I discovered Cycleina Organic Soaps through a friend. She gave me a couple of bars late last year, and I have been using them ever since. Cycleina is a small company based in the Philippines. They take pride in making hand made soaps using the traditional cold process. All of their ingredients are pesticide free and are guaranteed to make your skin feel absolutely wonderful after each use. And they are not just saying that as a marketing stunt. As I told you earlier, I have used these soaps and they are for real!

Cycleina has several varieties – or flavors as I like to call them – of soaps. My personal favorites are the coffee soap, peppermint, and tomato. The coffee soap has coffee grinds in it, which make it perfect as an exfoliant. The peppermint is great if you want to feel refreshed. The tomato is excellent for the face. For more information, visit the Cycleina web site.

Well think again. You may not be aware of it but the chemicals in some hair products can be awfully harmful to the environment. Would you really want excellent looking hair at the expense of the environment?

Here’s an alternative – using natural products that work just as well, maybe even better. I found a formula to make your hair look fuller and to get rid of the effects of the sun and wind.

Big Body Hair Rinse
2-4 tablespoons dried nettles
1 cup purified or distilled water
3-5 drops lavender essential oil (optional)

1. Combine herbs and water in a stainless steel or glass pan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer, covered, for half an hour. Remove from heat and let cool, then strain out the liquid and discard the spent herbs.

2. After shampooing, gently towel-blot your hair, then wrap a towel around your neck. Leaning over a sink or basin, apply the rinse with a spout bottle. For extra potency, pour over a basin so the rinse won’t drain away, then pour the collected liquid through the hair to use every drop. Do not rinse out. Blot hair dry with a towel.

I think that you can buy nettle tincture from the drugstore to make things easier for you. I mean, who would have the time and means to go walking around looking for nettles?

Rebecca Lacko from The Examiner recently featured hair washing in her environmentally-friendly column. She mentioned how “in our pursuit of conquering the unruly, straightening the tightly curled, curling the poker straight and tinting the color, our hair is repeatedly abused with countless chemicals, and stripped of its natural oils—and both are washed down the drain by gallon after gallon of water.”

As such, she suggests that hair washing should be washed less frequently. Here are some reasons.

Waste and expense
a. most use way too much shampoo and conditioner, too often
b. gallons of water to rinse it out
c. more bottles of product mean more packaging waste
d. less power used for blow dryers, curling irons and/or flat irons

Now that I think about it, it does make sense. It’s not just the water and the hair products that are involved here – the blow drying and other things associated with washing your hair also puts stress on the environment.

Allowing the scalp’s sebaceous glands to do what nature intended
The function of sebaceous gland is to secrete an oily substance to protect the skin from getting dried and scaly. Otherwise the skin after getting dry would shed off.

Maybe that is why some people have problems with dry itchy scalp?

In any case, if you wash your hair every day, you might want to reconsider that habit.

Welcome to Yurto, the blog about eco-friendly living in the home. Inspired by the yurt, an ancient circular dwelling place built in tune with nature, we hope to explore the ways we can all make a change for the better in the world that we live in – beginning from our homes.

Why is it so important to go green? Al Gore, who woke up the world with his now-famous documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, puts it succinctly:

“…Some of the leading scientists are now saying we may have as little as 10 years before we cross a kind of point of no return, beyond which it’s much more difficult to save the habitability of the planet in the future…”

10 years??? Now that’s a scary thought.  If you have children like me, that’s enough reason to stop procrastinating and do something about NOW.

So from plastic to canvas, wasting to conserving,  lets find ways to care for the earth while we can and live healthier, happier lives.