Green for a Day: Homemade Beauty Treatments

This morning’s beauty ritual:

Yes, really. I’m soooo expensing my grocery bill, y’all.
So, as promised, after Googling homemade beauty recipes far and wide (here’s just a sampling of what’s out there), I opted to go with whichever ones I could make without a special trip to the store. This was surprisingly easy — the only common ingredient I was missing was an avocado, which can pretty much be used for ANYTHING. Hair, face, eyes, hands…whatever needs a good moisturizing.
First up, a mayonnaise hair mask. After finding a ton of conditioning recipes involving oil, egg yolks, vinegar and lemon juice, a couple sites pointed out that hey, you’re basically making mayonnaise there, why not skip the blender and go right for the jar?
That’s my kind of lazy. So a half cup of mayonnaise (applied to dry, unwashed hair) and a couple sheets of saran wrap later, I had my revolutionary costume for the day…

I’m too sexy for your potato salad.
Now, I love mayonnaise, but hoo boy, does a half cup of it stink. The plastic wrap helps though, and now I’m totally in the mood for a BLT. (Just to balance out all this good-for-the-planet stuff with some bacon consumption.)
Leave the mayo on for 15 to 20 minutes. Just enough time for a face mask.
One tablespoon of honey, one tablespoon of yogurt and one egg yolk.

That healthy salmonella glow!
This concoction smells way better than the mayo, but hoo boy, is it a drippy mess. I tried adding more honey in hopes of thickening it up, but no dice. I smeared it on with my fingers (and then promptly had a sneezing fit, which was super fun), and kept dabbing at my mouth and eyebrows and nose with a paper towel to catch the drips. It eventually sort-of hardened, just in time to wash it off.
I washed everything off in the shower (I left the plastic wrap on until after I rinsed the face stuff off) and then shampooed and conditioned and washed my face as usual. (I decided to save the homemade shampoos and conditioners for another day, but hey! My Pureology is vegan and I recycle the bottles. So there.)
My hair was nice and tangle-free afterwards, and my face felt very tight. I swore my pores looked a little smaller, too. Behold the power of yogurt! My scalp felt a tad itchy though.
But before declaring myself done, I had one more treatment to try. A grated raw potato, wrapped in cheesecloth, applied to eyelids in hopes of lightening my under-eye circles.
Now I have to say that I was impressed that we had cheesecloth — it seems rather gourmet of us, considering I have absolutely no idea what we’ve ever used it for. Anyway, I grated the potato and made a couple eye-socket-sized pouches.

You gonna eat your tots?
The all-knowing Internet said to hold them over your eyes for 15 minutes, which didn’t seem like that big of a deal until I put them on my eyes, held them there for what felt like an eternity but was actually only two minutes. Bah.
I almost gave up after five minutes, but upon looking in the mirror found that my circles looked worse. So I gave it another five minutes. They looked better. Enough! Done.
A half-assed product-less blowdry and makeup application later…

My hair is ridiculously soft and shiny, if a little flatter than usual. And I SWEAR I STILL SMELL MAYONNAISE. My skin and pores are very tight but I discovered some fairly annoying dry patches when I put on my makeup. (Dammit! Where’s an avocado when you need one?) And I’m not really sure the potato did much of anything that a dab of any random eye cream couldn’t do.
All-in-all, these experiments were pretty fun, and I think this would be a great way to host a girls’ spa day on a shoestring budget. (Brides and shower-throwers, take note.) I’m definitely going to play around with the recipes and see if I can refine the results a little (clearly the face mask was too harsh for me, or I left it on too long), but since these fancy once-a-week deep treatments tend to be some of the most expensive beauty products on the shelf, going the natural route (at least occasionally) is a great way to shrink your beauty budget.
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