very good book

very easy recipes for making your own beauty products. I loved the soap recipes, but you do need to start with a basic soap and shred it and remold, so you're really just "adding" to a soap that's already been made. Very basic, fun recipes, great for kids! I am a huge olive oil fan, and I really enjoyed making some wonderful olive-oil products.

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Simple, fun recipes

I've bought a number of natural beauty books, and this is one that I use again and again. The recipes are simple enough to put together in 10 minutes, which is very important to me--I know it's lazy, but if a recipe takes too much prep work, I usually won't fit it into my schedule. Another thing I like is that the recipes are in small batches; I can try them out without wasting a lot of expensive ingredients if I decide I don't like the recipe (and because they're natural, they're less likely to do natural things like grow mold or go rancid before I'm done using them). I've had no problem finding all of the ingredients on the web--it would be hard to shop for them in a grocery store. The author gives you enough guidance to start as a beginner, with lots of encouragement to try out your own adaptations.

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Nice for beginners, but...

The recipes are okay if you're just starting out, but her creams tend to be high on oil and low on water. I find that the proportions in her cream recipes don't work very well for my skin (but they could very well work for yours. Everyone's different). For this reason, I didn't rate the book very highly. There is nothing here that you wouldn't find in other more comprehensive books (e.g. Earthly Bodies, Heavenly Hair by Dina Falconi). I was also mystified by Ms. Byers statement that facial steaming was bad for everyone (or something to that effect). It has certainly been wonderful for my skin, although obviously, it is not something I would do everyday. I've also read in Beauty magazines that many supermodels steam their faces regularly. For the amount of money I paid for this book, I felt I didn't get very much.

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