Doesn’t that just sound like I strung a bunch of random words together?
This is another stuff-that’s-almost-food post. First we had the incense for food-lovers; now there’s the self-care products for food-lovers.I have loved Lush for a long time, because their products are really natural and fun and they use whole entire foods in them. Like, this mask lists “organic free-range farm-fresh eggs” in the ingredients. I’ve seen a lot of good stuff in skin and hair products, because I shop in hippie stores. But I’ve never seen one that went so far as to include organic, free-range fresh eggs! They can’t even sell it online because it’s so fresh, although it’s lasted a couple of weeks so far in my fridge. (Oddly, it appears to be available online at their Australian site – what’s that about?)
Oh, my god. It smells so intensely good, you guys. It has this intensely perfumed honey scent, from actual honey instead of from some chemicals that smelled more like honey than anything else so the thing got called “honey” flavor. It’s a sweet, fruity, spicy smell. It smells like everything that I used to love in stores, and then not let myself buy because I thought it was too expensive and frivolous – you know, to take care of myself.
As I get more recovery around money issues, too, I have started to notice that in fact stuff is not that expensive. Take this stuff: it’s $10.95 for a little bitty jar. Okay, that seems pretty freaking pricey. But when you factor in how incredible it is for my skin, and the great physical and emotional benefits of taking care of myself, and the fact that you don’t use that much for a face mask so this thing has weeks and weeks of use in it… $11 and change after tax doesn’t actually seem like that much money to spend. (And if you go to a Lush in person, you can also ask for a free sample of it to try before you commit to the whole little pot.)
I got it for myself for my birthday, and shared it with friends at a skin-care party. Natural Health magazine had instructions for a “weekend skin detox” that I figured we could easily do in a day, which included using honey itself or a similar mask to moisturize and detoxify the skin. After a day that started with detoxifying tea, exfoliating, moisturizing, a brisk walk, and this mask, my skin felt incredible – like really soft porcelain. Incredible! Normally I don’t even wash it, so you can imagine how big the difference was.
More importantly, using it felt like making a promise to myself. A promise with actual follow-through. I’m 30 now, and I have a lot more experience taking care of myself and loving myself than I used to. I deserve good self-care and things that feel luxurious and abundant, and so do you. It was a wonderful birthday practice to slather myself in stuff that smelled amazing and made me feel incredible. And it was a great way to make amends to myself for all the times I’ve passed over cheap-but-expensive-seeming things I need and then wasted that money on bounced check fees, snacks and meals out because I hadn’t planned or shopped for groceries ahead of time, and binge-shopping because I don’t have that sense of luxury and I want something to make me feel that way. Recovery is so much easier than that way of living, but I never could have imagined it when I was living in chaos.
