“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” - Hippocrates

Natural Skin Care Tips, Remedies and Recipes using Everyday Ingredients

The Secret to a Beautiful Skin

Natural skin care means putting ingredients on your face that you would probably eat; honey, cream, milk, fruit, lemon juice...I think you get the idea. I don't know too many commercial face creams that I would like to eat!

Having a beautiful skin needs 2 things:

• A good diet
• Regular bowel movements

Everyone has the power within them to have beautiful skin. Natural skin care should be a daily priority and we will not only show you how, but also give you a complexion diet so that you will be eating the right foods that will give you a lovely complexion.

After that you need to do 4 things to your skin:

• Clean
• Tone
• Nourish
• Protect

And your skin care routine should be in the morning:

• clean
  
• tone
• protect

And in the evening your skin care routine should be:

• clean
• tone
• nourish
  

Natural Skin Care from your Pantries

Most ingredients for natural skin care can be found, not as you might expect from drug stores, but in the kitchen. Olive oil, lemon juice, oatmeal, cream, eggs and garden herbs are the basis for many wonderful beauty treatments to keep your skin soft and beautiful.

However, there is more to applying products to your face in order to have a nice skin. Fresh air, exercise and a healthy diet are all important. However, here's one beauty tip that few people know about. And surprisingly, it has to do with lemons. Who would have thought?

Natural Skin Care Tips to having a Beautiful Skin

The secret to having a beautiful skin is knowing that in its normal, healthy condition it is slightly acid. In other words, for a skin to be beautiful in texture, clear and smooth then it has to maintain its acidic levels.

Unfortunately, we often interfere with the natural state of our skin by not using the right cleansers. We end up upsetting the natural pH balance.

Washing your face with soap and water will result in an alkaline effect, rather than a slightly acid effect which is what you are after. Even many commercial face creams will have a slightly alkaline reaction. Not only that, but these creams leave a film build-up over time.

There is a natural remedy for this - and this is adding either lemon juice or apple cider vinegar to your creams and rinsing water. The juice of fresh lemons contains one of the same acids found in normal, healthy skin cells, and that is ascorbic acid, commonly known as Vitamin C.

If you are going to add lemon juice to your creams make sure that you add 1 teaspoon to every 2 ounces of cream. When you rinse your face use the juice of half a lemon in the bowl. This is all you need to balance out the alkaline properties and make your skin slightly acidic for a perfect pH level.

To prevent your pores from getting clogged up with make-up residue after you have removed it, can also be removed by rinsing your face in lemon water. I think you will agree that lemon juice really is a super homemade facial cleanser. And when you think how easy it is to get lemons, this is a simple beauty tip you can't ignore.

A Good Beauty Routine for your Face

Every Morning: Wash your face with warm water, neutral soap and almond meal. The almond meal acts as a very gentle exfoliate that you can use daily. Rinse with cold water that has had a half a lemon squeezed into it. You will find that this will leave your face soft and super clean. Tone and put on a sunscreen.

Every Evening: Wash your face with warm water, neutral soap  and almond meal. After cleaning and removing any traces of makeup. After toning you can now add your face cream that has had the lemon juice added directly to it.

You might find that there may be very slight signs of facial peeling, however, this is a good sign as it means that the lemon juice is doing its job. Within 2 weeks of following this natural beauty treatment you will have a beautiful complexion.

Honey is also one of the best natural skin care ingredients. Using it as a simple face mask you can just wash your face with warm water and while it is still wet place some honey onto the face. If you have an oily skin add a few drops of lemon juice to the mixture. Leave of for 20 minutes before rinsing off.

Thorough cleaning is the key - a facial steam once a week is also advisable, unless your skin is very dry, then once every 3 weeks would be better.

Natural Skin Care and Homemade Facial Products

• Homemade facial masks can be made with a variety of ingredients. Eggs, oatmeal, honey, cream, and various fruits can be used to make some wonderful home facials.
• Homemade moisturizers can be made with some wonderful natural products, leaving you with a great product for half the cost!
  

Natural Skin Care using Fruit on your Face

• All citrus fruits are toning, astringent and antiseptic
• Grapes and pears nourish the skin
• Apples and cucumbers soften the skin and reduce oiliness
• Peaches, apricots and watermelon all refine coarse skin
• Bananas and kiwifruit * soften and smooth
• Avocado is a wonderful home remedy for dry skin
• Tomato juice is great for oily skins
• Strawberries moisturize  and tone the face

* When using Chinese gooseberries, commonly known as Kiwi fruit, peel before using never use on sensitive skins.

If you are still not convinced about why you should put natural products on your face then see this infographic on 12 toxic ingredients found in skin care products.

The Complexion Diet for Natural Skin Care

Our skins are fed from our bloodstreams. And to have a good skin the bloodstream needs to be fed certain Vitamins and minerals that come from our food.

• calcium
• sulphur
• iron
• silicon
• iodine
• Vitamins A, C, D
• All of the Vitamin B family

The following diet will feed your bloodstream with the right foods to give you a beautiful skin. However, you need to stay on the diet for 30 days to see the benefits. Make sure that you get some sunshine and some exercise on daily basis and empty your bowels at least once day.

Breakfast:

• Choice of stewed apricots, prunes or raisins with a little honey
• If you are not on one of the natural weight loss diets then you can have a bowl of cooked oats and milk too. No sugar, just honey
• A glass of butter milk
  
• Twice a week., at 3 day intervals, replace the stewed fruit with a glass of orange juice

Mid-Morning:

• Juice up some spinach and parsley. Drink 4 oz spinach juice, with 2 oz parsley juice, with a dash of lemon juice. Drink straight away. Never make more than you will be drinking over a 10 hour period.

Lunch:

• Vegetable broth or tomato juice (alternate these over the days)
  
• Either a raw vegetable salad using vegetables such as raw cabbage, celery, carrots, and lots of green leafy salads, tomatoes and cucumbers
• If you don't have a cereal like oats in the morning, then have a baked potato, or a slice of whole wheat bread or some brown rice, with a little bit of butter on the potato and bread.
• Dessert can be stewed apricots, pears or a piece of fruit
• A cup of strawberry tea

Mid-Afternoon:

• A cocktail of 2 ounces of beet juice to 3 ounces of grapefruit juice. You can alternate this with a glass of fresh pineapple juice

Dinner:

• Tomato juice or vegetable broth
• Raw vegetable salad as above with either lemon juice or orange juice as a dressing. You can also add shredded raw beetroot to these salads as well
• 2 different types of vegetables steamed with no butter, but a little salt. Use plenty of carrots, celery and cabbage, preferably raw
• Eat meat only 3 times a week and only lamb and grass-fed beef. Have it broiled or grilled, not fried and cut away all the extra fat
• Dessert of raw acid fruit; pineapple, grapefruit, oranges, strawberries, sour apples
• A cup of strawberry tea
  

Recipe for Vegetable Broth:

2 cups finely chopped vegetables using carrots, celery, spinach, parsley, tomatoes, okra, but no cabbage or potato. Add 2 quarts of water and boil for 12 minutes. Strain and season with salt and a non-meat flavoring. You can make enough for 2 days at a time.

We hope that by following the natural skin care routine and using the complexion diet good skin will soon be yours!

Where to Go Next

By Kathryn Bax

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