BitterSweet Blog

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Jan

22

Beer and Beauty

By Kristy | Posted: January 22, 2010

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Isn’t January awful? The weather’s miserable, Christmas is nearly a whole year away, and a lot of us have been snowed in. So what do you do when you can’t make it out to the pub? We’ve been spending the time thinking positively, and have been thinking about the many reasons there are to love beer. One reason is that it can be great as a beauty treatment, improving skin and hair. And far be it from me to recommend something I haven’t tried! This month I’ve gone to great lengths – from mashing sweet potato to hunting down Catherine Zeta Jones’s favourite shampoo – to find out the best ways to use beer to enhance your beauty regime. Here’s a summary of what I’ve found so far.

Hair

• Linco Beer Shampoo: Dennis The Chemist tells me that this is Catherine Zeta Jones’s favourite shampoo – I’m unconvinced. It smells like an 80’s hairdressers, and left my hair feeling dry and unmanageable. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re entering a Wurzel Gummidge look-a-like competition!

• Lush’s Cynthia Sylvia Stout: It smells divine and leaves your hair feeling squeaky clean. While it looks like stout, it doesn’t smell like it – so no worries there about smelling like a brewery! I’d buy this again.

Skin

• The beer bath: I added Worthington White Shield to my bath and at first I despaired – my bathroom smelled like an old slop tray. But just like the beer itself, the character of the bath changed and suddenly I was enveloped by a delicious, warm, sweet, malty horlicks smell that was so comforting and relaxing I could hardly keep my eyes open and I could have stayed in it for ever. My skin was soft afterwards and it didn’t make me smell like a half-empty beer glass like I feared!

• The beer facemask, 1: After finding a recipe on BellaSugar, I decided to give the beer facemask a go: all you need is a cup of mashed sweet potato with two tablespoons of beer mixed in. Mixing it up was easy, getting it to stay on my face was difficult – as was getting rid of the orange tinge. Don’t try this one at home.

• The beer facemask, 2: Made out of a mixture of beer, Yoghurt, Olive Oil, egg, lemon and almond extract, this was a lot better than the last one – it hardened like a real facemask and smelled delicious. Really relaxing and worth a try.

So, as you can see, my experiments with beer beauty have been mixed, but definitely worth doing. You can read about all of these in more detail on my personal blog – and soon I’ll be trying even more. I’ll keep you updated!

Have you ever tried beer as a beauty treatment? What did you try, and would you recommend it?