How are all of You, I hope You are great? Today is the day I will share my early summer 2019 favourites in collaboration with the ever fabulous fellow green beauty blogger Laura Bruj. You should go and check her out (I will leave all the links at the end of this post) and you will be glad you did – she is US green beauty blogger who is making waves into the right direction, she focuses on all things plastic free, sustainable, natural and as much waste free as possible, and is not afraid to call out greenwashing brands. You just got to love her for it. But wait, there is more – she is also a Youtuber (again, find the link at the end of this post) and she is so good with make up that she is making me all jel – a green beauty chameleon for sure. You just have to scroll her IG page to see for herself.
Let’s see my current favourites now and go see Laura’s favourites straight after? Done deal 🙂
Have you ever thought what lipstick Audrey Hepburn wore? And if yes, do you want a natural alternative to it? I must admit that thought never crossed my mind until I watched Lisa Eldridge’s video about her putting Audrey’s DNA on her lips (go see her Youtube video about it) – Lisa is the last non natural Youtuber I watch, simply because I adore her personality, looks she creates and techniques she uses – and in fact she does use some natural and organic products. So while I watched the video, the lightbulb moment hit me – I knew in an instant what the natural alternative is, so instead of keeping it to myself, why I don’t blog about it to let people know? Maybe there’s a soul out there wanting the exact same thing, the Audrey Hepburn look sans the harmful chemicals that comes with it. I mean everybody knows about the lead in the conventional lipsticks many many times above the allowed limit (why is there lead in the lipstick to begin with?). If this post will help at least one person, I will be a happy (cruelty free) bunny 🙂 Continue reading “Audrey Hepburn lipstick natural dupe”
How are all of you, I hope life is treating you well? I’ve been thinking about my favourite products lately and which ones are long standing ones, and I have came up with a blog post on the spot – let’s see my ride or die favourites from 2018 still used daily today?
Firstly, let me just say that Love Lula is the only subscription box I am getting, and I am really happy with it! I’ve been getting it for around a year and a half maybe, and I have to say they do a very good job at including a good variety of products, apart of a few tiny missteps of too many scrubs or face oils in a row, other products were a delight to discover, and I have to say I am looking forward to each new month in anticipation to what’s to come – Christmas or Birthday present for yourself each month, anyone? They ship worldwide, and the price is 14.95£ monthly recurring for UK customers, and for us international gals there are two options of three months (52.50£) or a year (210£) including post and packaging. Green beauty boxes are a great way to discover new items you might have missed otherwise, and I love that anything coming from LoveLula is cruelty free and guaranteed not to have any toxic ingredients – they have very strict criteria for any product they accept, and that is taking the guesswork off your shoulders. International boxes sometimes differ from the UK ones due to Love Lula not being able to ship nail polishes or perfumes.
Welcome back! And welcome, if you are new here 💕💕💕
So as I mentioned in my weekly musings post here, I have a new found love and a new hobby of creative journaling, and some of you wanted to know more – so this post is for you!
You see, I might have a *thing* or two or three or four or five or six or seven about cute stationary, and I had for years. One of the things I was looking forward to every single year was opening a brand new diary, but in all honesty, I never found them quite fitting to my needs. I mean how can anyone fit everything they need to jot down into those measly ten lines a day? I can barely fit all I want to write down onto the whole page – until I get bored/ frustrated mid April and forget about the whole thing until October or something. As I need to keep track not only of the household stuff but also blogging affairs, I spilled over to spreadsheets, which isn’t quite also me – too rigid and not creative enough. So my life was forever changed when I discovered creative journaling is a thing on Instagram – search #creativejournaling and also #bujo and yours will be too! True to my style I soon fell down the rabbit hole. Continue reading “Let the creative journaling begin!”
If you read any of this kind of posts (see here & here) you will know what they are all about, but if not, let me tell you. in these kind of posts I am letting you into my world behind Green Life In Dublin. If you tried your hand at blogging, you might know how much of hard work goes into it – everything from taking decent pictures to testing the products (six weeks for skincare, no less in my case!) to hours and hours of research on newly discovered brands, products and ingredients, to actually finding time to put the review together – it is just a lot, man. And don’t get me started on the other side of blogging, the upkeep of social media! Sometimes I am on top of things for weeks, but other times I am drained, not going to lie. Coupled with busy family life and work with their own stresses and struggles – that’s a lot of plates to spin. And I feel deeply tired. Today is the last day at kids school before Easter Break, and I am typing this straight after the school run, even before my breakfast, all while trying to remember my today’s to – do list in my head and trying to mentally calculate how to cram everything I need to do in less than two hours, because today is a short day at school. All of the rooms need hoovering and mopping, I have a mountain of clean clothes on the dryer racks staring at me right now, with loads of washing waiting. Hello, my name is Renata, and I am never caught up with the laundry, ever. My mind is drawing a blank on what to prepare for dinner later today, and let me confess I am not looking forward to the kids playdate later today. The friend stays over for four hours at a time, so you can imagine the noise and the mess – I am feeling drained just thinking of it. Now that I am typing all of this, I am kind of realizing I have been running on empty all this year past New Year’s Eve. You know Blue Monday? Well, it kind of is still going strong for me.. I think I need a break.
Ok, pull yourself together Renata, people are not here to read about you losing your marbles – and besides, when you are tired, learn to rest, not to quit. I thought of quitting for a second, when I had hell after posting a bad reaction to a certain brand’s product. What happened next, the brand owner immediately flagged me to this green beauty heavyweight, who came down like a ton of bricks on me – her email hurt far more than my burned face. The brand has to deal with negative publicity because of my actions, I now lost all my credibility and so on. I will spare you the details and the names, but I won’t ever forget it.Being far away from everything and everyone in this Green Isle, I keep forgetting that everyone else is connected and can and will use those connection to shut mouths. So, all this aside, let’s look at the things I have been doing/ reading/ watching /brainstorming lately? In no particular order, here they are.
The latest reading list can be seen on my IG post here:
See my thoughts on these books in the comments. Any recommendations for good books in the health and wellness realm are always welcome, so please feel free to share. And thanks for the Dublin City Libraries for making this possible 🙂
I don’t know how about Your country, but here in Ireland climate change is happening in front of our very own eyes – it is 12th of April now, and yet the grass is frosted in the mornings, what is happening? I am not the gardener of any sort, but I think that is not a good news for plants & I assume it will affect the produce. The wind stays freezing cold even if the sun is shining, I haven’t felt brave enough to ditch my winter jacket yet. Imagine feeling hot and cold at the same time? Yes, that’s me most days. The last winter jacket I had from Next was not wind-proof at all, so I spent the last two winters shivering cold, even though Ireland is blessed with mild winters, the temps dropped below 0 for about a week only. Now that we are technically well into the spring, there’s still so much of colds and coughs going around. We missed quite a bit of school due to illness in winter, so despite feeling majorly under the weather, we are soldiering on – I give the kids NYR Organic Elderberry Syrup & NYR Organic Thyme & Honey Syrup – feeling kind of panicky, because I am on my last bottles of both. Mentally taking note to watch out for 20% off NYR sale, haha! We have had a couple of storms this winter, but thanks God nothing like The Beast From The East last year – that experience has left me scarred. Up until then I was lax about the demand-supply of products, but funny (not!) how a bit of snow can stop the entire country in it’s tracks when they’re not used to it! I still remember camping in the bedroom for a week straight because out east facing living room was 5*C FRIGGING DEGREES WITH NOT ONE BUT TWO HEATERS ON! I had to wear a coat and a hat inside to go cook some sort of a dinner, which consisted throwing something into the over and then quickly running back. It was even less funny when we ran out of the food on the day three, ventured out into the cold only to find all the nearest supermarkets and convenience shops closed within ten mile radius. (except for one Russian shop, which saved us then). So my mind, fuelled by the anxiety, is now panicky before every winter and I feel the need to stock up on absolutely everything I could possibly need to last us the winter. If you want to see what natural remedies, teas & homeopathic remedies I tend to stock on, let me know and I will be happy to put that blog post into schedule come next autumn. It wouldn’t make much sense before it, would it? For those of you with you with no patience (like me), there’s this post right here on my natural arsenal against colds & flu (with a fabulously bad pictures to match) and a post on OreganolP73, which is the natural antibiotic I use here. The products are mostly the same, if I find something that works, I stick with it.
Umm, for some reason I can’t see the captions on any IG posts when I browse on my laptop, only on my phone – does anyone else have this problem too, could you let me know?
I have been upping my trusty Tea Which Keeps Me Well In Winters– that applies for any time of the year, plus it is delicious, so I think you would benefit from reading that post too 🙂 Other tea favourites of the moment include matcha, Yogi Throat Comfort and Numi teas with turmeric, which are the best kind of turmeric teas around. I scored them very cheaply from Holland & Barrett a while ago, and now seeing how good they are, I would be happy to pay their worth – only to find out they have been discontinued. Just my luck, huh? Something else I am looking into in natural health realm, is liposomal vitamin C, a thing that is new for me – which is supposedly the best vitamin C on the market, made in a way that it bypasses the digestive tract and goes directly into the cells?? I have to be honest, I balked at the price of it – 50€ for 30, way out of my price range as it is, You need to take two packets per day, which makes it last for 15 days, meaning it’s 100€ for a month for me alone. So if I wanted to get it for my family for four winter months, I would need to spend I-need-to-sit-down-for-this 1600€!! I know, I know, you can’t put price on health, the health is a foundation of everything. But even if I had that much money to burn, I’d put it away for a house deposit if I am honest. So my curiosity was piqued immediately if there’s any way to DIY it, and turns out there is! There are lots of videos on Youtube, which I am not going to link because I don’t have makers permissions to do so, but now that you know, you can search for them yourself. Unfortunately all of them used a sonic jewelry cleaning machine (say what?) and I don’t have it. I have left my research there and then, with a thought to come back to it the first chance I get, which never happened… Anyone knows anything about DIYing it? Any tips, clues or links to clean food grade Vitamin C (not produced in China) would be appreciated. Also, any holistic tips on exposed gums? that’s another thing worrying me greatly. I have been doing this DIY oil pull from the Nadine Artemis awesome book The Renegade Beauty, which is basically coconut oil with probiotics and I am experimenting adding things like turmeric and coconut charcoal to it. If you want to see the rest of my super simple DIYs, see this post. Oh, by the way, this book is absolutely awesome, I highly recommend it. If you buy only one book this year, this is it 🙂 Your mind will be blown, promise.
I also took a bunch of new photos for my Natural Beauty In TKMaxx post on my recent visit to Blanchardstown store, so keep an eye for that, I am going to update the post really soon.
What else? I have been doing Oprah’s and Deepak Chopra’s 21 Days Meditation (it is still on, look for it on social media!) but I just can’t do it for the life of me.. Seemingly simple act of stopping my thoughts for 15 minutes is impossible for me. I try to do it while the kids are at school and I am home alone, but the monkey brain can’t be silenced no matter what I do – the best I have done is sitting still for about seven minutes and then getting up to continue doing stuff on my to do list. I have also been watching The Truth About Cancer The Eastern Edition and taking notes, but only from episode 6 only. Also I recently discovered Mark Hyman’s The Doctor’s Pharmacy podcasts, they sound good! Now that I think back, maybe I should have added all those with the reading list to my recent Favourites post?
What also should have been added to that favourites post is my new found love for creative journaling, something I also wasn’t aware of before. I always had a *thing* for cute stationery, notebook, diaries and such, finding them not quite suited for my needs, I am now jumping for joy at the thought of creating my own! I am working on my post of it, as I am still a beginner and not sure if I want to share my scribblings versus true art I see on other people’s pages. If you are like me and in any way inclined towards journaling, just search #creativejounaling or #bujo (short for bullet journaling) and your life will be forever changed 🙂 I predict you might part with your cash in your nearest art and craft store soon after, just like I did.
That’s it for today, see you here next Tuesday, my posting days. I think I will publish prepared posts in the next two weeks, but will skip the social media thing to give myself a bit of a break, I hope you are cool with that?
Please like and share my posts on social media, it really helps to get the green beauty word out – and you will forever have my gratitude!
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