Good morning ladies, I hate to say it, but feel I must. I have an extremely sensitive skin and have tried Elemis and it irritated my skin over a few days use. I am not at all convinced of its purity.

There are very few products that are actually organically pure, your skin is your largest organ, so whatever you put on it, needs to be processed and enters the blood-stream and I guess therefore, the liver. Personally, I try to avoid any toxic products, including household cleaning products and especially laundry and my skin has improved enormously. Why give my already stressed liver and more to deal with, you know?

Here’s a very helpful site : http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/
At the Skin Deep website, you can type any product in the “search” field and it’ll rate the toxicity on a scale from zero to ten (best to worst).

Here’s another interesting link for you : http://www.soilassociation.org/Whatisorganic/Organicbeauty

A quote from that website : “Unfortunately, unlike organic food, there are no legal standards for organic beauty products. So as a result, some companies choose to label a product as ‘organic’ even if it only contains 1% organic ingredients or if it contains potentially hazardous substances”

Beware clever marketing with the use of the words ‘natural’ or “nature” etc – Many toxins can occur naturally!

Hope this is helpful

Oops! Have just read the posts re the Elemis frangipani Monoi oil, but not the links yet, but will do.
I would find it very hard to give this product up as I find it so lovely!
But am going to look at these links now……..
Debs

I must say when I need a moisturiser, either skin or hair, nothing beats high quality coconut oil. It’s brilliant stuff!
I also find certain herbs are incredibly good for my skin….burdock is a big one. Boil up the roots and eat them or make tea.
You are dead right about beauty products LG…toxic rip offs for the most part. I stay well clear of all that stuff, especially make up, which is incredibly bad for your skin. Also most soap and gels, which just rip the moisture and vitality out of your skin.

Interesting debates
For me it just stresses the value in sharing from our experiences as we are all made differently and come from different climates and have had tx or not
I’m never going to beat myself up re being put through peg/inf I recoiled at a liver specialist who wanted me to sue the doc who put me on it
We all have our vulnerability and I have mine at diagnosis I had more than a full plate and was vulnerable
The most fantastic skin cure I found for my severe actinic and Alunare granuloma which is at times so disfiguring that my photos were taken for medical purposes was to scrub my skin with sands from the Big Island of Hawaii
I’m not of any real knowledge about why that worked for the fortunate time I was in HI but it did!
Maybe that the volcano spews out from the earths core into the sea?
Last night seven changes of clothes so stepping up the on call t shirt stack ha!
I’m keeping notes on these good shares
I think most of us want to restore ourselves
I wasn’t diagnosed until Dec 2011 myself and by then had two beautiful girls. It was a huge surprise to be diagnosed. Funny, but I always felt protective about things like toothbrush etc with my girls when they were growing up
Both are clear and HepC free
Mahalo for that
There’s a lot of good knowledge coming out here please keep the love coming xxxxx

I think we need to look at how we are confounding these factors – attributions are variously being made to HCV v treatment and IFN/riba treatment v DAAs. The only symptoms I have experienced are earlier menopause (ie mid-late 40s when the australian average age is 53). Subsequently I also experienced some hair thinning which frequently occurs with post menopausal women.

With the shock of menopause so early I researched and discovered that most HRT products contained the wrong balance of the three oestrogens and the progesterone with which it was necessarily opposed was usually progestin (a synthetic) – so no wonder a huge American study later found that it didn’t confer the cardiovascular and cancer protections manufacturers claimed. I arranged supply through a compounding chemist which obtained the properly balanced and genuine articles from Europe and prepared them in a good quality jojoba base.

Since commencing the DAAs I am actually losing my hair. Early in treatment (sof-dac) I noticed a greater than usual quantity of hair across the bathroom basin. Also constant loss through my hair brush. Its not like cancer hair loss which comes out in clumps leaving the scalp patchily bare – but I am losing so much that my hair is getting thinner and it is unusually dry.

As for skin/ products, I can’t tolerate most perfumess – I exfoliate 1-2 times weekly, use a non soap body gel for washing and 24hr aveeno body moisturiser. I use a bedhead shampoo and wella volume mousse conditioner for fine hair. When I apply some hair colour I go to a green krop hair salon which uses organic, least toxic products. I use La Roche-Posay facial cleanser, eye cream and face moisturiser including sun screen. Rarely used cosmetics – an occasional shallow brush of blush and lippie. So that’s me folks. All my secrets. Until last decade I never bothered with any additional care – just shower, wash hair and run.

It would never have been my intention to publish this information but felt I should join the girlie spirit of collectively gathering information. Ive never otherwise been much for cosmetic chat and I have an aversion to the TV commercials which demonstrate wealthy, glamorous women preening themselves with exorbitantly costly cosmetics and smugly stating ” Because Im Worth It”. What about all the poorer, hard working women out there burdened with multi-problem lives barely able to put food on the table, the silent heroes – too busy for the remote concept of worthiness.

Thanks Archer for sharing, I am sorry to hear about your hair, I think hair is really part of our identity and not because of commercials and the plasicifaction and botoxification of womanhood that has poisoned the conceptualisation of perceived beauty. Hair feels good when you run your fingers through it, it feels good when the wind blows it around, it is tactile, it is a sign of youth, of age, of wisdom, of health and of legend even. Old stories of Sampson and Delilah, of Rapunzel.. etc etc. Once upon a time women covered themselves all up, thinking of the Victorian era, and hair was their version of sexy. Scott Fitzgerald even wrote about how ‘daring’ it was for a woman to ‘bob’ her hair in the 1920’s..as a stand against the previous era of long gowns and high necked clothing. I have lost a ton of hair to tx before and I recall how fantastic it was to feel the wind in it again. Well that is my little hair done, take care, Ariel

I just copy pasted from a Chinglish website. http://scarfamilyditdajow.com/WhiteFlowerOil.htm
Definitely similar to Tiger Balm, which I still use for muscle pain (Cambodian imitation version actually). Tiger Balm doesn’t have wintergreen which possibly makes White Flower more effective for headaches.