The Recipe for Radiance: Discover Beauty’s Best-Kept Secrets in Your Kitchen (Running Press (April 22, 2014)
It’s no secret that I prefer homemade beauty products to store-bought ones. And I think the best beauty treatments are those that can be made with stuff from the garden or maybe the fridge. The Recipe for Radiance: Discover Beauty’s Best-Kept Secrets in Your Kitchen
Alexis Wolfer is a beauty and lifestyle expert (apparently nicknamed the “Female Beauty MacGyver”), and the founder and editor-in-chief of TheBeautyBean.com. Her book is all about how food can heal and promote a healthy, glowing skin and hair. The Recipe for Radiance includes recipes to boost the health of your hair and your skin from the inside, and DIY beauty recipes for the face, the body and the hair using natural ingredients: fruit, vegetables, herbs, yogurt, honey… There are recipes for face toners, treatments for puffy eyes, recipes for sunburned skin, treatments for dry hair, DIY beauty products for acne spots, treatments for brittle nails, recipes for cellulite or for dry chapped lips; all using ingredients from the fridge or the garden.
Recipes to Feed the Skin from the Inside and the Outside
The book is divided into sections for face, eyes, body and hair, and these are divided into subsections for different skin types, different types of hair or problems such as puffy eyes or under-eye circles. Now the best part: each sub-section has recipes for DIY beauty products using mainly food ingredients, AND recipes for dishes that can boost the health of your skin or your hair. Healthy eating is just as important for the health of your skin as what you put on the skin externally. For a skin that suffers from rosacea there is a Cucumber and Rose Redness Remedy that you can combine with Mint + Ginger Green Tea Lemonade. The Iced Tea Toner is for under-eye circles, and there is a creamy kale and walnut salad to eat too. For the summer, the Cooling Cucumber Mask can be used on sunburned skin while you enjoy a Shaved Fennel and Blood Orange Salad.
I’m happy to see that many beauty treatments in the book can be created with simple, everyday ingredients most people are likely to have in the fridge. Some home beauty recipes I’ve seen in books and on blogs recently are incredibly complicated and expensive, mostly because they involve ordering dozens of different types of rare ingredients. Those recipes are fun too, but generally I prefer simple ingredients that I can find in the garden. I’m just about to try the Avocado and Oatmeal Revival Mask for dry skin (oatmeal, avocado and honey), and I can’t wait to mix up some Healing Herbal Tonic with basil, sage and thyme…This book is a must to have on hand for self-care.
