Self-Care: Make your Skin Beautiful with Olive Oil

Healthy Self Care 

After a traumatic year of lockdowns and with the current uncertainty, you'll need to find ways of staying calm and grounded. Healthy self-care beauty routines with olive oil could help.

 

Do you struggle to find time to care for your body? Did you fall into the trap of making a list of self-care beauty resolutions you couldn’t keep last year? If you’re a working mother, practical well thought out intentions might be your best option, beauty treatments you can do at home. You could set an intention to look into ways of caring for and protecting your skin.

The good news is that natural extra virgin olive oil is chockful of healthy ingredients that work not only from inside the body but also on your skin. The start of the New Year is the perfect time to get your self-care routine going.

The top three essential components in this liquid gold to help you are :

·        Vitamin E, recognized for numerous health benefits due to its antioxidant properties. Check out the ingredients of skin products; you’ll find that most skin creams, lotions, and sunscreens all contain vitamin E.

·        Olive Oil also contains oleic acid, a monounsaturated healthy fat with antioxidant properties that adds a protective layer to the skin.

·        You may not have heard of squalene, a natural compound contained in olive oil. Squalene, also present in the skin's outer layer, is a lipid that protects you from environmental toxins and helps retain moisture.

 

Body Massage with olive Oil

Nothing beats a massage for feeling relaxed at the end of the day. Adding olive oil helps as the body tends to get dry during the winter months.

Start by putting 200 milliliters (7 ounces) of olive oil in your massage bowl, add the juice of one whole lemon and about eight drops or so of lavender oil, the essential oil recognized for its calming and relaxing properties. Your self-care oil is  ready to use.

 

For Shadows and Dark Rings

Those bags under your eyes are from stress, lack of sleep, and sometimes hereditary factors. You've heard of home remedies such as cucumber and teabags, but did you know you can also use a mixture of olive oil and lemon juice in your self-care routine?

Mix two tablespoons of olive oil with the juice of half a lemon. Using a cotton ball apply on the eyes, press lightly on the dark circles for five minutes, then rinse.

 

Face Mask

Cleansing the face is vital every evening, the best way to remove all the grime and dirt from the day and makeup. Ever so often, though, you need to go deeper, to pull out those impurities beneath the top layer of the skin.  Here’s a treatment you can use once a week that will also unclog your pores and get rid of pimples caused by bacteria.

Mash half an avocado with some olive oil and make it into a paste. Smooth it unto your face and leave for about 15 minutes or so and then rinse.

 

Olive Oil as a Natural exfoliant

Your body gets rid of dead skin naturally, but once a month or so, it’s good to push things along – to help your skin get rid of dead skin.  Use this paste for your self-care beauty routine.

Mix two teaspoons of sea salt with three tablespoons of olive oil. With the tips of your fingers, rub the mixture onto your face, neck, and body using circular movements. Pay special attention to the thicker skin of your knees, elbows, and the T zone area of your face (across the forehead and down the nose).

 Exfoliant 2

This sugar exfoliant, a mix of sugar and olive oil, is suitable for particularly hardened areas like the knees and elbows. Mix equal parts olive oil and sugar into a thick paste, rub into the hardened areas, leave on for about 7 minutes, then wash and dry.

Olive Oil bath

For all-over body smoothness, add a few drops of extra virgin olive oil into your warm bath.

 

Extra Virgin Hair Olive Oil and Hair

Don’t neglect your hair, include your hair  in your self-care routine. Of course, you want shiny, healthy hair. We all do.  Harsh hair products, dyes, pollution, and too much sun can cause hair to look brittle and attractive. Using olive oil regularly can restore the moisture to your scalp while strengthening the hair follicles.

Olive Oil Hair Mask

Heat3/4 cups of extra virgin olive oil in a pan or warm in the microwave for a few minutes.

Rub this into the scalp, gently massage, continuing right to the ends of your hair.

Put a towel in the microwave for a few minutes until it is warm but not too hot. Wrap the towel around your head for at least 30 minutes to let the warm oil penetrate. Wash your hair as you usually do with a mild shampoo.

 

There's no better time to start exploring healthy self-care intentions using extra virgin olive oil. A calming routine between work and home could just be what you need to  help  unwind, relax and recharge. 

Check out  7 Wonders of Olive Oil for more healthy options for 2021.

 

 

Photo Credit:JerzyGorecki   Pixabay.

Salad Niçoise: Adding Hearty and Healthy Ingredients as desired

 A  French chef recently got himself into trouble for cheerily telling viewers to add beans, potatoes, and parmesan in his salade niçoise recipe. It wouldn't be so bad if the report were in the local press, but this was on National French television Chanel 6. 

Purists defending salade niçoise, a salad made in the style of Nice, claim salade niçoise should only be made with the freshest of uncooked vegetables. You can’t help feeling sorry for Cyril Lignac; he had to put up with loads of unfair comments from angry spectators. With words such as 'Defiling our culture,' the poor guy felt compelled to revise his original recipe containing 17 ingredients.

It all seems a bit unfair because Lignac is not the only French chef who strayed from tradition. French culinary writer Auguste Escoffier (1846 – 1935) also added green beans and potatoes to his salad niçoise.  Defenders also attacked Escoffier saying he was not a real Nicois (a resident of Nice), which is unjust  as he was born in Villeneuve-Lou bet, a few villages away from Nice.

And, if you type in salade niçoise into your favorite search engine, there are tons of made from heaven recipes for this French classic. Purists should recognize sticking to traditional methods does not make us creative and adventurous when it comes to cooking  and enjoying food.

 Making  olive oil (so important for any salad nicoise)  is an excellent example of how traditional methods can improve over time. Today, most olive oil mills have a centrifugal system of pressing olives, replacing the original millstone method, which was unhygienic and time-consuming. But some consumers still look for olive oil pressed the authentic way, holding on to a tradition that is no longer efficient.  On visiting a modern mill at harvest time, they are surprised at the progress  commenting on how clean and odor-free the premises are.

Thankfully extra virgin olive oil is much tastier and healthier, all because of new modern techniques

To  summarize, holding on to tradition is not always the best solution.. And don’t fret, you can add whatever vegetables you like in a salad niçoise.

Here's what you need for a colorful, healthy, vibrant salad niçoise. 

Salade Niçoise 

 Salade Niçoise   – 10 ingredients

3 large eggs
Cos lettuce leaves
250 gms. French (green) beans
1 Lebanese cucumber sliced
½ red sliced onion
4 tomatoes cut in 8
3 waxy potatoes cooked and  quartered
1 tin of tuna chunks or fillets in olive oil, drained

1 can of anchovies in olive oil, drained

½ cup of green or black olives

Oleocanthal a Key Component in Olive Oil acts like Ibuprofen but doesn’t harm the body

Extra Virgin Olive Oil  from Casa des Hualdo  October 2019 

You must have noticed that peppery sensation at the back of the throat when you sip neat olive; it stings and may even make you cough.  It’s irritating; it’s pungent, even unpleasant. What you should know though is that these are all definite signs of good quality olive oil. And, the more peppery, the more stinging, the better the quality of the oil.

So why do you get that stinging and irritating?

It shows that the extra virgin olive oil is fresh, made with early harvest olives and contains a high percentage of a compound called oleocanthal.  This naturally synthesized anti-inflammatory was discovered by chance in 1999 by the researcher Dr. Gary Beauchamp in Sicily when he attended a symposium on newly pressed olive oil. 

The visiting American followed the instructions for olive oil tasting. He cradled the cup and sipped the samples.  To his surprise, he noticed the same throat stinging sensation similar to liquid Ibuprofen, the project he was working on at the time. Gary Beauchampwas intrigued. Subsequent analysis identified oleocanthal as the cause of the stinging sensation, a compound that proved to be an anti-inflammatory.

Research showed, for example, that oleocanthal, like Ibuprofen, inhibits the production of the two enzymes that cause arthritis.

Oleocanthal and Arthritis

Arthritis is quite simply inflammation of the joints caused by two inflammatory enzymes, COX-1 and COX-2. If the inflammation of these two enzymes continues unchecked, it causes damage to the cartilage and, eventually, the bones themselves. And once the deformity sets in, it cannot be reversed.

Doctors recommend anti-inflammatory drugs in particular Ibuprofen to reduce the pain and swelling from rheumatoid arthritis.

What’s great is that scientists have discovered that oleocanthal, like Ibuprofen, inhibits the production of the two enzymes that cause arthritis. It does so without causing harm to the body, unlike Ibuprofen which can  irritate the esophagus.

 So next time you're sipping extra virgin, look out for bitterness, it's loaded with  oleocanthal, the natural component that comes from the purest of olive oil.


Photo credit: Cécile Le Galliard