Personalized toner: trial 1

After a lot of reading on the internet. Here are the ingredient that I finally decided on:

Ingredients
4 tbsp (2 fl. oz.) rose water
4 tbsp (2 fl. oz.) apple cider vinegar
4 tbsp (2 fl. oz.) aloe vera juice
4 tbsp (2 fl. oz.) green tea
10 drops of jojoba oil

Proportions
This is the recipe I mostly based the proportions upon.

For the green tea portion, I am going to use the 1 cup green tea leaves/1qt of water. Probably not that much water and tea, as per this article. 

Explanation of ingredients
To start off, I never even knew there was a difference between different toners and such. This is a pretty good overview of them.

This is customized to my skin which is a bit acne prone during certain times of the month, dry/combination, but tends to be a bit more oily during summer, I think.

I wanted to create a toner because I started wearing makeup again and it'll be nice to have something to help take everything off.

Rose water (found in ethnic section of grocery stores, I found mine in Ralph's. It was better than the ones I found in Henry's): I'm using rosewater as a base because it has mild astringent properties and does not contain alcohol. It's good for dry/sensitive skin. If my skin was a bit oilier, I'd probably use witch hazel hydrosol instead (which also does not contain alcohol, but I have no idea where to get it.)

Be sure to get the kind that says "distilled rose water" as opposed  to "water, rose oil" or something to that effect. Distilling is really how one creates rose water. It's also why the one I found at Ralphs was better than the water/oil mixtures I found at Henry's. tsk tsk. 

Apple cider vinegar: originally I wanted to use lemon juice. However, the latter is more perishable than vinegar. I wanted the acidic properties of either. Acid is not a good environment for bacteria to grow in. It also helps in exfoliating the skin.

Aloe vera juice: can be gel or juice. Using it just because everyone knows that aloe is good for skin. I'm using juice to make mixing easier. However, it seems to be quite perishable. So that's a drawback.

Green tea: anti-oxidant. Replaces vitamins E, C, and A apparently because it's that much stronger.

Jojoba oil: good for moisturizing and makeup removal since it's an oil. Fairly useful it seems.

Ultimately though, who knows if any of that is effective? Who knows whether some new properties will emerge when all of them are mixed together? Beneficial or detrimental? Perhaps it's all placebo effect. Ah well, it'll be fun.

1st ever beauty post! The hunt for a perfect toner

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While I was home in LA for the weekend, I observed that my mom had awesome skin! I mean, she has her periods. There was one time when her skin looked pliant, radiant and taut and she told me she was using lemon juice diluted with water to rinse her face with every morning. I wanted to try it, but couldn't keep up the regiment. And this time, she told me she had been using Artistry, a beauty brand from Amway (for some reason though, I have an association of Amway with scam. I don't know quite where that came from.)

That and Clinique's bonus days this past weekend got me thinking about toners. With a simple question to google, "Is Clinique's clarifying lotion a toner?" I came upon several cool sites with my mind teeming with ideas for an ideal toner for myself.

First and foremost, Skin Deep, a cosmetic database that evaluates products based on the safety of their ingredients. It compiles a compendium of published research on different ingredients. I've been able to find a fair number of common products that I use on a daily basis. While I take its reviews with a tablespoon of salt (since many scientific studies feed rats a great amount of a particular chemical to amplify the biological effects), I find it useful when used as a relative safety guide.

After being scared by Skin Deep blaring about the dangers of the various chemicals we are committing suicides with, I searched for a decent all natural toner, but I couldn't find one easily available on the market. In my search, I then stumbled upon care2 make a difference. I find some of the articles fairly useful and on the dot, such as using apple cider vinegar as a cleaning agent or a hair rinse, or using baking soda as a clarifying agent to get rid of residues from hair products. Anyway, by logical extension, since they are not crazy green people, their advice might be worth trying. I am particularly interested in making a sugar scrub (pictured, and I already have one as a gift which works totally well, but that's the allure/fun/pitfall of makeup and skin care, it's the novelty of it all), it seems super easy to make, add vinegar to Butters' water as a flea deterrent (from the apple cider vinegar article), apple cider vinegar toner, and a green tea toner.

That got me thinking about my own toner. Initially, someone recommended using just aloe vera juice. In wondering what other properties/goodness I can add to it, I thought about the more traditional witch hazel. So far, a witch hazel hydrosol (one without the standard 14% alcohol, using water instead) has been rather elusive. However, it might not even be necessary because according to this, for my skin, it's better to use a floral water as a base rather than witch hazel. I totally feel like a chemist, trying to navigate the creation of the toner btw. What is the purpose of glycerin in some of these recipes? What is the shelf life of this concoction? Will the different properties even counteract each other? Only time will tell...