Archive for the ‘News’ Category
New Mom Or Mommie-To-Be?
Amanda Reade writes about being glamorous while becoming a mom.
She covers all things beauty – natural and organic – for you and your baby.
She knows how much time it takes to find the best, safe products and shares her experience with them and her daily life as a new mom.
She writes in her blog…
“I know that not everyone has that time, so I want to share those products, tips and deals. I also want to share things I wish I’d known and what I’ve learned on this new journey – all in hopes that it may help other mommies/mommies-to-be in deciding what to buy or choices to make (or NOT make). Or if anything, they can get a good laugh or shed a similar tear.”
If you are a new mom or mommie-to-be, you can learn from Amanda’s journey by following her blog – Sparkles and Spitup – which says it all!
Better Consumer Protection For Skincare Products
All of Gaelle Organic’s products were recently registered for sale in the European Union. Going through the registration process showed us how much better consumer protections for skincare products are in the EU than in the United States.
- Each product had to be examined and approved by a third party chemist.
- The formulas were analyzed to make sure they contained no known toxins.
- Each product was tested for how well its preservatives performed when deliberately contaminated by bacteria, mold and yeast.
- Scientific evidence had to be submitted to substantiate every benefit claimed on the label.
- Every ingredient had to be listed on the label, no matter how minimal the amount present.
Failure to satisfy any of these requirements meant the product could not be entered into the EU’s registry of approved products and could not be put onto the shelves of European stores.
We believe the United States has a lot to learn from these regulations.
We were told that 50% of US products tested in Europe fail the preservative safety test – meaning they will not resist common contaminants. Yet they are on sale in the United States. US manufacturers are allowed to hide chemicals they do not want consumers to know about under a made-up ingredient called “fragrance” and then the product can be claimed to be “natural” or “pure.”
Not to go on about it, but it does looks like, in Europe, governments are protecting consumers, while in the United States, not so much.
Don’t Let Bottled Water Stay Warm
A new study from the University of Florida has found that if bottled water is stored in too warm a place (like your car), it can cause BPA and other chemicals to leech from the plastic into the water. The study was based on prolonged exposure to high temperature, not just an afternoon in the sun, and the amounts of BPA are not enough to make a couple of bottles of water a danger. But if you keep bottled water in a hot garage through the summer, you may want to think about rotating it every couple of weeks.
There’s a movement on college campuses away from bottled water. Students question the wisdom of bottling and shipping water, with all its environmental costs. versus having it delivered through the faucet. They also believe that tap water, regulated by the EPA, is less likely to be contaminated than bottled water, which is regulated by the FDA. So they are mounting campaigns to discourage bottled water use on campus.
Whatever the EPA may be doing, the water delivered by our water company does not taste great. I would not drink it without filtering.
We have a heavy duty carbon filter outside the house that treats all the water on its way in. Most everyone in the neighbourhood has the same. The filter is changed every week by a service company. Then, before it comes out of the faucet, we run it through a reverse osmosis filter under the sink.
Like the students advocate, I fill a canteen with tap water when I’m on the go – no plastic bottles involved. But unlike them, I’m not at all confident that unfiltered water from the tap is good enough to drink.
Organic? You still need to read the ingredients.
Just because a product is “organic” doesn’t mean it is good for you. Gabriella Boston’s article in today’s Washington Post points out that products can be organic and still contain large amounts of things that don’t do us much good – like sugar – and that if we do not pay attention to the ingredient list on the label, and become complacent because a product is “organic,” we could be missing the larger point – that it contains ingredients we are better off without. 
This applies especially to skincare. For example, one of the very few effective preservatives permitted by the USDA’s Organic Standard is alcohol, and alcohol has to make up about 14% of a product’s content for it to work as a preservative. Just because it is organic alcohol does not make it good for skin, especially dry skin. So, like sugar in organic food products, there can be ingredients in organic skincare products that we would be better off without. Paying attention to ingredients remains key, whether a product is “organic” or not.
(You can read the Washington Post article by clicking here, or on the image above.)
Ojai – Our Home Town
Nice piece on CNN about Ojai, our home town. They call it a “nouveau hippy utopia.” You can see the article by clicking on the picture below (it’s a view towards the ocean from Meditation Mount, at the head of the Ojai Valley).
Aside from the hippy-hype, Ojai’s a lovely place to live. It’s beautiful, warm, and has a truly friendly community – just like most small towns in America. I don’t think we notice how really friendly we Americans are. It’s just more obvious in smaller communities, where there isn’t so much bustle.
Sex Appeal Boosters
Turns out we are more attracted to faces that glow naturally from eating fruits and vegetables than we are to sun-tanned faces. This is according to 3 scientific studies published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
This reinforces an earlier study we wrote about that found people who eat plenty of fresh produce have a more attractive complexion, due to the carotinoids in their diet – carotinoids are what give fruits and vegetables their vivid colors.
So if you are thinking of using a sun-bed this winter, think again! You’d be better off in every way if you ate more fruits and vegetables.
Meditation and Anti-Aging: Exciting New Science
There’s a lot of research been done about meditation and its psychological benefits; the same for its health and wellness effects. Now, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Elizabeth Blackburn, is investigated how meditation actually slows down the core aging process of the body.
You can read about Professor Blackburn’s work in this article – Can meditation really slow aging?
I’ve long advocated meditation for beauty. and if anti-aging is an interest of yours, here’s another good reason to start meditating!
Having Beautiful Skin At Any Age
You can have beautiful skin at any age. It’s just a matter of how you take care of yourself.
Check out this photo of Sophia Loren, taken in Somalia in 2006, when she was 72.
What beautiful skin! You can’t get that from surgery.
Fortunately, it just takes a couple of minutes of simple daily care.
Click on simple care to learn how you can create beautiful, radiant skin. It’s easy!
How Can A Product That Contains Carcinogens Actually Be Good For Us?
According to the largest-ever study of the health effects of coffee, it looks like coffee drinkers may live longer.
The study was published by the New England Journal Of Medicine, where the researchers state that
“In this large prospective study, coffee consumption was inversely associated with total and cause-specific mortality.”
Yet coffee contains over 20 compounds that have been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. And there may be more. A thousand or so additional compounds in coffee have yet to be tested. We just don’t know.
So how can a product that contains known carcinogens be good for us?
When we drink coffee, we benefit from the whole coffee bean. But if we isolate individual compounds from coffee, we can have a whole different experience.
Which underlines the fact that nature packs super-complex chemistry into deceptively-simple packages. We are only beginning to understand it. But it is clear that the benefits of the whole are different from the effects of the parts.
And that is why at Gaelle Organic we use whole natural ingredients in our products, in preference to synthesized ones.
