Organic Body Care Recipes: 175 Homemade Herbal Formulas for Glowing Skin & a Vibrant Self Paperback – May 30, 2007

Hands-down the best make-it-yourself nature beauty care book I've used. It's a great starter book.The Pros:The recipes use familiar measurements, the directions are easy to follow, and everything I've made from this book has turned out really well. The instructions are so much better than in The Other Beauty Book that I purchased that I'm using the directions from this book to modify the recipes from the other one, which are much harder to make but this book has shown me that it doesn't need to be difficult for a lotion to turn out really well.It covers a wide range of beauty products you can easily make at home with easy to acquire, non-scary ingredients. Most of the recipes are very practical and the selection of products isn't horribly skewed to one or two types of products (only 18 pages on masks, as opposed to 40!), and there's a wider range of skin cleansers than I've found elsewhere.A great feature is that each recipe lists several very important and useful details, including recommended uses, prep time, tools needed, type of storage container, and recipe yield. Compared to other natural beauty books, this puts it heads and shoulders above the competition. Seriously. You won't realize how important this is until you try to use the books that don't provide it!The Cons:The Table of Contents and Index are terrible - basically useless, a librarian's nightmare. The TOC does not list individual products, only chapters in which to find them, and even those subsections of each chapter are not listed with a page number/ The Index does not list products by name, or even keywords within product names; I have to flip page by page through nearly the whole book if I didn't write down the name and page of the item I want to make.This book needs a TOC and Index like those in The Joy of Cooking - far more cross-indexing is really needed and the titles of each product should appear in the TOC and in the Index, no exceptions. These are recipe books, after all, and should be produced as such. However, every other DIY body care book has the exact same problem, so I'm not knocking the ratings down for that. It's not the author's fault that the editor/publisher did a terrible job on front and back matter, right?

everything from the soothing colors, layout, and explanations make the book itself a real joy to read. her recipes are simple, diverse, and really good! i've tried the face scrubs, body washes and creams, lip glosses, and now i'm collecting the ingredients for a delicious-sounding 'love potion', which i described to a woman in the grocery store, so that even she wants to go out and get the book (i don't know if it was the recipe itself that got her or the idea of using it on her husband!).in one chapter, she gives a very helpful description of all of the ingredients that she uses in her recipes, what they do, what kind of skin (or hair) they're best for, and what possible substitutes can be used, which i find really helpful since i don't have every ingredient on the planet.in each recipe, she tells just how to make the product, what kind of skin it's best for, how to apply it. and how to store it. she also gives helpful hints on how to give these products as gifts, which has come in handy because there's no way i can use all the stuff i've made! my friends and family have all really liked what i've made for them too and eagerly ask for more--even my brothers! that's because the skin cream, for example, is much better than anything i've ever gotten in a store. this stuff is really hydrating and long-lasting, and you can scent it whatever way you like or not at all. in our cold dry winters, this is just the ticket.i was actually getting back online to see what other books stephanie tourles has written, but i thought i'd stop and write a product review first. as you can see, this has quickly become a really enjoyable hobby, and this book has made it easy to do.

My girlfriend has grown keen to the plastics and toxins and synthetic materials that are found in even top-tier quality make-up brands and shampoos and conditioners and air fresheners etc..... everything they sell to us has intentionally untested or poorly tested toxins in them these days.That said, my girlfriend has taken to concocting a lot of her own solutions for these problems and I believe this book was an excellent square #1 for her to begin that quest to conquer the toxins in our everyday lives.All I can really say is she has spent quite a bit of time with her nose in this book down in the kitchen mixing up essential oils and beeswax and vegetable glycerin and all manner of stuff to make new lotion bars and face toners. I get to play test subject sometimes and I am actually pretty impressed with the quality of the final product in these recipes. Beats the heck out of face-shriveling chemical scrubs and washes, hands down.Again, i haven't actively spent any time in the kitchen making the recipes within this book myself, but prior to this book neither had she and now she is cooking up a storm of products to replace all the crazy chemical goods that research has shown is not at all healthy for us, especially in the long term.This book is in no way all-encompassing and I would strongly recommend supplementing any body care book with other literature and opinions and points of view on account of the new field that this science still is. But if you are new to the practice of essential oils and organic body care, this book will definitely not waste your time.