Homemade Beauty: 150 Simple Beauty Recipes Made from All-Natural Ingredients

150 all-natural skin, hair and body care recipes that are inexpensive, toxin-free, and easy for readers to make themselves.

Homemade Beauty is a beautifully packaged collection of 150 all-natural skin, hair and body care recipes. From turning blueberries into a lush detoxifying mask to fresh lemongrass into a non-toxic bug repellent, Homemade Beauty takes the ubiquitous eat-local, farm-to-table concept and brings it to the beauty category.

As reports on the dangers of chemicals in cosmetics become increasingly alarming and the aspiration to live a more natural life grows, many of us are eager to take beauty regimens into our own hands to ensure we are putting only the safest and most natural ingredients on our bodies. Commercially available organic beauty products are expensive, but they are easy and cheaper to make at home and most require 5 simple ingredients or less. Recipes like Almond Rose Body Lotion, Coconut Lavender Shampoo, and Brown Sugar Vanilla Scrub will enchant you with heady scents – and thrill you when you realize these pampering products take only 5 minutes to make!

Annie Strole is a makeup artist, natural beauty expert and contributing editor for style, beauty and DIY site Lovelyish.com. A lifelong luxury beauty product junkie and hippie-at-heart, Annie eventually began researching the ingredients of her beloved beauty potions out of curiosity. Not pleased with her findings of the effects of some particularly nasty ingredients, Annie decided to take beauty into her own hands by creating effective, all-natural beauty products at home using the freshest ingredients possible.

Welcome to your guide to all-natural, toxin-free beauty products that you can create easily at home. This may sound daunting to some, but making your own products is one of the most empowering ways to take your beauty and health into your own hands. Just because the beauty products in stores contain tons of ingredients with extremely long and complicated names doesn’t make all those chemicals necessary—don’t let them overwhelm you. Making beauty products is a lot easier than you’d think.

Some of those ingredients can even be harmful. Pthalates, sodium lauryl and sodium laureth sulfate, propylene glycol, polyethylene glycol and the infamous parabens are just a few common beauty product ingredients that have been reported to cause irritation, cancer, organ abnormalities, hormone disruption and sterility.

Now that that’s out of the way, for the majority of the book I want to focus on the enjoyable aspects of natural beauty rather than the disease-causing aspects of the unnatural variety. Hand-crafting your own all-natural beauty products is extremely satisfying and fun. If you love DIY, then I’m certain that you’ll enjoy creating some handmade beauty products. Additionally, making homemade beauty products is also a cost-effective and super thoughtful way of making gifts for friends and loved ones.

From the stance of a beauty professional, creating your own personalized homemade beauty products is a fantastic way to find solutions to problematic skin without blasting your face, hair and body with chemicals that may be detrimental down the line. I speak from experience.

After moving to New York from Texas, my skin had never looked worse. Stress, change of climate, change of water, pollution and who knows what else were clearly taking their toll, and my skin exacted its revenge with tons of huge, angry, inflamed zits. Of course, my first course of action was to evaluate my diet, up my water intake and be sure to be active and sleep well, but then I took a look at what I was putting on my skin. After some research I discovered my ordinary store-bought cleanser was mostly petroleum-based, preservative-filled garbage. I began researching more natural brands, and as I did that, I realized a lot of their active and most effective ingredients were those found in my kitchen. As a makeup artist and beauty addict, I’d always been interested in skin care, but once I embarked upon my natural skincare sleuthing, my interest turned to an obsession.

For my imbalanced, acned condition, a friend suggested I use raw apple cider vinegar as a toner after cleansing. I began seeing drastic improvement in my complexion, and started trusting all-natural ingredients to care for my skin. I also began using tea tree oil to zap away zits, and a lemon and honey concoction to decongest my pores (you can find the recipe for that in the Detoxifying section of the Skin chapter!). Day by day my skin was improving and eventually returned to a state of homeostasis.

I began to wonder what natural ingredients could do for my dry hair and body. Natural oils, fruits, yogurt and a number of other items found in my very own kitchen did a fantastic job of nourishing and hydrating my hair and skin. At this point I was hooked on educating myself about, and randomly slathering on, all types of edible ingredients.