• 1 Tablespoon French Green Clay, finely ground
• pure aloe vera juice
• 2 drops German chamomile or helichrysum essential oil

In a small bowl, use a wisk or a spoon to combine the clay with enough aloe vera juice to form a smooth, spreadable paste. Stir in the essential oil.

APPLICATION TIPS: Use fingers, spread paste onto the face and neck and allow to dry completely fpr 20-30 minutes. The mask will seemingly lift and tighten the skin. Rinse with cool water and pat dry.

Excerpted from Organic Body Care Recipes by Stephanie Tourles

 Stacy Malkan: Why We Made The Story of Cosmetics.

Recommended for all skin types. Use as necessary. Shake well before each use and store in a plastic or dark glass spray or spritzer bottle. Yield: approximately 1 cup.

• 1 cup aloe vera juice
• 20 drops lavender essential oil
• 10 drops rosemary (verbenon) essential oil

Place all ingredients in a storage container and shake well. Keep refrigerated and use within 4-6 weeks. Use as often as needed.

Organic Body Care Recipes by Stephanie Tourles

After watching the video, please do your part! Send a message to your elected officials to sponsor this bill! Just about every last one of us has been affected in some way by cancer, infertility and other environmental diseases. Passing this bill is the starting point to get the cosmetics industry to clean up it’s act. 7o years is long enough to wait, don’t you think? I know for me it is. My husband is a two-time cancer survivor (non-Hodgkins lymphoma) and changed our lives forever. If reform could have happened, say, even 30 years ago, well, I guess I wouldn’t be writing this now, would I.

[ Hi All -

So glad many of you are enjoying the daily updates on our facebook and twitter pages and our FAQ page. We don't want to spam you with our updates now that the crisis has calmed down, so we are just sending monthly email newsletter updates, and we are posting all blogs, newsletters etc. on our website, which is currently getting a facelift Thanks to amazing volunteers: Paul Goulart www.sayfamily and Eric Wood www.franwoodmac.com

As you know the Gulf spill has been capped and the mysterious oil is staying mostly offshore (except for where BP is present). The theories are that the oil is hard to find because some has evaporated and much has sunk as a result of the Corexit (dispersant) that was used. Oil based synthetic boom is now being sold in hardware stores in the Gulf and the Coast Guard worked with us to help with the awareness for pick up of oiled materials (including hair, fur, fleece & feather boom). When we give out boom we are also providing this 1 866 448 5816 number which we are told is good for pick up for the entire Gulf. When we say fleece we are referring to waste fleece - not the fine fleece fibers which are a commodity. We have stuffed about 1/10th of the donated fiber (hair, fur, fleece & feathers) thanks to hundreds of volunteers! We are consolidating the 19 generously, temporarily donated warehouses as it has now been over 3 months. That's an unusually long spill and the continued press and word of mouth brought in over 100,000 boxes, bags, truckloads of your donations! We have all seen how impressive renewable resources are! There is always more hair, fur, feathers and fleece when you start collecting it! We've been getting lots of emails from generous salons and groomers and farmers wanting to send more and we just can't take any until we have the room. This really highlights the issue that it is so silly to drill oil to make oil based synthetic boom to soak up oil spills, when we have so much of this absorbent fiber available, sorted and ready for use! There have been 2 more large oil spills in the US in the past week. And anyone who needs donated boom both in Michigan (Kalamazoo - we love saying that!) and the Mud Lake spill (2nd Gulf spill) can email us at team@matteroftrust.org.

We are still correcting the stories that came out a few weeks ago that said that hair and fur and fleece and feathers don't soak up oil and that our booms don't float etc. Luckily, they were quickly shot down by thousands of people testing it themselves - that's the thing about such a low tech material, anyone with a haircut try soaking up oils and can stop propaganda for only using synthetic solutions. No boom is working great on the Corexit mixed sludge, but our booms work just as well on the sheen, lighter oils and plumes in the water and it's free and renewable. As for floating higher in the water, many fishermen emailed us and suggested buoys and pool noodles saying if you can make steel ships float, floating a boom is really easy! But, interestingly, it was the sinking oil that got us looking at our floating booms in a new light. They have now been adapted to help with this crazy Corexit oil. We now have been donated thousands of recycled coffee bean burlap bags to cover the booms. Thanks to Tereson Dupuy of fuzzibunz.com a cloth diaper manufacturer with lots of sewing machines in Louisiana and John Nistler & Anna Keller of Gulf Coast Recovery for this design. With grommets added to make holes on the top for stringing to buoy line so the bags can hang down and catch more oil than simple floating boom. This may be helpful in Michigan too, as we hear the heavy pipeline oil is also going under their boom. An added benefit is that it looks better, a bunch of quilted burlap sacks instead of the hairy leg sausages. And the burlap is a sturdy covering that lets water in and out and lets the hair trap the oil. They can be used on river banks, shores, in nets, strung on line between piers etc. Please check out our photos and updates and please feel free to send in suggestions as we are changing our web site to please as many people as possible. We know that some ideas will counter others, but we'll try to put in as many as possible! This is a public charity and it is therefore yours to help create! We are still responding one by one to all your 41,000+ individual emails, and all phone messages - we're committed to getting back to each and every one of you! Thanks for your patience there are just a few of us plus volunteers here as we keep admin costs low so that all funds can go to the program needs.

We have also been suggested an idea that we would love to hear your opinions on. As we have so much fiber (hair, fur, fleece & feathers) and many of you have more boxes available, there is another similar use we could create. There are many, many marinas in the world and all of their boats could use little bilge pads to soak up and remove oil in bilge tanks. It has been suggested that green businesses start up that take these abundant recycled fibers, nylons and burlap and make these little pillows. We are working now with people in the Gulf to see if we can help the fishermen families by creating a program for this in the Gulf and having their pillows be sold to marinas elsewhere as a fundraiser . Anyone who wants to help with this idea please let us know! team@matteroftrust.org We need idea people and people who could use or distribute the bilge pillows, and would love to hear from anyone who wants to create this on their own in the US or in other countries. Also, people making bilge pads in different locations could collect from their local salons, groomers and farmers to cut out shipping costs. Please remember all you generous donors! WE PROMISE WE WILL EMAIL YOU WHEN WE HAVE MORE AVAILABLE WAREHOUSE SPACE - PLEASE DON'T JUST EMAIL FOR ADDRESSES TO SEND IN HAIR, we love to hear ideas from you, but as for the fibers, our first our priority is to make all this fiber into the most useful booms, to deploy booms as storms wash up oil and as we get access to more and more canals. After a completed cycle of donations is deployed, we will be ready to take in more. Ok all of you amazing people! Such a delight to be a part of this recycling movement with all of you!

Best wishes, Lisa Gautier www.matteroftrust.org ]

We have a nail salon 2 doors down and somedays just walking by, I am taken aback by the odor coming out the door. In the summer they leave the doors open, but in the winter they cannot. They are the sweetest ladies and the hardest workers and are only trying to make a living here. This is why we all need to support the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010. Please contact your representative and ask them to help make salon/spa environments safe for workers and customers by passing this into law.

We need to clean up our act people. Click here to sign a petition and send to your elected officials. No need for a stamp or to figure out who to write to…they do it all for you. It takes all of 30 seconds.

Beauty products are  wonderful tools to help us look and feel our best, but they need to not harm us and our children. We all know true beauty comes from within, but for those of us that need a little help on the outside, well….we can all breath a little easier now.

Read: Just Introduced: The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010!

Read: Press Release

I flew to my home in Venice, Fl., this week to move the donated hair out of my garage and turn it into booms for the clean up. I connected with Andrea Sorrenti of Andrea’s Organic Hair Studio in Naples, Fl., after seeing her event on her  Facebook page and she was kind enough to allow me to bring the donated hair to her boom making get together. I have been following her progress on Facebook after this began and watched as she hauled a ton of boom up to Louisiana last month with her husband Jaime, all of it made by her and her volunteers. She said she comes to work in the morning and has to clear a path to get to her salon door, because of all the bags of donations piled up in front. She also says she is getting burned out and I for one, can see why. She has taken on quite a responsiblity with this and in the short time that we spent together yesterday, I got the feeling that it is just her nature to want to help people. All people. A very genuine soul she is.

I packed my rented PT Cruiser plum full of donated hair and drove south to the park. We were very lucky that it was an overcast day and very little wind because I was soon to find out, and I should know this, hair loves to attach to sticky, sweaty skin.

The boxes that I brought were shipped from all over the south, and one small box in particular caught my eye.  A woman from Crystal Springs, MS., sent a very small bag of (assuming her freshly brushed) pet fur, a medium-sized bag of human hair (that I imagined was sacrificed for the effort), and a few pantyhose. I sat there for a minute looking at this small box and thought…a Boom Making Kit! How cute! And then I  thought about The Starfish Story (an earlier post) and how one person can feel as if they are making a difference in this world.

We managed to get maybe a hundred boom finished before it started to rain, so we tossed the boom in the bed of her pick up and drove to her home to store it, where it sounds like her and her husband will be hauling it to Pensacola where the oil is coming in now. Andrea pays for her own gas, takes time away from her business (without pay) and donates her spare time to make booms.

She is most certainly making a difference.

A Boom Making Kit!

Andrea and I making booms.

Donation from Kentucky

Full of hair boom!

More Volunteers Needed as Coast Guard Clears Hair Boom for Deployment.