these botanicals in this expert formulation do a truly wonderful job of cleansing and calming. With no artificial anything, parabens, petrochemicals, or GM ingredients, it gets a shiny gold star for being uber-natural. And once you’ve used it a few times, you no longer need conditioner – it’s just that good for your hair.

So you had better make up your own mind, and it won’t be easy. I think for now I’ll go with Essential Care and their gentle herbs, for starters, and see what I feel like when that bottle’s empty! 

Connecting the chemicals in cosmetics to obesity

For the sake of our health and our weight, we’re used to carefully considering what we put in our mouths. What we aren’t so used to is choosing natural, organic cosmetics. We don’t give a thought to the products that we slather onto our skin, nails, and hair – products whose ingredients can be absorbed by, and accumulate in, our bodies.

Concern has been growing over the past few years about the link between chemicals in shampoo, body lotion, household cleaning products, and the bottles that they come in – and rising obesity. Studies such as those by Paula Baillie-Hamilton at Stirling University suggest that some of these chemicals can suppress the body’s production of adrenaline and dopamine, hormones that aid metabolism and weight loss.*  As these chemicals accumulate in our bodies, they can affect the hormonal balance, impairing the body’s ability to naturally monitor and maintain its own ideal weight.

Research has also been done at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York into some of these chemicals, specifically phthalates and Bisphenol-A (BPA). Studies on animals have shown these chemicals to depress testosterone levels, and to act in a similar way to oestrogen – both factors that have shown to be linked to weight gain in humans.**  Professor Philip Landrigan, who heads up this study, says that phthalates can be found in up to 70% of cosmetics. (You can read more about the dangers of phthalates in cosmetics on the Suvarna website here: http://www.suvarna.co.uk/phthalates-in-cosmetics.html)

More work in this area is accumulating, prompting calls for companies and legislation to limit what can be put in the products that are being absorbed into our bodies on a daily basis. In the meantime, we can all make sure that as well as eating healthy food, we take the time to choose cosmetics that do not endanger the health of our bodies, by going for natural, phthalate- and BPA-free, organic cosmetics.


* Laura Tuffrey, 12/01/12, ‘The Mother Who Exposed the Links Between Obesity and Common Chemicals’, in The Ecologist http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1191047/the_mother_who_exposed_the_links_between_obesity_and_common_chemicals.html

** Peta Bee, 11/07/2011, ‘Is your shampoo making you fat? The truth about “chemical calories” in beauty products’, in The Daily Mail 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2013283/Is-shampoo-making-FAT-The-truth-chemical-calories-beauty-products.html

Hair accessories, all new to Suvarna



Bright and breezy

Spring has sprung, and Suvarna is celebrating with scrunchies! Try gaudy floral or simple pastel, whatever takes your fancy.










To make more of a splash, try these scrumptious flowers.
They come in three different colours, each one textured
and layered and lovely.








Check out our entire and all-new range of hair accessories at http://www.suvarna.co.uk/hair-accessories.html

Fragrance - natural or artificial effects our health and lifestyle

Fragrance is an important part of our experience of living.  Our sense of smell is connected with emotion.  A smell can create a mood or evoke significant memories of a person, time or place which means something to us.


Inhaling artificial fragrance from our personal care products or cleaning products could be masking our natural sense of smell and affect our natural experience of the world.

A single word “Fragrance” denotes a load of chemicals
The single word "fragrance" on a cosmetic ingredients list - be it skin care  product, makeup,  or perfume  can mean a formula that comprises hundreds of chemicals many of which can get absorbed through your skin and get inside your body and cause health problems and allergies. Manufacturers are not legally bound to disclose the full ingredients of a fragrance because it is a secret brand formula.  So the consumer will never know what is in their product.

To avoid synthetic fragrance choose an organic natural brand.  Having a certification such as Soil Association, BDIH or Ecocert will ensure that it doesnt have synthetic fragrance.  At suvarna, of course, we don’t sell any products with synthetic fragrance, only natural fragrance from plant extracts and essential oils.

I feel it's absolutely unnecessary to create synthetic scent given the wealth of lovely fragrance available from nature from pure essential plant oils. Essential oils are more expensive than chemical fragrance which is a motivation to the profit driven chemical cosmetic manufacturers.

Unscented can mean extra chemicals added
Some petrochemical cosmetic products which are marketed as unscented can mean that they use a lot of chemical fragrance to mask the natural (or unnatural) scent of the other chemicals.  It may be advertised as a simple, gentle product but it is actually complicated to make something with no smell.

When natural organic cosmetics brands state unscented, on the other hand, this usually means it is without essential oils.

Perfume from essential oils creates a holistic effect
Since aromatherapy has become more mainstream many of us are aware that essential oils applied to the skin are absorbed in to the body and have powerful therapeutic properties. And we know how they can create a mood - relaxing, de-stressing. healing or stimulating effect.  Natural cosmetics with essential oils therefore give us more than superficial beauty and healthy skin but have a holistic therapeutic effect on the whole body, mind and emotions.

At Suvarna we sell totally natural organic perfumes and eau de toilettes from Farfalla, Lavera and Florascent.

www.suvarna.co.uk

New! Sante Goji Berry Moisturizing Day Cream

I tried this new day cream with organic goji berry and found it light and smooth in texture yet moisturising enough for dry skin.  It has a pleasant berry fragrance. 

The value of Goji berry extract is that it is rich in vitamins and minerals, antioxidant, moisturising and strengthening. This moisture cream  also contains  a host of other moisturising organic ingredents such as organic shea butter, passion flower oil, olive oil, organic aloe vera (soothing, moisturising). jojoba oil, almond oil: (nourishing, softening, soothing).

I love the packaging with a very pretty pink/purple tube with leaf design!

For more info and to purchase this product visit: http://www.suvarna.co.uk/moisturisersandnightcreams/organic-goji-daycream.html