Once upon a time the business of shopping was very simple, but now it seems that purchasing even the most everyday of products requires a long period of squinting at a big list printed in small font, trying to remember whether parabens were good or bad, essential oils to be avoided or welcomed, ginger extract suitable for muscle cramps or not.

Unlike natural and organic skincare products, many of the intensively branded, expensively marketed, high profile products subsidise their marketing budgets by using liberal quantities of chemicals and synthetics, often to extent a products lifespan (allowing the shipping between factory and shop shelf to be unhurried) or to perfume a product that would otherwise smell of burning plastic or chemical death.

Whilst analogies between the food industry and the skin care industry are not perfect - after all, one does not have to be a incurable cynic to suggest that some of the big brand food manufactures out there use more dubious ingredients than we might like - what is certainly true is that the privileging of organic, or at least relatively additive free foods has not entirely crossed over in consumer's attitudes toward skincare.

This is crazy, because our body absorbs around sixty percent of everything that we place on our skin, meaning that ingredients in our creams and lotions become just as cosy to us as the food we eat.

For this reason more and more people are turning their attention away from the well advertised, but not entirely beneficially constructed, big brands and taking the time to find out about the benefits of various natural and organic ingredients. Whereas a couple of years there was the assumption that the more ingredients a product had contained within it the better it was for us, now the tide is shifting, and many of us are aware that a well produced and packaged product consisting of a few genuinely beneficial natural or organic products can far better meet the needs of our skin than it's chemically cousins.

An example of a fantastic natural skin product is Scin Boutique's very own This Works Deep Calm Bath and Shower Gel. Rather than other, non natural shower gels that we can choose to lather onto our body, our This Works products work their magic thanks to the fantastic natural properties of the plants that we use as ingredients. In the case of our Deep Calm shower gel, lavender - grown at high altitude in France - is used for its antibacterial properties, as well as for its calming and relaxing scent.

In addition wild camomile, grown in Morocco, is used in combination with vetivert for their calming and soothing properties (anyone who has ever enjoyed a cup of camomile tea will attest to its relaxing properties).
Another great body wash on the market which utilizes the power of natural ingredients is the Green People Nourishing Body Wash.

This product uses ylang ylang and ginger for their natural uplifting properties, and avoids parabens and other artificial fragrances that can lead to the 'chemical cocktail' - the unpleasant thought of many different chemicals penetrating and remaining in our bodies.