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Why Ghastly
What makes Ghastly different
We believe in ethically sourced, sustainable, organic and gluten-free, plant products to use as ingredients. We use as many hand picked or home grown ingredients as possible in our proprietary herbal vinegar, which is the base to all of our tonics.
Miracle Facial Tonic is handmade, and every batch is personally tested and used by the maker.
When considering skin care, define skin care... Get that image in your mind, then read on.
Over the last 100 years, we have been conditioned to believe that skin care comes in many steps and tubes, and that soap is needed and moisturizer is white stuff that you slather on.
If you need to use soap, even milk soaps, just use them on stinky or dirty parts, or when you have oils on your hands that could be trapping oil based viruses, or are cooking. Do not use soap on your extremities unless you are actually dirty. Your blood vessels and capillaries do not reach your Epidermis, so you must keep Your Epidermis clean and well fed.
Everyone has a soap and some will add DEA, MEA and TEA as foam boosters that not only irritate the skin, but are easily absorbed through the skin and accumulate in the brain and organs. These foam boosters as well as lye, have such high PH that they repel our oils. This disrupts the delicate 3:1:1 ratio of Ceramides to Cholesterol and Essential Fatty acids, which are part of your Acidic Mantel, home of the first layer of defense in your immune system. The Acidic Mantel is also your water-resistant, UV protective barrier. Leave your oils on!
Do you notice that your fingernails leave a white line when you scratch it? If so, your mantel is damaged and all hell can break loose, anything is game... So, if your soap lathers, watch out.
An alternate? use coconut oil and a hot wash cloth to wash your face. It works better, it is antimicrobial, non-comedogenic, it pulls other oils and dirt out of your skin, even cleans water-proof mascara off and it neutralizes odors! Why not! The silver cloths also remove odor and are antimicrobial. If you are a bar person, use sparingly.
"Skin care" companies, small and large, need the look, feel and shelf-life seemingly required, to sell in stores. To get the shelf life needed, people add anti-bacterial ingredients like PEG or Triclosan, which both have release carcinogens.
Preservatives are also used like, DMDM, Urea, the Paraben and Methyl family (Methylchloroisothiazolinone/methylisothiazolinone ). The Methyl family is becoming increasingly linked to Dermatitis, due to long-term exposure and allergic responses. The Methyl family seems to be proving that they do long-term damage.
Dermatitis, Dandruff or Eczema could all stem from an intolerance to this.
The Paraben family are infamous endocrine disruptors that are banned in many countries and are linked to many cancers, especially hormone based breast cancer... Are your hormones imbalanced? Are your carrying excess weight on your hips? or hair on your lips?
Next, these preservatives and chemical liquids have to mix with the nutritional oil ingredients, so they need an emulsifier. If the product is emulsified it is likely comedogenic, you will see that it is white. The emulsion process allows liquids and oils to mix and keep that bond stable. Chemically, this occurs when you add a chemical substance like polysorbates and stearates.
The worst part is when emulsifiers are added to a recipe, processes such as the ethoxylation process, are used to make ingredients more evenly disbursed and more soluble and tolerable for the skin. Other ingredients that go through this process include certain detergents, foaming agents, and solvents identifiable by the prefix, word, or syllables "PEG," "Polysorbate", "Polyethylene," "Polyethylene glycol," "Polyoxyethylene," "-eth-," or "-oxynol-."
Regulation requires that you list in order of volume, the ingredients in the product, not the resulted chemicals created... Though, some like Polysorbate are said to be "safe chemicals" they are reported to enhance the activity of known chemical carcinogens, like Dioxide, while not actually being carcinogenic themselves nor the chemicals lingering in petroleum based ingredients.
Phthalates also function as emulsifiers. They are also used as solvents and stabilizers. Phthalates are endocrine-disrupting chemicals and SVOCs, they are detrimental to the reproductive, neurological, and developmental systems of human from multiple exposure pathways. Children are at a higher level of exposure and more vulnerable to phthalates. ". These are also banned in several countries.
What is interesting about how Ghastly interacts with lotions is that, it exposes them. If someone applied lotion in the morning and then, in the afternoon applied Ghastly; the a.m. lotion will literally reconstitute - meaning that you can feel the original greasy feel.
There are plant, animal based emulsifiers. They are likely comedogenic and interfere with cellular respiration by acting like mortar or be irritating. There are good uses for these, like wind blocks and lip balms.
A common plant based emulsifier is carrageenan, a red seaweed. Green seaweed calms and soothes, red seaweed brings up the blood and causes irritation on the skin and in the linings of your digestive organs. This is often found in foods as well.
Finally, we have Lecithin from egg yolks and soy beans. Something that is okay in skin care products. Just look for organic Lecithin because non-organic soy is treated with Glyphosate and mass produced eggs are inferior in so many ways.
In addition to emulsification, chemical humectants are added, like Glycols. Humans often have a Dermatitis response to Glycols. So, people with dry or irritated skin should avoid these.
Vinegar and Aloe Vera are wonderful Humectants, so we do not need any Glycols either, which are Petroleum plastics. Even the EPA warns not to come into skin contact with glycols to prevent organ abnormalities!
Additional risks are UV disruptors such as, Benzos and zinc oxide. Benzo ingredients are so dangerous that they are stunningly linked to neuronal delay and cancer. Zinc oxide nanoparticles are linked to oxidative stress, organ dysfunction, primarily liver and lung dysfunction leading to cancer. "nano-ZnOs showed dose-dependent toxicity on collagen in skin, potential reasons for which may be that the nano-ZnOs passed through skin due to their small size ". This is why we use non-nano zinc oxide, a larger and heavier zinc oxide, in our High-Noon Balm... This basically reads that it damages your collagen!
Finally, they add chemical fragrances, not made for ingesting, well, you skin absorbs most things that you put on it, so aren't you ingesting it? Yes, that is why autopsies find skin care ingredients in cancer and abnormal buildup in organs, glands and lymph systems, even in the brain. When things penetrate the Epidermis to the Dermis, now the capillaries bring it into your blood stream.
The result? A chemical cocktail to oxidize and poison our body.
There is so much more, its sickening... No wonder skin care is not regulated by the FDA, it wouldn't be legal!
Then, mixing products... Oh my
This is why I made Ghastly. I simply brought back an ancient way of balancing, moisturizing and purifying the skin with herbal vinegar, Aloe Vera, hydrosols and oils ONLY! This is why you have to shake them before every use and store them at room temperature and our of direct sunlight. We are capable human beings and can do these things and we don't need our skin care to last for years! yuck
It is my hope that you have learned a few things and will be mindful of what you put on your skin and ingest.
Tara
https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jat.3027
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.1409200
https://www.healthline.com/health/beauty-skincare/propylene-glycol-in-skin-care#side-effects
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378427412014051
read this one!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6477564/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4056723/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5061426/
I developed Miracle Facial Tonic's because I was tired of hearing about adverse effects like cancers, hormonal changes that have emerged from our skin ingesting topical ingredients. Once Johnson and Johnson admitted that they were aware of the asbestoses in baby powder, I had enough.
The idea of chemicals seemed foreign to me in comparison to what mom had always done. It was a wonder to me how new, man-made things, could possibly be better than nature. Turns out, they aren't, and more chemicals are getting banned every day...
I thought, “Ingredients have to come from nature or how could they make something up that wasn’t from earth”? The answer is in the processes that labs have. To create a chemical, scientists use processes like biosynthesis that change the molecular structure of the ingredient or extract the active ingredients without the catalyst that makes said ingredient usable or identifiable in our bodies, or it creates a volatile substance that may turn carcinogenic when it encounters another substance.
Cosmetic companies also use things that are greasy like wax or petroleum-based products. We read today that petroleum-based products give an instant softness by filling in the cracks, but create long-term damage to the lower layers of our skin… Oh, and don't forget how these two ingredients plug your pores so they cannot absorb nutrients from the air or make their own oils...
I thought, “How awful! There has to be a better way than this”! I looked to my mom about how they took care of their hygiene without running water. My mom told me that her family used to capture rain water or snow then mix it with vinegar and flowers and how they would shine and look so healthy.
After I heard this, I bought a little antique French book about the old ways of bathing, and it was just like what my mom had said!
This was great because it added to the medicinal herbal research that I had been doing for years already (as I had been researching how to make herbal teas for years at that time. Now, I am in a Master Herbalist Program, which I LOVE!)
See, my great grandparents immigrated here from Eastern Europe and some specifically from the Carpathian Mountains in Bucovina, which is split between Romania and Ukraine today. Being a mountain dwelling family, they learned how to care for themselves from nature and passed some of that knowledge down to us. My great grandma was even the town healer in northern Minnesota!
I fully believe that our bodies can heal themselves if taken care of properly with nutrition, stress management and exercise. Then, I wondered, “How can we do that for our skin”? I wanted to create a well-rounded super-food for our skin so that it could heal itself!
In 2010 I added organic cold-pressed oils to my tonic and fell in Love! They are made with temperatures less than 90 degrees, so they contain most all of their micronutrients. They are a mild but powerful way to deliver nutrients from nature to our skin that our bodies understand and are exactly what I needed for Miracle Facial Tonic ~ what I call “Skin Food”!
Steeping my tonic was the easiest thing to learn and it was like making cold-tea right out of my garden and the forest, the hard part was researching which ingredients to steep in it. I did figure it out with years of trial and error and everyone is so pleased.
Finding the right organic Aloe Vera to use was a bigger issue than I thought! All organic Aloe-Vera is not created equal!
For the next 7 years, I kept researching and cross-referencing herbal healing with herbal studies from the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and the National Health Institute, to name a few. I chose the most proven oils to use in my tonic. Eventually, I perfected the ratios, creating what I feel, is the perfect formula, with my favorite ingredients to feed our skin! Then, I made one for several skin types!
I made it available to the public in 2017 after my friends and family hounded me enough to "get it out there".
So, after that, I went with my 82 year-old dad, who is a wildlife artist, to an art show to help him set up and tear down and decided to get a booth of my own next to him. We had so much fun, especially at the German Fest in Otsego where we Polka danced most of the day instead of selling stuff! LOL
I kept going to shows with him and now I go on my own as well as with him :)
I decided to brand Ghastly Good, so I drew the logo to reflect a lot of the ingredients in the tonic and now I keep trying to figure out how to let people know about this wonderful product and someday, I hope to have this be my FT job, as I am an accountant during the day and all I want to do is be in the outdoors.
The rest is history!
Thank you for learning about me and Ghastly Good, LLC!
Love, Tara
This is me, no make-up. Only lip gloss and mascara. Who cares if you have rosy cheeks! Let them glow