I get lots of questions about how to maintain photo-ready pin-up girl skin, and always say the main three things are:
- stop smoking
- start drinking a Glowing Green Smoothie for breakfast
- use natural skincare
Petroleum =/= beauty
Most of the stuff you get in the chemist or supermarket, whether it's the super cheap stuff or expensive designer brands, is pretty minging when you get right down to it. My eyes were opened when I learned that petroleum, which is the main ingredient in almost every commercial lip balm (just read the ingredients list!) attacks the natural collagen in your skin, speeding up the appearance of wrinkles! So I tried Burt's Bees lip balm, which uses beeswax as the base instead of petroleum. Over an admittedly fairly long period of months of using organic petroleum-free lip balm, I noticed that my lips looked smoother and fuller. I wasn't getting the ridges in my lipstick at photo shoots, or having it keep travelling upwards into those vertical lines that cross the upper lip line. This was a couple of years ago. Now I'm older, but my lips look younger :)
Designer vs Natural Skincare
Well, that got me interested in natural skincare as a whole! I'd always figured that something specifically engineered in a lab had to be more effective than something that occurred in nature. Now I think there are two problems with this seemingly reasonable hypothesis:
- We evolved within only natural environments, so it makes a kind of sense that we'd react better to natural ingredients than new/ modern ones.
- Just because something amazing could be engineered in a lab, doesn't always mean it actually has been. Massive corporations have motivation to keep costs down and profits up. If say, good advertising did more to sell products than their actual effectiveness, there's no question that more money would then be invested in the advertising than the product. It just makes good business sense. Ditto using cheap ingredients over quality ones.
Good lip balm is a bondage model's best friend!
I wear lip balm every day, re-applying regularly from when I first brush my teeth in the morning to when I go to bed at night. I like to let it soak in! Red lipstick doesn't look good over chapped lips! I keep lip balm in my handbag and like to use it as a lipstick base- it acts like a moist Polyfilla, making my lips look extra smooth, full and plump!
Today I tried using Bare Skin Beauty Chamomile & Honey Lip Saver as a lipstick base at my bondage shoot. I know a lot of bondage models wear little or no makeup at bondage shoots, because it's a bit of a gamble- you naturally end up in some odd positions and if your makeup smears/ runs/ flakes/ otherwise goes awry, you don't have a free hand to fix it with! And end up with a bunch of crappy pictures. I can't bear being shot without my red lipstick unless it's really frigging necessary so I work on doing makeup that holds- I use a lip brush and lip liner, makeup fix spray and a waxy lip balm base for my lipstick. Today I actually forgot to use the fix spray, but still, my lipstick stayed looking like this:
Not bad, right?
Is Bare Skin Beauty Chamomile & Honey Lip Saver worth a fiver?
I upgraded from £1 or less ageing petroleum jelly horrortins from Superdrug to natural lip balms ages ago and after seeing the change in my lips, begrudgingly concluded that the price difference was worth it. But a full £5 for a pot of lip balm?
Now I actually have it, I wish I'd made the switch years ago- I would have actually saved money. A tiny, tiny amount of this stuff goes a really long way- I'm talking a micro-blob about the size of a third of a grain of rice that just melts and covers my whole lips! I really like to slather lip balm on too, to make my lips extra shiny. That's right, an application the size of half a grain of rice is more than enough! This one little jar I have is going to last me months, and I use a lot of lip balm!Up until now I’ve been using organic natural lip balm from an eBay seller, which was okay but not as greasy- it pulled at my lips more during application, had little scratchy bits in it that I had to pick out o.O and ran out really fast. I like a really greasy lip balm that will make my lips feel lubricated and look glossy, as well as being really moisturising and softening.
Bare Skin Beauty Chamomile & Honey Lip Saver has a light herby taste that I quite like. Boyfy said he couldn’t taste the honey but my lips do indeed feel softer! I think there's going to be a jar in my mother's and grandmother's Christmas packages this year :) It should be extra useful for protecting against the upcoming months of biting winter winds.
I hope this blog helps anyone interested in raw, organic natural skincare and makeup that makes you look good in the long-term as well as immediately after you put them on :) Please feel free to use the comments section below to share your thoughts, esp. if you give Chamomile & Honey Lip Saver a try yourself!
Anita x
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