Review on hand cream (Crabtree & Evenlyn, La Prairie and Neutrogena)

I have a sweet sister-in-law who claimed that she has never got any luck when it comes to lucky draws. Well, she is wrong. She has been very lucky recently. She won herself an iMac during her company's annual dinner, and one week later she got herself a Crabtree & Evelyn Avocado ultra moisturising hand therapy during a small Christmas party. Sweet as usual, she never forgets about me; she decided to gift this hand lotion to me as my 1st Christmas present this year (probably the one and the only one haha!). Thank you ASC (her initial).

So in this post, I am going to write my review on this hand lotion comparing to other hand cream that I have used.

First of all, I would like to correct myself that I am not the person who like to apply lotion on my hand and body. In fact I hate to be covered by layer of lotion. They normally feel sticky, greasy, unbreathable. And all because of that, I become very picky when it comes to hand and/or body lotion/cream. That's why, I believe I can give a fairly good review on hand and body lotion/cream.

Right below are the photos of my Christmas present, selling at RM78 in Malaysia. More details please click here for their website.

I love the smell of this hand cream (although a little bit stronger to me) and the texture is great! It melted and absorbed quickly into my skin without any greasy or sticky feeling and my skin can still breathes happily (ok, I know it sounds funny).

I have once given a sample of La Prairie Cellular Hand Cream I know this is a much expensive product which I should be kissing and value it like a treasure. However to my disappointment, this is not the type of hand cream I would like to have. I don't like the smell, it smells really strong and I don't like the texture as well. Alright, I got to be fair a bit here, some of you may like it if you have a really really dry skin. But I will not recommend this to those who has sweaty hands as it makes me feel like as if there is one layer of stuff covering my hands. I never managed to finish this small little sample and it gone bad before I realise it and throw it away.

I have only bought one hand cream in my life so far and that is Neutrogena Hand Cream. It was recommended by a good male friend of mine who claimed that he has sweaty and yet very dry hands. He swears that this is by far the best product he has ever tried. I bought this product with no regret. It really did what it says - "just a dab relieves dry chapped hands". With just few small dabs, I can apply to both hands front and back including all my fingers! It smells nice, very light; and it absorbed into my skins in seconds. My hands feel smooth, nice and again; breathing happily! It lasted very very long (years for me as I don't apply them everyday).

On top of the smell and texture of the products, I would also like to compare the safety of the products. I have stumbled upon this website where you can get rating of the safety of the products. They give you the explanation on the ratings as well. If you are serious about environmental and safety of the products you are/will be using you will be shocked by the findings of this website. Not all products claimed to be natural are safe and vice versa.

Now, please see the ratings of the three hand creams here (0-2 low hazard, 3 - 6 moderate hazard, 7-10 high hazard):

1. Crabtree & Evelyn Avocado Hand Therapy - No rating for this product. But most of their products are moderate hazard.

Crabtree & Evelyn Naturals Botanical Body Butter, Avocado Butter, Olive & Basil is rated at 6. Giving this product having the similar ingredients, I would suggest the rating of this product to be the same.

2. La Prairie Cellular Hand Cream - No rating for any product of this brand

3. Neutrogena Hand Cream - Rated "3" - moderate hazard

None of the products above are consider safe! You need to score 0 to 2 to be green and safe enough in this website. Well, at least they are not high hazard (apart from La prairie as there is no rating on this product).

These are just my reviews and no offend if you feel otherwise.

Christmas Eve... I wish all of you have a peaceful silent night!

My Breast Milk Soap

To those who is not following my blog, just to recap that one month ago I have sent my breast milk to this lady, Patty; to make breast milk soap (I have shared in this post). And after a month of waiting, I have finally got contacted by her that my breast milk soaps are ready for collection. I had a nice dinner with Patty and collected my 40 pieces of breast milk soap.

This is how it looks when I reached home and unpacked my soaps:

This is the closer look of some of my breast milk soaps:

Aren't they sweet and cute? They look delicious! Yummy! Next is, I need to get a soap dish for the yummy soaps....

I have all together 5 types of soaps and each of them carries different benefits, but all of them are meant to be gentle and good on baby and sensitive skins:-

1. Purple artemisia breast milk soaps - Great anti-oxidative properties. Good for stressed, dry skin. For skin protection and anti-aging purposes.

2. Bitter gourd breast milk soap - Detoxifying. Good for skin ailment such as acne, herpes, eczema, itchy/heat rashes. Improve skin complexion and dryness.

3. Purple seven white breast milk soap - Mixture of seven types of Chinese herbs. Good for healing, whitening, reduce scars and skin radiant

4. Hinoki breast milk soap - Great antiseptic properties (Sooth and heal). Good for skins prompt to allergy, eczema, and psoriasis.

5. Purple calendula breast milk soap - Great anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties. Good for dry or damaged skin and also promotes the fast healing and regeneration of the skin.

These are just the short summaries of some of the many benefits of the soaps. If you want to know more about the benefits of the soaps please click here for Patty's blog post, she has mentioned about my breast milk soaps in this particular post. Of course she has many more type of soaps that she can make and you are recommended to go and explore her blog or website. 

If anyone of you is interested to try the soap, yes they are for sell. Please feel free to contact me for price.

I will definitely try them out and share my review here.

Christmas is around the corner, I would like to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas. It's going to be a special Christmas for me this year.... with twins in my arms....

 

Revamp

As I have promised, I have decided to give my 1st homemade breastmilk lotion a rescue on last Saturday. From what I have gathered from online readings, I can add more water/breastmilk/beeswax or add cornstarch to my breastmilk lotion to make them less greasy (but I don't know if less greasy will help with the stickiness). I am not sure if I will like the texture of the lotion with cornstarch, so I have separated my lotion into two bowls. One to add breastmilk where the other one to add breastmilk as well as cornstarch. And this round I will be added sweet orange essential oil hopefully to cover the coconut oil smell.

It was actually very simple, re-melt the lotion (again with double boiler) and add the mentioned stuff into the melted lotion. My 1st bowl I have added another ounce of breastmilk plus few drops of sweet orange essential oil. For 2nd bowl I have added one ounce of breastmilk, few drops of sweet orange essential oil and one tea spoon of cornstarch.

This is how it looks after I have melted my lotion, it looks just like breastmilk!

This is how they look after I have added the breastmilk, essential oil and cornstarch (for my 2nd bowl), whisking and left to harden. I have transferred them into two seperate containers:

But I don't know why when I whisking the 2nd bowl (with cornstarch) my breastmilk seems to be not able to stick to the lotion? look at the white colour liquid in this bowl, I have to throw the water away.....

The result? Not as satisfied. Yes the sweet orange smell is there to make my lotion smells better, but if pay attention the coconut oil scent is still there. Although it is less greasy and less thick/hard, more to lotion consistency; it still gives the stickiness and greasiness; only lesser compare to before. Well, sad enough the cornstarch did not do the magic, the lotion with cornstarch does not feel any different from the one without it. There must be something that I have done wrongly. Which I think I will need further research.

I guess next round I need to use a different base oil. As for now I have to struggle and scratching my head thinking of ways to use my coconut oil and grapeseed oil that are bought purposely for the lotion making.

Sweet Patt had contacted me the other day that my breastmilk soaps are ready! I am going to collect them tomorrow! I will share with you about my breastmilk soaps in my next post.

My 1st DIY Breastmilk Lotion

I have been searching around for breastmilk lotion recipe since the day I started accumulating breastmilk in my freezer. As a beginner, I was looking for something simple and easy, and of course as natural as possible. I want something as basic and chemical-free as possible. So I stumbled upon this recipe below from this website here which seems to be simple and easy:

BREAST MILK LOTION

3 ounces of breastmilk

3 ounces oil (grapeseed oil for sensitive skin)

1 tablespoon of beeswax

a few drops of Vitamin E oil

optional: add essential oils for therapy/scent

Microwave the oil and beeswax slowly just until the beeswax melts, approximately 3 minutes.

Add the Vitamin E oil and slowly poured in the room temperature breastmilk while whisking rapidly until it thickens

(you can use an immersion blender to mix if preferred)

Pour into shallow jars or lotion tubs. It will continue to thicken as it cools. Refrigerate and use for up to 3 months.

 

Two weeks ago, I finally decided to try it out and this is what I have used for my own breastmilk recipe:

 

3 ounce of breastmilk

1.5 ounce of extra virgin coconut oil

1.5 ounce of grapeseed oil (edible type - good for cooking and also cheaper compare to the cosmetic type)

1 table spoon of beeswax pallets

1 vitamin E capsule

and I gave the essential oil a pass

 

Step 1:

Mixed coconut oil, grapeseed oil and beeswax in a double boiler (I have read somewhere that microwave is not an good option) under slow heat and wait for the beeswax to melt. It took about 10 to 15 minutes for the beeswax to melt and turned off the fire.

 

Step 2:

Broke one vitamin E capsule and dropped the vitamin E oil in. That was about 3 to 4 drops.

 

Step 3/Final step:

Poured in room temperature breastmilk and start whisking. The moment I started pouring the breastmilk the liquid started to thicken.

 

This is how it looks:

  

 

 And after cooling the lotion, I poured them into few small containers:

 

It was fast and easy up to that point but how is the texture? How does it feels like putting on my skin? Well, It feels greasy and sticky on me! And it smells just like coconut oil without the essential oil. I personally do not like the smell as well as the texture, let alone to put them on my babies' skin. I have put them in my fridge and it really thicken more in the fridge. Maybe that's why my sister and other family members do not find it greasy, but they do agree with the stickiness.

So what went wrong? Is the stickiness due to the type of oil that I have chosen? coconut oil? or grapeseed oil? Or that I shouldn't be choosing edible grapeseed oil? Is the greasiness due to too much of oil used? is my 1:1 oil to breastmilk ratio too greasy? I find the lotion too thick (feels almost like balm, which I don't mind) that may be due to too much of beeswax used, again; I don't mind that. I later did some searching online and found out that ratio as well as type of oil really do make a lot of difference.

Now what do I do with my failed lotion? They are still in my fridge and I have decided to melt them again and have my second round of DIY fun over this weekend.

Please feel free to drop me comments to share with me your experience, or tell me what went wrong or give me advices on how to improve/rescue my lotion.

 

 





Breast Milk Soap

I have in my earlier post mention about extra breastmilk in my freezer, and yes I have like 20 packs (each pack is around 12oz) at this moment and increasing..... that makes me seriously looking into ways to use up my breastmilk. Having packs of breastmilk filling up your freezer is no fun, very soon my freezer will be running out of space.

About a month ago, that was the time when I started to have breastmilk accumulating in my freezer (thanks to my daughter who decided not to like older refrigerated expressed breastmilk out of the sudden) and started looking into ways to turn breastmilk into other product(s). I have heard about  breastmlk soap long ago from my husband's cute little niece telling me story about her mom's friend turning extra breastmilk into soaps and gifted one to her. But when I checked on the recipe; it's not as simple as I thought and I did not know where to get all those ingredients for soap making. One of the main ingredient needed will be lye, and handling/heating lye in my kitchen doesn't sound fun or easy at all. Safety would be my main concern (forgive me if I am wrong, some of you may tell me it's totally safe to handle lye). Then I found this website/blog (Lullabelle website and lullabellesoap.blogspot)  which is selling homemade soaps and other related products as well as conducting soap making classes. The blogger also helps mothers to turn their breastmilk into breastmilk soap and that is totally what I was looking for!!So, I have contacted the blogger, who is a very nice lady, Patty; and we started to discuss on her charges (which was very clearly listed out in her blog/website) and the arrangement to hand over my breastmilk to her. Whoever is interested in homemade soap and other related products, I strongly recommend you to go and have a tour to explore her website as she has got so many type of homemade soaps and other related products. Trust me, you will have fun exploring.

So, I have sent 5 packs of breastmilk to Patty and that will make 5 batches of soaps (about 8 pieces per batch). And that was in early November. It has been a month since then and my soaps are still not ready yet (it takes a while for the curing) but I shall have them soon! I can't wait to see those cute soaps and use them on my babies!I will definitely share about it when I received my soaps.

Next post, my 1st DIY breastmilk lotion.

Introduction

Welcome to Hill's alley blog, a blog that shares about my life, my experience and DIY experiments. Let's start with a bit of introduction about myself in my very 1st blog post.

I am a mother of a pair of 5 month old twins (one girl and one boy), oh yes you may call me lucky and I will happily admit that. There are so much to learn when you become a mother and on top of the list, breastfeeding most probably is your most exciting and challenging one. My journey of breastfeeding is not a smooth one but I still manage to breastfeed them along the way, although not fully; and maybe I will share with you in another post. If you are one of the lucky mommy who is blessed with a good supply of breastmilk, you may probably face with excess breastmilk stored in you fridge and don't know what to do with them. Of course the best way is to donate them out to those who is needed, but how about the expired one? and/or for some reasons you are not able to donate them out? No I am not the lucky one, but I do somehow ended up with extra breastmilk storing in my freezer and the quantity is still increasing. So here I am, starting my journey of searching ways to put my breastmilk into good use and share them here. Everything starts from breastmilk.

Go googling around and you will be surprised by how many things you can do with breastmilk. The best is to use breastmilk as an ingredient for your food recipe where you can enjoy the nutrition of the breastmilk directly. Unfortunately, even though it  is totally alright; many of us will find consuming breastmilk unpleasant (I am truly impressed with those husbands who don't mind consuming their wives' breastmilk). Then the other way is to apply breastmilk externally. You may apply breastmilk to your skin directly but again, many of us may not like the smell and the texture/feels of it. If applying breastmilk onto your skin is not an option, then you turn them into something you don't mind to put on your skin!! So I started to find methods and recipes to turn breastmilk into soap, lotion, cream and etc. In this blog you will find me sharing my DIY experiments, both failed and succeeded; and you are free to comment or share yours so I can learn and improve from there.

My next post, breastmilk soap.