Summertime wreaks havoc on our skin – face and body. Our skin is exposed to sun, dunked in drying chlorine, covered in sunscreen, and let’s not forget icky sticky sweat. All of this can result in either flaky skin or clogged pores – or worst of all, both. This is why it is so important to exfoliate religiously throughout the summer. And that is why this week’s sale lets you save big on all of our exfoliating products!

Exfoliation removes the outer layer of dead skin cells and reveals fresh, younger looking skin. It helps to keep pores unclogged and skin extra smooth. It also leaves skin primed perfectly for moisturizing, so it should be followed immediately after with your face cream (for faces) and body lotion (for body).

As you can imagine, your skin is extra sensitive after exfoliation so it is extremely important to wear sunscreen after exfoliating when you are going to be in the sun (clearly it’s important to always wear sunscreen in the sun, but after exfoliating you should be extra careful!).

Also – you should take care not to exfoliate too frequently. In general a good rule of thumb is twice a week for your face, and up to 3 times a week for your body. Oily skin can typically benefit from 3 times per week for your face, and sensitive skin should generally be only once per week. Doing it too frequently can cause damage so you want to be sure not to overdo it.

Lastly, for faces, be sure to use products that are designed for your face – NOT for bodies, which can be too harsh. And watch for products with crushed seeds or similar exfoliants as they can scratch skin and cause damage.

So this week’s sale is giving you a big ol’ 20% off all of our exfoliation products -

Starting Over Microderm Scrub – this is our first facial exfoliator and a personal favorite. It uses the same microcrystals used by the dermatologists to do the very expensive microdermabrasion treatments. But this way you can get similar results at home -for a lot less money! This scrub is in a natural, paraben-free, creamy base that leaves your skin soft, smooth and hydrated and helps to even skin tone, reduce fine lines and unclog pores. (NOTE: The offer is good on both the 2 oz. jar as well as the 2 oz. eco-friendly refill package!)

Break Free fruit acid gel – Break Free is the newest addition to our facial exfoliators – and quickly rising to the top. It is a fantastic dermatologist-grade product that is amazing for oily/problematic skin as well as dry skin (however, it is not recommended for sensitive skin). Break Free has three alpha-hydroxy acids that pack a punch. Simply apply in a thin layer on the face (avoiding eyes) and leave on for 1 to 3 minutes. Then rinse with cool water. You know immediately that it is working as it tingles, signalling that it is removing the dead skin cells. Repeated use of Break Free can result in a reduction of thickened skin, the evening of skin tone, and a reduction of breakouts and blackheads. Oh – and of course fewer fine lines and wrinkles!

Pucker Up Coconut – Pucker Up is our body exfoliator. It is perfect for the summer – and because it is a sugar scrub (not a salt scrub) you don’t have to worry about stinging! Pucker Up is packed in a rich, thick and creamy oil that leaves your skin incredibly smooth and soft and hydrated. Bonus – it’s fantastic for shaving!

Don’t forget, all of Garden Girl’s products are carefully crafted in the US with the highest quality ingredients and are always free of parabens, sulfates, petroleum products and phthalates!

This week’s offer is at www.gardengirlskincare.com and it is valid thru Friday, July 3rd at midnight. But to take advantage, you have to sign up for our email list! Go to www.gardengirlskincare.com and sign up right there on the home page. You will get a $5 coupon emailed to you, plus we’ll send you the email with this week’s offer code.

GoodGuide.com has a great post (http://www.goodguide.com/issues/2009/3/26/goodguide-transparency-manifesto). In it, they discuss the need for new labeling requirements for food – and I wholeheartedly agree. However, I won’t hold my breath! The FDA is so understaffed and underfunded that I think it will be years before they move toward this comprehensive list of changes.

But there are lots of things that they are proposing that are very interesting. They are requesting new requirements that include listing:

1. Where it came from:

• Disclosure of where ingredients were grown and processed. For meats, this should include where the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered.

• Tracking and labeling throughout the supply chain, with a process for tracing contaminant issues.

2. How it was made:

• The use of synthetic pesticides.

• The use of hormones.

• The application of antibiotics.

• The presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

• Animal cloning in meat and milk production.

• Food Irradiation

• USDA Organic production standards.

• Explanation of a company’s food tracing and contaminant control program from farm to table.

3. What’s in it:

• Complete ingredient lists, with details of common allergens, applied to restaurant items as well as store-bought foods.

• Nutritional information normalized to a standard serving size.

• Explanation of levels of nutrients that may be harmful (such as saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and sugar).

• Contaminants such as pesticides, methyl mercury, or PCBs that remain in the product, even in trace amounts.

I don’t know about you, but increasingly I feel like I have little idea of what goes into what I’m eating. We have become accustomed food that is so processed – with ingredients sourced from so many places. Movies like Food, Inc. will be very eye-opening for many people, and hopefully will have an impact on the industry. Fingers crossed!

The Green Blog in the Boston Globe posted on Monday that the Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal “is investigating whether industry officials are using ‘fear tactics, political manipulation, and misleading marketing’ to fight regulation of the chemical, which is used in hundreds of everyday products, from baby bottles to canned food.” Connecticut is a leader in the fight against BPA, having recently passed a ban on the use of BPA in plastics used by children and babies.

A couple of weeks back, I posted about the meeting of corporate minds when industry leaders met to determine a PR campaign that suggests that BPA is not as dangerous as it really is. Blumenthal wrote a letter to the companies that were involved – including DelMonte and Coca Cola – asking for details about the meeting and the notes that have been circulating.

I hope other states, including Massachusetts, follow Connecticut’s lead and start banning the use of BPAs.

This week’s sale is a big fat 25% discount on all 3 of our face cleansers. Good deal, eh? We have a cleanser to match whatever skin type you have. Not sure? Email us at questions@gardengirlskincare.com and we’ll work with you to figure out the best choice. And don’t forget – Garden Girl products are always free of parabens, sulfates, petroleum products and phthalates.

Normal/Combination – choose You’re Fresh herbal face wash with aloe, tea tree oil, lavender and vitamin e. Packed with pure extracts and essential oils, this face wash is perfect for keeping skin clear and balanced.

Dry/Sensitive/Mature Skin – choose Oasis for Faces with hydrolyzed oats, aloe and silk protein. This is the gentlest cleanser that leaves skin fresh, clean and hydrated – never dry and tight.

Oily/Problematic/Acne-Prone – choose At Long Last with gylcolic acid and seaweed extract. A cleanser packed with glycolic acid that keeps your oily or problematic skin clean and clear without resorting to harsh chemicals. It removes dirt, dead skin and excess oil, leaving your face smoother and brighter.

So go have fun and enjoy the savings. But to take advantage of the offer this week – you need to be on our email list. If you haven’t signed up yet, simply go to www.gardengirlskincare.com and sign up for our list on the home page. Not only will you get a $5 coupon, but you’ll also be emailed the coupon code for this week’s offer.

To be honest, if Garden Girl used synthetic fragrances for all of our products, it would be far easier. Working with essential oils can be tricky – they can be inconsistent, and it is challenging to get the exact same scent each time. This is why our Alive lotion, just as an example, can smell more like peppermint one time and a little more like basil another. Even though we use a specific proportion each time, the individual oils can be stronger batch to batch. So it isn’t easy – but we make the extra effort for good reason. Fragrances are typically jam packed with all kinds of ingredients – mostly chemicals and petroleum products.

Did you know that the word “fragrance” is all that needs to be listed on a label even though it can contain hundreds of ingredients on its own? One of the most concerning issue with fragrances is phthalates. You have probably heard me rant about phthalates before – they are of deep concern because they are considered to be key factor in birth defects in the reproductive system of male babies, plus there is a possible link to breast cancer, along with numerous other potential issues.

Fragrances are also considered to be one of the top five known allergens (again, likely due to the fact that there are so many components) and also a potential neurotoxin. According to EWG, “as far back as 1986, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences identified fragrance ingredients as one of six categories of neurotoxins (chemicals that are toxic to the brain) that should be thoroughly investigated for impacts on human health. However, this research has not been demanded or funded. The FDA has taken no action on a petition submitted to the agency in 1999 requesting fragrance components to be listed on labels.”

Doesn’t sound so great, does it? That’s why we have decided that the quirkiness of essential oils are a small price to pay to ensure the safety of our products.

Today we let our 9-year-old ride his bike to the library by himself. Actually, I rode with him there to show him where to cross, where to be extra careful etc. since he’d never gone by himself before. I have to admit I was a wreck – I realized that I told him to cross the street at a spot that had good visibility on the way TO the libary, but on the way HOME it was terrible. Would he figure it out? Would he be smart and safe? What if he wasn’t paying attention and he got hit by a car? I started imagining the worst.

Now some people may be thinking – what’s the big deal? And really, that’s how I was raised – I walked to school starting in Kindergarten. I took the subway in the suburbs with a friend to the Mall in 3rd grade, and all the way to downtown Boston in 5th grade. But I know that there will be far more people reading this that will disapprove. People say things are different now. There are more people in the world and the world is more dangerous. But really – is it that bad?

We have become a society obsessed with protecting our children. We don’t let them go off to college without calling them 5 times a day on their cellphone. Our kids are carted from one organized activity to another starting at a young age and we are hovering all the way through high school and beyond. Mom or Dad seems to be there always. We worry if we drop them off and leave Little League practice. What happens if Johnny gets hit with the ball after I leave? What if Susie twists her ankle? What if my child walks to school and someone abducts her? We judge parents who aren’t as “careful” as we are.

All this makes me wonder. What are we teaching our children? To be scared and worry about everything? To only feel safe if they are with Mom or Dad? Shouldn’t we be teaching them to be confident and secure? Shouldn’t we teach them tools and strategies so they can do things and make smart decisions and figure things out on their own? That’s certainly the kind of person I want my boys to be when they grow up.

It just so happens that today, when my son earned another notch on his belt of independence, there was a very interesting article by Joanna Weiss in the Boston Globe. In it, she says she insisted that her 5-year-old not wait for her on the front porch while she ran into her suburban home to grab something she forgot. She wanted her daughter to come in – “just in case”. Then she started thinking about it.

To get perspective, she talked to Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is the woman who recently caused so much controversy by writing about letting her 9-year-old son take the subway in NYC. She is now expanding her cause by writing and speaking about Free Range Kids. She believes that we are doing more harm than good by being helicopter parents. Turns out, statistically speaking, you would need to leave your child waiting on the front porch for 750 THOUSAND YEARS before she would be abducted. Really. So I say – let’s let the leash loose on our kids just a bit. I’m not saying we should let them do whatever they want and go all over the place by themselves. I’m saying teach them responsibility and good decision making and let them test out their independence as they grow.

The look on my son’s face when he came home – safely! – today was priceless. He was trying to be very cool and nonchalant – but he was bursting with pride. I knew immediately that we’d made the right decision. Later, I asked him about crossing the street at that bad spot I was worried about. He said he had to wait a long time until it was safe, but he could see the cars before they disappeared behind the bushes so he knew when it would be OK to cross. Good decision.

Boy we had many entries for this contest – and some people really were very creative in their responses! Even though the drawing is random, I really love reading the fun things that people write. Some people already are Garden Girl customers and others are hoping to try our products for the first time. But don’t forget, if you didn’t win, you can always try Garden Girl without any risk – we have an excellent return policy (which we can do because we are so confident you’ll love the products!)

OK, I know you’ve probably already skipped down to see the winner’s name anyway, so here it is:

Caroline Scannell of Massachusetts (no, I didn’t play favorites for the “local gal” to win!)

Caroline – I have your email address so I will be in touch. For everyone else, be sure to sign up for our email list (you can do that on our home page at www.gardengirlskincare.com). Not only do you save $5 on your first order as a “thank you” for signing up, but you also get special offers and early notification of our contests. Also – if you’re on Twitter you can follow me @GdnGrl and also get updates. So sign up, then stay tuned for another contest coming soon!

Wow – EWG has done it again. Instead of sounding like whiners, they always find great ways to exemplify the issues with chemical and toxin exposure that grab your attention and have an impact.

This time, they looked at 5 women from all over the country, from different cultural traditions and are exposed to different environmental hazards outside of their homes. These are no ordinary women – they are 5 women who have been fighting against environmental pollution for years. But rather than testing the women for the big industrial chemicals, they chose to check for household chemicals which drives the point home that we are bombarded everywhere we are. This is what they found:

“All 5 were contaminated with flame retardants, Teflon chemicals, synthetic fragrances, the plastics ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) and the rocket fuel component perchlorate.

Each had a high body burden of at least one controversial chemical whose lack of regulation and widespread presence in American life is fueling debate over reform of the nation’s toxic chemical policies.

Overall the women tested positive for 48 of 75 chemicals for which EWG-commissioned laboratories searched, with a range from 26 to 45 per person.”

So you have to figure, these are women who are more aware than the average person of the toxins in their surroundings. And they STILL found all those chemicals. Scary to think about what we are probably carrying in our bodies. Really – doesn’t it seem that it’s high time that chemicals and toxins get a lot more attention from our regulatory agencies – and that the companies who produce the chemicals take responsibility for what they are doing to us all?

If you’d like to read more about the study, check out the EWG blog

Looking for our weekly sale? Well this week it is only available through our email. If you haven’t signed up for our email list – what are you waiting for? Not only do you get a $5 coupon for your next order, but you also get sneak peeks at our weekly specials and extra info.

So go to www.gardengirlskincare.com – and right there on our home page is a link to sign up. It’s easy!

I’m very excited to say that I have found a decent (not perfect – but what is??) sunscreen for faces. It is paraben-free AND oxybenzone-free – which is incredibly hard to find. (read about oxybenzone here) Plus there is no “nano” zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. My family and I tried it this weekend and it worked very well, and it didn’t sting anyone’s eyes (bonus).

The active ingredients rate well on EWG for protection and decently for safety. As I’ve said before – the ultimate is a sunscreen with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide that is not “nano” – but unfortunately that type of suncreen is very thick and white and leaves your face white if you sweat or get wet. Not pretty. Blue Lizard Baby or Sensitive fits the bill so we use it for our bodies but I have been seeking an alternative for the face and it looks like I might have found it!

So if you have a Trader Joe’s nearby – check it out! And if not – again, my recommendation is to find a product that does NOT have oxybenzone. But lookout – it’s in almost everything!