Plant-Powered Beauty: The Essential Guide to Using Natural Ingredients for Health, Wellness, and Personal Skincare

No Series
NON-FICTION / BEAUTY
SOURCE: Netgalley / ARC



You know your diet should be rich in plants for optimal health. So shouldn’t the products you apply to your skin, which are absorbed into your body, also be filled with plants?

If you’ve ever looked at the back of your so-called “natural” facial moisturizer or body cream and seen a list of complicated additives you couldn’t recognize or pronounce, then you know firsthand that mass-produced synthetic beauty products can be something of a mystery.

With Plant-Powered Beauty: The Essential Guide to Using Natural Ingredients for Health, Wellness, and Personal Skincare (with 50-plus Recipes), harness the power of plant-based energy to maintain your natural beauty and let your skin glow like never before. Natural beauty experts Amy Galper and Christina Daigneault show readers how to deconstruct beauty labels, parse ingredients lists, make informed choices about the products they use—and, most important, better understand how their skin works.

There are a lot of natural beauty books out there, and almost all have similarities.

This one boasted some perks and differences:

  • - The details of deconstructing the label with this before discussing details on carrier oils and ingredients.
  • - It goes into much heavier detail of plant extract differences and methods compared to a lot of beauty books outside of actual herbals.
  • - The Essential Oil section is generous, including a lot of mood and themed blend ideas.
  • - Beautiful and colorful pictures (Full page)

There are fifty 'recipes', almost all tying back to Essential oil synergy blends listed in the front of the book.

It's an excellent book for beginnings and those wanting to expand on basic recipes -- but while I found the information itself quite details, the recipes didn't offer up anything unusual. In other words, if you have some natural based beauty books already, you've probably seen similar recipes with the scrubs, masks, powders. 



Some recipes:

Almond Milk Facial Cleanser
Anti-aging Facial Scrub
Blemish Gel
Choc-o-Mint Lip Balm
Coconut Whip Makeup Remover
Vitamin-Rich Hair Health Serum
Quick and Fresh Cucumber-Thyme Body Scrub
Moisturizing Body Oil for Super-Dry Skin
Natural Mouthwash 

 
The book doesn't offer any natural makeup ideas, which was a disappointment. While it shows a unique way to make lotion bars without worrying about getting special containers, it stays away from any water and cream based moisturizers and lotions that would require preservatives, so it's understandable why that was left out.