I love smoothing my face with an oil in the evenings – properly, so that I’m positively glistening. When I wake up in the morning my face is bright and glowing. And since I L-O-V-E fruit acid peels and fruit acid based serums, I make sure to provide my skin with lots of repairing fatty acids, vitamins, and antioxidants – especially vitamins A, C, and E.
If the rest of your skin care products are wrong, using potent fruit acids might actually do more damage than good. Make sure you have a hydrating toner, a good quality serum, as well as a nourishing night cream or oil to balance out your fruit acids products.
Personally, I prefer oil blends, simply because a combination of vegetable oils will provide more complex and potent nourishment for the skin than just one oil (avocado or jojoba, for example) would. Going for a blend will get you more for your money, too.
A high quality oil blend should not contain any consistency-regulating ingredients. This is why I’m not a fan of dry oils. Don’t worry about the oil making your skin glisten – it will have absorbed by morning. These oils often use quickly absorbed oils like jojoba or sesame seed as their base.
Absolution’s Huile Addiction has long been my go-to oil. It is a mix of 27 vegetable oils and extracts, and I love its consistency, its intoxicating scent, the feel of it on the skin – even the packaging. It repairs and brightens very effectively, and is simply addictive.
I have developed a second addiction, however, to go along with the one I have to Absolution. It is for a cult product that took me a while to warm up to. Spurred on by my intuition, I grabbed it off the shelf one night about a month ago, and now I can’t understand how it took me so long to fall in love with it. Perhaps I was using it with the wrong products before, but it has been the perfect addition to my current skin care ritual.
This jewel I’m talking about is Neal’s Yard Remedies’ best known and top-selling product around the world, Wild Rose Beauty Balm, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of its release this year.
The Wild Rose Beauty Balm is a multi-purpose product that can be used as a cleansing cream (a muslin cloth is included), a face mask, a night cream, a primer (just a drop is enough), as well as a repairing cream for any skin damage, including sunburned and cracked skin.
The cleansing function of the product is wonderful; just take a small amount of the balm and apply to dry or damp skin, including around your eyes if you’re wearing makeup, and wipe with the muslin cloth dipped in warm water; the cloth will exfoliate the skin gently while you’re doing this. The Organic Pharmacy’s Carrot Butter works in much the same way.
The best part is of course the ingredients. Neal’s Yard has amazing expertise in essential oils and herbs, and has certainly outdone itself with this cream. The first item on the INCI is organically grown rose hip oil. There is lots of it, and its repairing properties are great. Rose-hip oil has a high vitamin A content, which makes it an excellent anti-aging agent, as vitamin A both strengthens and repairs the skin, as well as smoothing and softening wrinkles. You can actually see the difference for yourself.
Besides rose-hip oil, the balm also contains jojoba oil, beeswax, and shea butter, as well as hemp, borage seed, geranium, rosemary, frankincense, palmarose, and patchouli oils. With 99% of the ingredients being organically grown (frankincense growing in the wild), the product is more than certifiably organic.
You will only need a small dollop of it in the evening, and the balm is likely to last you over the winter.
The addition of the balm to my recently updated Beauty Guide should give you some idea of how passionate I am about the product. There are also other new additions to the guide, some of which I haven’t even gotten around to writing about yet, so make sure you check it out!
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Wild Rose Beauty Balm has been revamped and given rose red packaging. The code KATJA15 will get you 15% off this and any other product at Naturelle.
Below is a video from Neal Yard’s Remedies, showing a group of Kenyan women harvesting the sap from wild frankincense trees. The land on which frankincense trees grow is unsuited for farming, and the sap from these trees is therefore an important source of income for the families living in the area.
The magazine featured in the photos is my new favorite, Alvar, which is run by two mega-talented Finnish expats currently working in London.
Photos Katja Kokko
Translation Katja Nikula
