Mom’s Review: 200 Tips, Techniques & Recipes for Natural Beauty
Shannon Buck provides a broad stroke introduction to aromatherapy, natural skin care, hair care, and perfumery in her book 200 Tips, Techniques & Recipes for Natural Beauty.
If you’re looking for a basic DIY natural beauty and skin care book, this is a good one for your library.
200 Tips, Techniques & Recipes for Natural Beauty is filled with beautiful full-color photographs that complement the easy-to-follow recipes. Shannon’s many tips, techniques, and recipes are suitable for the DIY natural beauty newbie.
Highlights
- 261 natural beauty tips
- Over 120 natural skin care, hair care, and essential oil recipes
- At-a-glance profile charts on carrier oils, essential oils, and herbs for herbal infusions
- Tips on caring for specific hair and skin types
- Mix-and-match charts for salves, creams, lotions, lotion bars, bath bombs, body scrubs.
200 Tips provides concise descriptions of butters, waxes, hydrosols, herbs, and exfoliators—clays, sugars, and salts—that make up the foundation for natural skin care. The fixed lipid carrier oil and essential oil profiles are detailed and easy to understand, providing characteristics and benefits of the oils, along with shelf-life and safety information.
The chapter on facial skin care goes on to discuss how to use those ingredients. It provides skin care tips and recipes for homemade skin care products including facial steams, DIY masks, and cleansers for normal, dry, oily, blemish-prone, and sensitive skin.
Do you want to try your hand at using pantry and kitchen staples in your skin care regimen? Shannon provides pointers on crafting homemade body washes, body scrubs, herbal bath teas, bath oils, and salt soaks. Her recipes include strawberries, bananas, honey, oats, yogurt, and even garlic!
The extensive chapter on hair care is one of my favorites. It includes recipes for basic hair cleansers, both foaming and dry, wash-out and leave-in conditioners, and herbal rinses. It provides general hair care techniques—no, do NOT brush your hair 100 times! And, best of all, it provides specific tips and recipes to enhance the natural beauty of different colors and types of hair.
đź’šFor example, the recipe featured here is Shannon’s Happy Hibiscus & Cinnamon Red Hair Rinse. Not only does it smell lovely, my long, straight, red hair is shiny, and feels smooth and soft.
Other Favorite Recipes from 200 Tips, Techniques & Recipes for Natural Beauty
- Rejuvenating Argan Oil & Rose Facial Balm
- Creamy Complexion Milk Mask
- Chamomile Cream & Honey Dry Skin Cleanser
- Coconut Milk & Rosemary Hair Mask
- Herbal Camper’s Salve
- Lemony Whipped Body Butter
- Herbs & Salt Reviving Foot Soak
The chapter on basic perfumery and aromatherapy provides aromatic profiles of the essential oils commonly used in perfumery. She shares a few basic blends, and briefly discusses top, middle, and base notes. Shannon also provides some simple starting natural perfumery blends with herbal, earthy, floral, and fruity accords.
200 Tips also has short sections on hand and foot care, eye and lip care, natural deodorants, and lotion bars. You’ll find pointers for stocking your DIY natural beauty tool kit and some lovely ideas on gift giving of your handcrafted products.
The discussions of safety, sanitization, and storage are especially important when it comes to homemade skin care, as none of these recipes includes a preservative.
Although 200 Tips was written in 2014, the vast majority of the information feels timeless. It provides a great starting point for anyone wanting to give DIY natural beauty a try.
🔶️Skin Safety Notes
Milk or cream is not an appropriate carrier for essential oils. This is an outdated notion and is not a safe option. Instead, when essential oils are used in a natural beauty formulation, even if it’s a cleanser, dilute those essential oils in a plant based lipid carrier oil or liquid soap. Or if you are making an alcohol-based perfume, perfumers alcohol or high-proof grain alcohol is the best choice.
Anytime water or a water-based ingredient—hydrosol, floral water, etc.—is combined with essential oils in a homemade skin care product, please use a solubilizer, like solubol or polysorbate-20. This reduces the chance of neat essential oil contact and potential skin sensitization.
You can pick up 200 Tips, Techniques & Recipes for Natural Beauty at your local bookstore or library or have it come right to your door when you order on Amazon (also available as a Kindle).
Shannon Buck’s book and other good reads on natural skin care, aromatherapy, and herbal wellness can be found on Mom’s Library Favorites list on Amazon.
- Title: 200 Tips Techniques & Recipes for Natural Beauty
- Author: Shannon Buck
- Publisher: Fair Winds Press; Illustrated edition (September 15, 2014)
- Language: English
- Paperback: ‎144 pages
- ISBN-10: 159233654X
- ISBN-13: 978-1592336548
Chris P | Writer, Certified Aromatherapist, Natural Skin Care Formulator
Chris (“Mom”) enjoys formulating bespoke aromatherapy, skin care, and herbal products to support her family, pets, friends, and clients. She also loves experimenting with recipes in the kitchen. An avid reader, writer, and lifetime learner, Chris enthusiastically explores research rabbit holes and then writes about her discoveries.đź’š (Learn more >>)
