We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Lotions

OK, so Christmas is drawing nearer every day, every moment. You might have some people on your gift list who seem to have everything. You might go into a luscious-smelling lotion store and view the displays so beautifully assembled and think, “That’s it! It looks beautiful. It smells beautiful. And who doesn’t need lotions?” 

Answer: the person you’re buying it for.

I’m talking toxins here. They are literally all around us. They’re in our produce, our grain-fed beef, and our caged poultry. Our pharmaceuticals are teeming with them. They’re in our cleaning products and in the air we breathe. When you think about the fluoride instilled in many of our cities’ water systems, you realize that they’re even in our tap water. And they’re in almost every lotion, shampoo, soap, and cosmetic we pick up, too.

Never worried about toxins applied to the body before? Me neither, until recently.

I learned that our topical products look good, smell good, and have good texture but that it’s the toxins that cause this. Manufacturers know we like this so they insert toxins such as PEGs so that the ingredients like oil and water will stay mixed and will be reliable. I learned that these products actually dry our skin and hair out by causing our cells to put up shields to protect against their toxic effects.

The more we burden your bodies with toxins, the harder our organs like the liver have to fight to process them. The harder it works the more tired and sluggish it becomes. In its overwhelmed state, it becomes desperate. Rather than flushing the toxins out, it wraps them safely in fat cells and stores them away—in our hips, thighs, and abdomens. Yuck.

Anything we can do to lighten our toxic load brings us that much closer to living a highly functioning, efficient, and balanced life. 

We can buy organic produce, grass-fed beef, and free-range poultry. We can take only those pharmaceuticals that we must have in order to function and work with our health care professionals to find more natural alternatives. We can drink filtered water. We can install air purifiers and clean our homes with things like lemon juice. But what about the stuff we put on our bodies, like lotions, shampoos, soaps, and cosmetics?

In a nutshell, when it comes to body stuff, look at the ingredients label. If you can’t pronounce an ingredient and don’t know what it is or what it does, it’s probably a toxin. PEGs are the worst, but there are so many others.

Lotions: I use sweet almond oil (about a nickel size pool in the palm of my hand) with three to four drops of my essential oil of choice and apply it to one leg, heel, and foot after a shower; I repeat on the other leg. An eight-ounce bottle of the almond oil seems to last forever, and you can imagine how long the essential oils last using just three or four drops at a time. 

Shampoos: You have to look, but you can find companies that specialize in completely non-toxic shampoos. I have been afraid to do this because I so love my shampoo, but I found an all-natural recipe online that just might be worth a try:

• Mix one part baking soda to three parts water in a squirt bottle. Squeeze onto your scalp (not all your hair) and massage in for several seconds. Leave on your scalp for one to three minutes before rinsing thoroughly.

• In another squirt bottle, mix one part organic white vinegar to four parts water. Feel free to add essential oils or herbs. (One writer said she added one cinnamon stick and one-half teaspoon vanilla, explaining that it masks the vinegar smell.) This second treatment goes on all of your hair, leaving it on for several seconds before rinsing.

I’ll let you know if I try it and what I think of it, and I’d love to hear if you get up the nerve.

Soaps: I use Dead Sea Mineral Soap by One With Nature as my body wash, and I can pronounce every ingredient! A seven-ounce bar will run you between four and five dollars, but it’s triple-milled, and I swear one bar lasts me a couple of months. I keep it outside of the shower when I’m not using it so that other people’s shower water doesn’t break it down.

Cosmetics: Again, I’m a chicken on going outside of the norm here, so I have nothing to offer you. I searched online for certified toxin free cosmetics, though, and accrued nearly a million hits. So they’re out there! If anyone has any first-hand knowledge, I’d love to hear about it.

Sorry to burst your bubble on the gift idea that you thought was so great, but I guess you’ll just have to keep looking!

Enjoy your day. Enjoy this blog.