The biggest difference from between organic and chemical hair salons must be in their choice of hair dyes. Organic hair salons often use herbal dyes or henna hair dyes instead of chemical dyes. But even when you’re just going out for a regular hair cut the shampoos, conditioners and hair styling products can contain harsh chemicals that in the long run will dry out your hair and scalp and possibly even give you allergic reactions. Not to mention the fact that you would spend an hour in an environment where workers have to take out early retirement. Maybe.

Last Friday, I visited Big Hair Mama, an organic hair salon in Malmö, Sweden where I currenty live. This hair salon is extremely popular, I could only get a time over three weeks after booking. Big Hair Mama uses organic and natural brands in their shampoo and hair styling products, and as for hair dying they use herbal dyes and mineral pigments.Personally, I was only getting a plain hair cut, but I decided to try out this organic hair salon anyway to avoid being exposed to all those chemicals, with the added benefit of not being to blame for anyone’s asthma diagnosis.

The thing that surprised me the most about Big Hair Mama was how much it felt like a “regular” hair salon. I got my shampooing done, we looked in some hair style magazines, and afterward she used some hair styling products and blow dried my hair. The only thing that was different from before was that the products and the shampoo, which probably contained essential oils instead of synthetic perfume, smelled really nice! The service was very good and I really felt like the hairdresser was listening to what I wanted, at the same time as she came with her own proffessional opinions on it. This is something that I have found to be really rare so I was very happy with the process and result.

If any of my readers happens to live in or pass by Malmö I warmly recommend you visiting Big Hair Mama (after you visit me for a cup of coffee that is) for a hair cut or hair dye.

It’s this little guy.

I don’t know how many of you already use eyelash curlers. Some of you might have one lying in the back of your bathroom cupboard and never take it out even to look at. Many of you probably already use one on a daily basis. But did you ever consider the fact that an eyelash curler actually is a 100% natural way to make your eyes look larger and brighter? No need to worry about any kinds of harsh chemicals or long ingredient lists with words you don’t understand. Just curl up and look pretty.

For color, I personally just go with some eyeliner (when I wear makeup, that is). I use this homemade eyeliner that works great for me. I made one already three years ago and only now am I starting to run out! I don’t wear makeup every day but it’s still lasted for a very long time. To make a super simple eyeliner, you can grind some charcoal tablets, mix in a tiny amount of coconut oil and apply with an eyeliner brush. I haven’t tried this yet, but as soon as my current eyeliner is out, I’m definitely doing this! You can store the eyeliner in a glass jar for a year or more.

Here are some other cool and innovative ways of making your own eye makeup:

Youtube video: Use berries as makeup
Burn an almond – make eyeliner

These pill jars can be stacked on top of each other, giving you a perfect stack of all of your mineral makeup.

These tools can be super handy when you’re making stuff, or moving said stuff from one container to another.

Spray bottles are great for storing homemade facial toners, hairspray or perfume.

You can find travel kits in many different kinds of stores, some of which are kind of surprising. Try looking in department stores, dollar stores, clothing shops, interior design shops… You never know where you’re going to find the cutest and cheapest ones.

One thing you should be aware of is that plastic isn’t the best container for skin care products, or for anything really. Plastic always lets out a small amount of toxins and even though it in general is considered unharmful “for most individuals” the best option if you want to be certain that your products stay toxic-free is glass bottles, preferably dark ones as they increase the shelf life of many products.
Another side note – if you’re going off to buy some of Muji’s bottles, don’t be tempted by the “essential oils” they sell. These are actually not 100% essential oils, only essential oils mixed with some preservatives. If a bottle of essential oil doesn’t per se say “100% essential oil” and have the latin name on the label, there is cause to be careful.

It’s cocoa powder.

When using cocoa powder as a dry shampoo, the powder will suck in the excess grease from your scalp and your hair will look completely newly washed. Plus, it adds crazy amounts of body and makes your hair look amazing. All you need to do is rub some cocoa powder in your hair, run a boar bristle brush through it a couple of times and it’s going to look amazing! The application can be a bit messy sometimes but it really takes only a few seconds. Just take some in the palms of your hands and rub it in. Or you can just a large kabuki brush to apply it evenly over your scalp.

Washing your hair too often isn’t really good for your hair, as it strips out all the natural oils and prevents your scalp from producing more. Applying some cocoa powder between washes can help you prolong the times inbetween washes especially if you’re trying to get used to not washing your hair regularly.

Cocoa powder works best for redheads and people with brown hair. If you have light hair, there are a bunch of other powders you can try to get a similar effect. Try potato starch, finely ground oats, arrowroot or cornstarch.

Hanging jar shelf

Dictionary style transparent labels

1. Hanging jars shelf

This idea actually came from my grandfather. Who then passed in on to my father, who then… you know. Both my dad and my granddad have made these kinds of nifty shelves for their workshops to keep nails, nuts, bolts and whatever kinds of small objects they use for whatever they’re doing down there.

And that’s the great thing about this shelf. It can be used anywhere! I decided to keep some spices in it, but you can just as well use it in your bathroom for keeping hairbands and cotton balls, or in your work space to keep drawing pins and paperclips. Or why not a place to store your homemade beauty raw materials?

The idea is so easy – simply screw on some jars under your shelf. It looks pretty and it uses space that you normally wouldn’t use! When you need to use something, you simply twist the jar, and the lid will stay where it is under the shelf!

Unfortunately, I didn’t think of taking pictures of the process, but it’s really simple.

Things you’ll need

1. A wooden shelf (or supplies for making one)
2. (Paint)
3. Some mason jars or glass jars with a metal lid
4. Screws (2 for each jar)

If you want to make the shelf from scratch, you can google around a bit on how to do that. We made this really simple one using a piece of wood and a couple of brackets.

If you already have a wooden shelf, this is even easier. Simply screw the lid on to a wooden shelf! The jars we used were two different kinds, old olive jars and old pesto jars. We placed the olive jars, which are a bit longer, on the second row so that the spices in that row were visible as well. We also painted the lids red, but that’s completely optional.

It’s a good thing to use at least two screws in each lid, other wise the lid might just go round and round when you’re trying to take the jar down.

And that’s it, basically! Now you can start filling your jars with anything you like looking at! And if you want to decorate the jars further, see here:

2. Transparent jar decoration labels

The other day, I came across these fantastic dictionary themed jar decorations that I, typography lover as I am, immediately fell for. She uses something called magic decal paper that gives you the possibility to move a picture straight to any surface and even leave it dishwasher proof. I wanted to try this out, however,  I’m cheap I didn’t have any of those supplies at hand. So I started to google around a bit to see if there are any cheaperalternative ways of doing this. I found out that a similar thing can be done simply using the plain transparent contact paper that you used to cover books in elementary school. However, the ink would take a good while to dry (up to three days!) and of course this would leave a transparent label on the jar, which you wouldn’t have with the magic decal paper.

So I went and bought some contact paper, cut out a couple of paper sized pieces and put them under a whole bunch of thick books (good thing I got some use for those) to straighten the paper out so it wouldn’t get stuck in the printer. I made some labels for the things I have in my jars, quite similar to the ones over at the magic hive (scroll down for free printables!). Then I tried printing my labels out on the contact paper.

The result was… not so good. The ink was uneven and, even after a couple of days, it hadn’t seemed to dry even a little bit. I realized I had to try some different printer settings to get as much ink as possible. I found some good instructions here. I noticed that my printer (canon pixma) had, for some reason, used color printing even though the labels were in black. This was the thing that made the biggest difference. I also used matte photo paper as the paper setting, and increased the black intensity. You’ll probably have to try this out for yourself with a few different settings until you find the best settings for your printer. After this, the result was a little bit better, however it was still a bit uneven, so I printed two copies – that way I could choose the label from each page that had the most black in it.

I let the ink dry for a few days again, and then glued them on to the jars.

The result was still far from perfect. I’m pretty sure these won’t last for any kind of washing, and like I said, the ink was quite uneven. But I decided to stick with these, considering that the price is only a fraction of what it would have cost to buy magic decal paper and waterslide decal paper. The contact paper I bought cost around 1,50€, so next to nothing, really.

The other problem was that I used food that in itself was quite dark and colorful, which made the text kind of hard to read, such as sunflower seeds and black lentils. In the tutorial I linked to above, she used mostly white or light colored things, which makes the text stand out in a whole different way.

Things you’ll need

1. Jars, and lots of ‘em
2. Contact paper
3. An inkjet printer (I can’t vouch for how this’ll work in a laser printer. Might be better, but it might also melt the contact paper and ruin the whole thing…… again, ask mr. Google!)
4. Scissors
5. Some labels

Play around with your printer’s settings until you find the settings that print with the most/blackest ink.
Print out jar labels (no need to mirror image). Let lie until they are completely dry
Cut out the labels and glue on to your jars.

I enclose the labels that I made, and you can choose for yourself if you want to use them with contact paper or if you want to follow the instructions at the magic hive. These labels work well for both cases, and you can combine them with the printables she’s made to get more options. You can even choose to print them on plain white printable labels.

Here are the labels!

Printable #1 Spaghetti,  sunflower seed, whole wheat, whole oats, sesame seeds, hazelnut, black/red/puy lentils, hemp flour, pumpkin seeds, rice. Size A4

Printable #2 – Tea and spices black/green/herbal/nettle/chamomile/oolong/rooibos/white tea, coffee, spices: allspice, basil, cloves, cumin, curry, mint, oregano, pepper, paprika, salt, thyme. Size A5

One of the spices we use most in our kitchen is turmeric after soy sauce and chili. We might even put turmeric in more dishes than salt and pepper. It’s just such a simple way of enhancing almost any flavor and you can hardly ever put too much of it.
Turmeric is also traditionally used in skin care in many asian cultures. In ayurvedic medicine, it’s used both as an anti-aging ingredient and agains acne and to soften the skin. It’s also supposed improve your tan and give the skin color a golden tone.

Previously, I have successfully made a simple turmeric face mask from Lisen Sundgren’s fantastic book Lisens indiska spa. This mask consists only of two ingredients: milk and turmeric. Simply take a couple of tablespoons of milk and add a pinch of turmeric, apply it to your face with a cotton ball and let sit on for 30 minutes. This was a great treat that left my face feeling amazingly soft and refreshed. I also tweaked the recipe a bit and used some thick turkish yogurth to make the mask more … masklike. For this I used:
2 tbs yogurt
1 tsp turmeric

But then came the day when I wanted to be real experimental. In general, I like experimental, and I encourage everyone to be experimental in skin care and in the kitchen as well as in life. But sometimes it can go wrong.
For this new face mask, I looked in my kitchen cabinets and in my bathroom and found a bunch of ingredients that are all great for the skin and that I figured coupldn’t go wrong. Turmeric, nutmeg, honey and castor oil. That’s simple enough, huh? I combined these ingredients without measuring (because, well, I rarely do) and ended up with a solid mixture that seemed nice enough. Lasse and I both covered our faces in it, and left it on for almost all of the new The Planet of the Apes-movie. It felt really nice.

Then, it was time to wash it off. So I went in to the bathroom and washed my face with hot water for a couple of minutes. Look up, and I look like this:

I kid you not. This is the “After” picture. The picture that should be all like oh-look-at-my-soft-pretty-acne-free-face turned out to be an oh-look-I-turned-into-one-of-the-Simpsons-picture.
As if this wasn’t enough, Lasse was wearing a white shirt at the time. (he shouldn’t have done that). We did try some eHow how to remove turmeric stains, which did lighten the stains but not remove them completely, and the shirt had to be thrown out.

In the end, we did manage to get rid of the yellow from our faces. Actually, what I found best was to take some more castor oil on a cotton pad and swipe it over my face. Which is really ironic, since my guess is it was the castor oil that made the turmeric stick to our faces. Still, the next day I was told that my eyebrows are yellow.

So what are the lessons learned?

1. If you’re making a turmeric face mask, stick to milk or yogurt
2. if you’re making a turmeric face mask (with milk or yogurt), don’t wear clothes that you are too fond off
3. If you want to dress up as a chicken, mix some turmeric with castor oil and honey
4. Experimenting is fun, but if you can, do it when you don’t have to go out the day after. Or the day after that

Now I want to hear all about your homemade beauty or kitchen failures! Share, share!

How much do you understand? And how much time are you willing to spend to understand?

The reason why I started making my own cosmetics is simple. It’s because I’m a control freak.

I suppose it’s no revolutionary in saying that I want to be in control of my own body. In fact, I’m pretty sure almost everyone of you would agree. But when you start thinking about it, this is easier said than done. Without starting to discuss feminist politics, let’s just focus on some more tangible issues. The food we eat, the hormonal contraceptives we use, even the clothes we wear affect us in ways that we often can not control ourselves. Not to mention the skin and hair care products we use. Lotions, perfumes, shampoos, sunscreens, lipsticks, antiperspirants, night cream, day cream, eye cream, hand cream, foot cream, cuticle cream… The list goes on forever and ever. The average person uses literally hundreds of different chemicals every day. And even though these are “safe” (other wise they wouldn’t be allowed to be sold) it doesn’t mean they are good for us.

Natural beauty skeptics sometimes ask ”how do you know that this naturally derived ingredient is better than this chemically produced one?”. And my answer is, in many cases I don’t. But that’s not the issue here.

To me, making my own skin and hair care products is very much a question of taking control of my own skin. This way I know exactly what I put in my face, and even though I am not 100% sure about the exact benefits or possible harms of the ingredients I use, at least I know exactly what they are.

When I make something myself, I know what it is. Many of the ingredients I use in my products could just as well go in to my mouth (and taste good!). And since I know that my eating blueberries hasn’t killed me yet, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to do much damage to me if I decide to put it on my face instead. I know there are vitamins and antioxidants in blueberries, and I know those are good for my skin. When it comes to N,N-Bis(2-hydroxyethyl)-2-nitro-p-phenyleneadiamine, I know nothing. I don’t know if it’s good for me, I don’t know if it’s bad. But as I have a job and studies that take up most of my time, reading scientific studies on every single ingredient in all skin and hair care products is not an option. So I stick to the things I know something about. Such as blueberries.

Do you want to take control of your skin? Only one way to get started!