A Guide to Natural Skin Care Products

While you may think you prefer natural skin care, some natural ingredients may not work the best on your skin. What should drive your purchase of skin care products is how well they work on your skin type.

    In today’s world of eco-conscious living, being good to the environment is a high priority, whether you’re buying light bulbs or a cream for dry skin and wrinkles. And cosmetics companies take advantage of that by offering natural skin care products with ingredients that are touted as being better for your skin and environmentally friendly.

Cosmeceuticals: Combining Moisturizers With Antioxidants

Certain ingredients in cosmeceuticals may help clear up acne and make your skin look younger. Get the scoop on the pros and cons of common cosmeceutical ingredients.

Who doesn’t love a moisturizer with a luxurious feel? And wouldn’t it be great if it also made your skin look clearer or younger? That’s the promise of cosmeceuticals.

How to Use a Skin Exfoliant

Dead skin cells often need a little help to slough off. A skin exfoliant with ingredients like an alpha hydroxy acid or a beta hydroxy acid can leave you looking fresh and feeling smooth again.

    Our skin is constantly renewing itself, growing new skin cells to replace the surface skin cells that grow old, die, and fall, or slough, off. Every minute of every day, between 30,000 and 40,000 dead skin cells flake away.

How to Find the Right Skin Moisturizer

Knowing what your skin needs will help you make the right decision. (Hint: Choose one with sunscreen.)

    Feel overwhelmed when you want to buy skin moisturizer for your dry skin? That’s no surprise, as there are dozens to choose from at the drugstore and hundreds more at high-end cosmetics and department stores — creams, lotions, ointments, some with sunscreen, others with an exfoliant. Choices range from the basic $1.50 jar of petroleum jelly to a $500 five-ounce tub of designer skin moisturizer. And all the options in between can make your head spin.

Chinese Medicine: Keeping the Balance

This type of alternative medicine dates back thousands of years, but is still used all over the world.

    Balance is the foundation of Chinese medicine, which seeks to find and correct imbalances that give rise to illness and symptoms of disease. This alternative medicine dates back more than 5,000 years, with roots in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism. Today, the use of Chinese medicine has spread throughout the world - for example, a recent report showed that in just one year about 3 million U.S. adults used acupuncture as a type of treatment.