Natural Beauty Products to Suit Your Age

If you are a teenager or a forty-something plus, your skin needs extra-special care. Follow these recipes using natural oils to give your skin V.I.P. treatment, whatever your age.

Hormones – We can’t do without them, but they send skin into turmoil, especially in teenage years and around menopause. When we’re in our teens, and sometimes into our twenties, hormones send oil glands into overdrive, triggering overproduction and resulting in shine, pimples, and spots. The conventional beauty industry sells hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of “skin-stripping” cosmetics each year -which all too often worsen the problem they are intended to cure. The more oil that is stripped away, the more skin tries to rebalance itself, by producing even more oil.

How to beat hormones
Instead of continuing this cycle, your skin regime should become simpler in order to deal with the problems. In addition, there are some trouble-shooting natural remedies to help calm and soothe troubled skin.

Mature skin, meanwhile, becomes drier and more papery as estrogen production slows down. It develops crepiness and wrinkles, because the skin produces less of the lubricating oil that is the curse of so many teenagers. Added to this, the barrier function -the protective role of skin – becomes less effective with age; as skin becomes thinner, it is easier for moisture to escape. That is why dry skin is increasingly a problem as we age.

The anti-aging skincare industry is worth millions if not billions of dollars. However, it will be years before the long-term effects of some of the ingredients, for instance, fruit acids (which work by exfoliating the skin’s top layers, on a daily basis), are seen and truly understood. Will these anti-aging preparations actually speed up the march of time, or will they turn back the clock as promised? So far, nobody knows. But certainly, the organic beauty world has plenty of natural anti-agers to help skin retain its youthful glow – such as frankincense oil.

Facial oil for oily skin

• 1/4 cup (50 ml) grapeseed oil
• 2 tbs jojoba oil
• 8 drops cedarwood oil
• 10 drops lemon oil
• 5 drops ylang-ylang oil

Mix all the oils. Then tie your hair off your face, and with clean hands, massage the oil into the skin. This blend will help regulate the skin’s natural oil production.

Oil for problem skin

• 1/4 cup (50 ml) apricot oil
• 10 drops lemon oil
• 10 drops cypress oil
• 5 drops lavender oil

Combine the oils and massage well into the area of lymph glands (down both sides of the neck), the sinus area, and the forehead. Pouring oil on troubled skin – in which oil production is already in overdrive – might not sound logical, but if you persist with daily treatments using this treatment oil for acne, you should see benefits. (It is possible that the oil tricks the skin into believing it has produced enough oil and so slows down production.)

Replenishing neck and eye oil for mature skin

• 1-1/2 tsp glycerin
• 1/4 cup (50 ml) apricot kernel oil
• 30 drops jojoba oil
• 3 drops neroli oil
• 2 drops ylang-ylang oil
• 2 drops frankincense oil

Combine all the oils and keep in a dark glass jar with a dropper top. Massage a single drop into the area of the orbital bone around the eye at night; use more generously on the neck area.