Organic Ingredients for Facial Care

Last week, I shared some amazing organic skincare ingredients that I use in my own Living Earth Beauty line. I’ve talked about such magical things as mucuna, mangosteen, and chaga, and now I’d like to share with you some of the balancing ingredients that are especially beneficial for use in facial toning and cleansing.

Anti-Inflammatory & Anti-Microbial Essential Oils

Citrus sunrise doubles as an organic facial toner and cleanser and is not only generally uplifting, invigorating, and a pleasure to use, but it has anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-microbial properties that make it a gentle skin cleanser and exfoliant is great for all skin types and also helps with acne and oily skin while promoting a healthy skin pH.

What makes my skin love it so much?

Citrus sunrise is made with several hydrosols and essential oils, including, calendula hyrdrosol, lemon verbana, and a variety of citrus oils (mandarin, lemon, lime peel, and blood orange).

How do they work?

• Calendula is a truly versatile herb that can be used beneficially for just about anything skin related. It’s useful for rashes, hotspots, scratches, abrasions, sunburns, scars, and many skin disorders. Calendula hydrosol makes a great all around skin tonic and it has a refreshing, mildly sweet floral scent.

• Lemon verbena has a strong antioxidant capacity, making it revitalizing for all skin types and a great aid for cellular regeneration. Not only that, it’s a mild astringent, a gentle skin cleanser, and is lightly stimulating and uplifting.

• Mandarin essential oil, aside from having an invigorating scent, is a natural antiseptic that gently cleanses the skin and clears away harmful bacteria while helping balance oily skin and heal acne.

• Lemon essential oil is anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, anti-fungal, and anti-inflammatory, making it an excellent natural aid for cleansing and returning skin to its healthy balanced state.

• Lime peel essential oil has similar properties that make it an excellent complement to lemon essential oil. In addition, it can be slightly more helpful with acne and it adds a pleasantly tart scent to anything it’s used in.

• Blood orange essential oil is said to be the most antidepressant of all of the essential oils. Similar to the other citrus oils, it has anti-inflammatory and antiseptic properties.

Rejuvenating and Cleansing Hydrosols

Moonlight Mist is the natural evening compliment to Citrus Sunrise. While Citrus Sunrise is invigorating and rejuvenating while deeply and gently cleansing skin, Moonlight Mist is soothing, calming, and relaxing – perfect for clearing away the day’s debris and sinking into a sweet, lovely evening before bed.

Why does my skin love it so much?

Moonlight Mist is made with several special ingredients, including, rose hydrosol, tulsi (holy basil) hydrosol, rose geranium essential oil, and chamomile essential oil. Deeply hydrating and soothing, these leave skin feeling refreshed and soft.

How do they work?

• Rose hydrosol is predominantly a gentle cooling and anti-inflammatory agent, and has possibly been used for thousands of years for just that purpose. However, it has been found more recently to also have anti-bacterial properties which help regulate skin oil production.

• Tulsi (holy basil) hydrosol is soothing and calming, and has excellent anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties. It is a highly medicinal herb and is considered a sacred plant.

• Rose geranium hydrosol has been used to assist wound healing for centuries. It has analgesic, antibacterial, antiseptic, astringent, and anti-inflammatory properties that make it excellent for gently cleansing skin, helping with acne, and balancing skin pH.

• Chamomile essential oil, similar to those above, has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties. It is also is antispasmodic and analgesic. It is extremely healing and wonderful for treating skin conditions. It has a gently sweet, apple-like aroma. Chamomile has been used for centuries in aromatherapy and is known as an anti-depressant and an herb of calming.

Photo Credit: BotheredByBees

I am currently spending a lot of time writing an article about veganism and cruelty-free living, especially in the arenas of food and skin care. I am attempting to cover as much as possible, without going on for days. I would love to address your questions and concerns. Please share them in the comments below.

In the meantime, here are some quotes to inspire consideration:

“Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.” -Albert Schweitzer

“Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.” -Albert Einstein

“Animals are my friends…and I don’t eat my friends.” -George Bernard Shaw

“If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.” -Albert Einstein

“I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.” -Gandhi

“If man wants freedom why keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat.” -Leonardo-da-Vinci

“Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel.” “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” -Leo Tolstoy

“How can man be possessed of kindness who, to increase his own flesh, eats the flesh of other creatures. As those possess no property who do not take care of it, so those possess no kindness who feed on flesh.” “Like the (murderous)mind of him who carries a weapon (in his hand), the mind of him who feasts with pleasure on the body of another (creature), has no regard for goodness.” “Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.” -Red Indian Chief (1854)

“We pray on Sundays that we may have light/To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;/We are sick of war, we don’t want to fight,/And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.” -George Bernard Shaw

“My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension” “Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.” -Benjamin Franklin

“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.” -Henry Thoreau:

“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being” -Abraham Lincoln

Genesis 1:29 “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”

“There will never be any peace in the world as long as we eat animals.” -Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Not having known anything better does not alleviate the suffering of the animal. Its fundamental desires remain and it is the frustration of those desires that is a great part of its suffering. There are so many examples: the dairy cow who is never allowed to raise her young, the battery hen who can never walk or stretch her wings, the sow who can never build a nest or root for food in the forest litter, etc. Eventually we frustrate the animal’s most fundamental desire of all – to live.” -David Cowles-Hamar.

“In all the round world of utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And in a population that is all educated and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic aspect of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.” -H.G. Wells

“There is something so very dreadful in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defense, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it” -Cardinal Newman

“There will come a time…when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say “meat-eaters!” in disgust and regard us in the same way we regard cannibals and cannibalism” -Dennis Weaver (actor)

“Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable.” -John Robbins, Diet for a New America

“When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.” -Buddha (563? – 483? B.C.)

“Cruelty to animals is as if humans did not love God.” -Cardinal John Henry Newman

“…many vivisectors still claim that what they do helps save human lives. They are Iying. The truth is that animal experiments kill people, and animal researchers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children every year.” -Dr. Vernon Coleman, Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, UK.

“We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realized that we were eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said, “Wait a minute, we love these sheep–they’re such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?” It was the last time we ever did.” -Linda and Paul McCartney

“To be non-violent to human beings, [but] to be a killer or enemy of poor animals[?] In this age there is always enmity against animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always the strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally… “The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass. As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” -Pythagoras

“To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.” -Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

“I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.” Mahatma Gandhi

“The human body has no more need for cows’ milk than it does for dogs’ milk, horses’ milk, or giraffes’ milk.” -Michael Klaper, MD

“In every respect, vegans appear to enjoy better health in comparison to both vegetarians and non-vegetarians.” -T. Colin Campbell, PhD Professor of Nutrition, Cornell University (letter dated 3/29/98)

“If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero.” -Walter Willett, M.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, director of a study that found a close correlation between red meat consumption and colon cancer.

“When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings.” -William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of Cardiology

“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of `real food for real people,’ you’d better live real close to a real good hospital.” -Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, D.C