NEW Natural Beauty

A Gift of Beauty, Born from the Earth
Volcanic Ash Clay has been recognized throughout history for its extraordinary health and cosmetic benefits. The ancient tribes of central Africa, North American Indians, and the spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi all praised clay for a multitude of uses. Even Cleopatra made Volcanic Ash Clay a part of her daily beauty regimen.

Now, these legendary beauty benefits can be yours with Clay Essentials, a unique new line of skincare masques you can enjoy right at home. These nourishing clay formulas restore your skin’s natural radiance, softness and clarity - at a fraction of the cost of professional spa treatments.

Reserved for the most exclusive Spas in the world, until now. One of the most remarkable things about Clay Essentials is the astonishing results you’ll see after just one use! Dramatically improves stretch marks, acne, cellulite, wrinkles and more! Skin is softer, smoother and suppler. Your skin “breathes” better, radiating health. Even unsightly blemishes begin to fade with just a few applications, revealing the fresh, clear complexion that you were meant to have. Best of all, the more you use Clay Essentials, the more dramatic the improvements to your skin. Great for teenagers too, with blemishes or problem skin! Clay Essentials is excellent for everyone, whether you’re a man or a woman!

FREE CLAY ESSENTIALS FACE & BODY SAMPLE

Your Price: $0.00

I'm so confident that you will love the way you look after using Clay Essentials, I'm giving away two free masques! Exclusive spas routinely charge anywhere from $160 to $320 for two facial treatments. Don’t miss this amazing opportunity to experience natural, soothing clay masques in your own home – for FREE! Discover for yourself the amazing properties of volcanic ash clay by ordering your free samples today. You won’t believe how great you will look and feel after just two applications! Boost your confidence and look your very best with Clay Essentials.

A small shipping charge of $5.95 will apply and must be purchased separately. Limit one Free Clay Essentials Sample Pack (includes two masques) per order.

This has been a long time in coming, but I'm happy to finally be discussing it. What prompted me was a barrage of television infomercials. Products like "Wen" and others are being widely marketed as natural beauty products. They're charging a fortune for those products...and getting it! And for more reasons than just those "natural" products being advertised as such, I'm concerned about the many chemicals loaded into those products we use - all for the sake of beauty. Many of them contain chemicals that you may or may not have heard about, as being potentials for causing cancers.

So does that mean that we just stop using it all? Some would say a flat out "yes"! Other's would like to find a happy medium. And still other's want to find a completely natural approach.

So let's talk about it...did you know that 90% of the dirt on hair and skin can be removed by washing with warm water only? Add a clean washcloth and you increase that percentage drastically! Think about that one for a while.

Quite simply put, it's no shampoo...no longer washing your hair with conventional shampoos. While the first thought of not shampooing your hair anymore might produce that "ewww, icky!" grimace to cross your face read on, because there's a lot of good information here.

We use a shampoo to clean our hair and make it smell fresh, and in doing so we strip away every iota of it's natural oils, causing it to feel dry. So we then moisturize with a conditioner to put back the oil that we just washed away! Usually this conditioner weighs down our hair so we apply a mousse-like product for fuller, fluffier hair. But these products tend to dull our hair, so we then add a "shiny factor", such as hair spray or polish. I could go on, but do you see this vicious circle? AND we spend billions of dollars a year on this cycle! Not to mention the potential damage we're doing to ourselves and the Environment via all those chemicals...entering our bodies through our skin (the bodies largest "organ") and eyes, nose and mouth. Additionally, all of this nonsense leads to an imbalance of sebum production (natural scalp oil), and that's when we realized that we had either too much or too little of it (dry or oily hair/skin).

[Prepare before you begin a no-shampoo routine: Wash your hair with a clarifying shampoo to remove any silicones and styling product residues. Get your hair trimmed if you have any split ends. It takes an average of 2-4 weeks (6 in some cases) for your scalp’s sebum (natural oil) production to adjust to the no shampoo. Keep in mind that your hair may even look worse at first. Hair is a long-term project and it may take more than a couple weeks for it to regain its health, but once it does…you’ll be AMAZED! ]

1. Consider using non-sulfate shampoos or home remedies (below) in place of harsh sulfate shampoos. All of these may be drying to the hair so use only once a week and be sure to condition afterwards.

2. Avoid waxes and silicones, ingredients that generally end in “one” or “ane”, in hair products. Short term, silicones will make hair look sleeker and less frizzy, but in the long run they will coat the hair shaft and seal out moisture causing hair to become straw like, less defined, and frizzy. The only way to remove silicones and waxes is to use a harsh, drying sulfate shampoo. Most of the commercialized lines of hair products (Pantene, Garnier Fructis, Aussie, TRESemme', Sunsilk, Etc.) contain silicones. However if a silicone has "PEG" in front of it, it is water-soluble and will not build up.

Do you No 'Poo?

Have you heard about No 'Poo? No, it does not involve poo. It's No 'Poo as in no shampoo. Why would you want to No 'Poo? Well, according to an article by Audrey Schulman, the natural oils in our hair, called sebum, are all we need to keep our hair healthy. When we wash sebum away every day with shampoo, all we are doing is forcing our scalp to go into overdrive, making more sebum to compensate. Sebum is intended to protect your hair and even has antimicrobial properties. Of course, going No 'Poo also cuts down on consumption of shampoo, including the plastic bottles.

To go No 'Poo, according to Schulman, all you have to do is wash your hair with plain water and then brush with a washcloth for 100 strokes. The brushing distributes your own natural oils from your scalp across your hair. Schulman is a convert; she claims her hair is shiny and wavy and she's been going No 'Poo for five years now. If you feel like you need a little help once in a while, Schulman recommends washing with a conditioner or using a bit of baking soda mixed with water just near your scalp. To tame the frizzies, brush more often with a washcloth or douse hair ends in some apple cider vinegar.

BBC presenter Andrew Marr has given up washing his hair - saying the scalp's natural oils will keep it glossy and clean. We challenged two women to do the same...with surprising results:

Lucy Sutton, 24, a trainee marketing executive, is single and lives in Hammersmith, West London. She says:

Three weeks into the great hair challenge, my sister came over to my flat for the evening. She took one look at my hair and said: "What have you done to it? That's a great style - did it cost a fortune?"

A look of revulsion came over her face and she said: "That’s awful." But then she looked at me curiously. "The weird thing is," she continued, "it really suits you."

My hair is naturally very fine and thin, and I used to wash it every two days, and then use hair straighteners. A good 90 per cent of my self-confidence in how I look comes from my hair, so much so that if I was having a bad hair day I could barely drag myself out of the house.

Looking back, I can see how much I’ve been damaging my hair by doing so much to it. My hair always looked neat, but I think it was lifeless - the shampoo was taking all the natural oils out of it. Since I stopped using shampoo, my hair has more volume, and I’m astonished to find it has a natural wave - I always thought it was just straight and boring.

Six weeks on, I love my new look. But it has been a real test of nerve. I am applying for a new job at the moment and I need to look my best, so when I took on the challenge I thought: "What on earth will I look like in six weeks’ time, when I have my job interview? And will it smell?"

I have always prided myself on looking clean and neat and my friends all thought the challenge was hysterical. They said: "You’re crazy. You’ll never keep it up."

I must say, I nearly cracked after a week, when my hair was at its worst. It was dry at the ends, but greasy at the roots, and I became obsessed with it, checking my appearance in the mirror every hour to see if it looked as bad as it felt.

In that first week I refused to go out with my friends, but I persevered, and by the second week I was beginning to see an improvement. The ends were still dry, but the roots were less greasy - my hair seemed to have a kind of film over it, like a natural sheen.

Luckily, my hair smelt clean - there was no unpleasant odour. Then it started to look rather healthy and bouncy. I now really love its natural wave, and I am worried that if I go back to washing it, I will lose that curl.

An old friend from university asked me last week: "When did you start curling your hair? It looks great." I smiled and said that in fact I just hadn’t washed it. He burst out laughing and thought I was joking. Now, my hair looks in really good condition, but it does need the ends cutting off.

This experiment has made a huge difference to my life, because I’m no longer wasting an hour a day washing and blow-drying it. I’m also saving about £40 a month on hair products.

I am now never going to wash my hair with shampoo again and feel positively liberated by this experiment. I can’t believe I used to waste so much time and money obsessing about my hair.

Tamaraye Sawacha, 24, is an HR graduate who lives with her parents in North-West London. She says:

My father is Nigerian and my mother is from Barbados, so my hair is black Afro-Caribbean. Normally it is very dry, and I wash it maybe every two weeks using Dark And Lovely shampoo, which is specially designed to add moisture and shine to dry hair.

If I wash it more often than that, it becomes even more dry. I also have hair extensions, and my natural hair becomes extremely brittle, because the extensions pull at the scalp and make it harder to wash and condition the hair underneath.

So I was very interested to take on this challenge, and the results have been fascinating. After six weeks, my natural hair is the softest it has ever been. It looks so much less frizzy and I am thrilled with it.

I am now going to go without washing my hair for much longer periods, because I think it is a much more natural state. My scalp feels so much softer and smoother, and there is none of the itching I used to experience.

The greatest thing holding all of us back is psychological - we think that if we don’t wash our hair, it will look awful and smell. In fact, this isn’t the case at all. My hair looks great, it is much softer, and it doesn’t smell at all.

None of my friends have noticed any difference, apart from saying that my hair looks nice. The difference in texture is astonishing - it has taught me that hair is not designed to be washed day after day in expensive products which strip out all of the natural oils.

Now, it neither looks nor smells dirty, and it feels great. This experiment has been fabulous for me, because it means I will save time on all that washing. Like most women, I’m a bit of a slave to my hair in terms of how much time and money I spend trying to get it right.

But the past six weeks has illustrated that I can just get on with my life and let my scalp’s natural oils take care of my hair. It’s been a revelation.

The No-’Poo Do

If you want to lose the ‘fright wig,’ try ditching your shampoo

By: AUDREY SCHULMAN

5/25/2007 4:36:15 PM

Halfway through my last haircut, the stylist asked me what kind of “products” I used.

This was an embarrassing subject for me. “Not that many,” I mumbled.

He ran his fingers though my shoulder-length hair and said, “Whatever it is, honey, you keep doing it. Your hair’s looking fine.”

I’m terrified that this stylist (surrounded by packaged lotions piled high on shelves) will find out I don’t use anything. No hair dye. No conditioner. And here I cough uncomfortably and confess, no shampoo. A “no-’poo do,” as we folks like to call it.

I used to use shampoo, but around six years ago the ends of my red hair began to rise into the air a little higher each week, frizzy and dry as poodle fur. I tried soaking it in different types of conditioners but they seemed to affect only the hair near my scalp, flattening it with grease until I began to resemble Little Orphan Annie in a rainstorm. Desperate, I experimented with expensive and time-consuming hair-care techniques, the kind that called for heat compresses, mud from the Dead Sea, and (oy) deer placentas. Nothing helped.

Around the time I was seriously considering a crew cut, I read about a traditional Mexican no-shampoo method that spread natural oils through the hair rather than leaving them clumped up near the scalp.

This hair treatment is simple, cheap, and fast — my kind of beauty routine. All I have to do is wash with water, then brush my wet hair with a washcloth 100 strokes each side. This moves the oils from the scalp, spreading them evenly across the hair. Miraculously, within two weeks, my frizzy ends became less flyaway. My hair began to shine again, getting wavy instead of bushy. And, since the oils weren’t massed near the scalp, my hair didn’t droop, limp and greasy.

The more I used this washcloth process, the less I needed to shampoo (winnowing down gradually to every week, then every few weeks). After a month or two, I found I could stop shampooing entirely — except in rare circumstances, like that time I sanded drywall and appeared to have been dragged in from an archeological site.

Insane in the mane
Before you mutter anything about what a big fat liar I am, take a look at a book of old photos — maybe one featuring daguerreotypes from the turn of the century. As you peruse the photos, consider this: the first commercial shampoo wasn’t even invented (right here in Springfield, actually) until 1930: Breck. Before that, people didn’t rinse their hair more than a few times a year. Although soaps gentle enough for personal hygiene had recently been invented, they definitely weren’t used on hair. Sure, some historical photos might get retouched, but not a photo of a Yakama Native American, her hair thick, lustrous, and definitely not oily. And not a daguerreotype of an Irish maid, her curls vibrant even in black and white.

Since I’ve gone “no ’poo”, I’ve done my research. The oil in hair, known as sebum, is a protective sheath of esters and fatty acids that give your hair shine and bounce and protect it against damage. According to research conducted at Bristol-Myers Squibb, sebum even has natural antimicrobial properties that help stop scalp infections. Like melanin in your skin, sebum is created as needed. If you spend a day on the beach, your melanin goes into overdrive and your skin gets darker. If you wash your sebum down the drain every morning, your follicles click into sebum-overproduction in order to protect your scalp and hair. When you stop shampooing constantly, they begin to produce less.

In fact, shampoos aren’t designed with your hair in mind. Instead, they’re meant to satisfy your fingers and eyes. Marketers know you don’t believe you’re cleaning unless there’s a thick lather, the kind you get when washing the dishes and scrubbing the floor. But your hair is more delicate than pans, and the chemical that produces lather, sodium lauryl sulfate, is too harsh for hair. Over time, it strips away sebum, leaving hair frizzy and dull. You get split ends and breakage. You begin to look like Ronald McDonald. And so you reach for conditioner.

Conditioners, which began to be sold commercially a few decades after shampoo had created the need, coat your hair with artificial esters and gives it back some shine. Of course, the stuff builds up after a while (along with the natural sebum your poor follicles are still desperately overproducing) and the combination makes your hair lie flat as a wet blanket.

Okay, time to shampoo. Vicious cycle.

Grateful head
Without shampoo for five years now, my hair has never looked better. Shiny, with body and blond highlights, it glows with health. My mom, who has a bloodhound’s sense of smell and absolutely no tact when it comes to dirt, stuck her nose right into my hair and (incorrectly) guessed that I’d washed it yesterday. I even went to the fancy Grettacole Salon in Copley Place for a professional opinion. The stylist there, not knowing about my hair-care regime, decreed my hair shiny, healthy, and clean with lots of body.

As a bonus, the rest of my health may be better, as well, since commercial shampoos can include a cocktail of chemicals, such as methylisothiazolinone (a known human mutagen), and zinc pyrithione (a nerve and muscle toxin). As Kristan Markey of the Environmental Working Group told me, “Taken orally, zinc pyrithione is very toxic. It’s a broad systemic toxin. Something between a teaspoon and an ounce will kill you.” As for the preservative methylisothiazolinone, he added, it is “already restricted in certain concentrations in countries such as Japan and Canada. It has immune-system toxicity. Still, it’s used in several hundred shampoos and conditioners.”

Who wants these toxins rinsed down the drain into rivers and lakes, much less slathered on one’s scalp? Skin can absorb chemicals, just as the lining of the stomach does. Yet the FDA, through some crazy legal loophole, doesn’t regulate the ingredients in personal-care products.

(Seriously. There are endocrine disrupters galore in nail polish. And I don’t even want to mention hair dyes.)

But let’s get back to style. The Web is filled with wavy-haired folks who live by the no-’poo technique. No surprise, since the curlier your hair, the more sensitive it is to drying out.

There’s no shortage of no-’poo believers among those with straight hair, too, since the system can help give a little body to your locks once they aren’t weighed down by conditioner. Yes, there are people who report no ’poo doesn’t work for them. But whatever causes these failures, it’s not linked to a specific hair type.

As to step-by-step directions of how to go no ’poo, you should do your own research on the techniques. See what you’re most comfortable with. If your hair begins to feel dirty without shampoo, then wash with a gentle conditioner like Suave or use a little baking soda mixed with water on the hair near the scalp. If your ends get frizzy, brush your wet hair more often with a washcloth, or soak the ends in water-diluted lime juice or apple vinegar.

You might go through some ugly transition days (I had a lot of ugly days), but the more gradually you start weaning yourself off shampoo, the more subtle those days are going to be.

Think how much cash you spend on shampoo and conditioner, hair gel, and the like. Think of all that — your money and those chemicals — washed literally down the drain. None of it is good for your health, those fish downstream, or your hair.

Audrey Schulman is a freelance writer living in Cambridge. She can be reached at audrey@audreyschulman.com