Why Body Food does not hold a candle to McDonald’s French Fries

I mean, besides the very OBVIOUS reasons…A) It doesn’t go good with ketchup OR ranch, B) It’s not made of potatoes, C) There is no drive through were you can buy it, and D) You cannot retrieve it from the underbelly of your car 36 months later in the exact same condition it was in when you purchased it. ‘D’ being what we are going to gab about today. Actually I guess I gab and you read, which works out great for me, maybe not as great for you :)

I am finding this journey through natural skin care product manufacturing to be quite educational. I mean, I realize there is a science behind everything but when you start a company sort of by accident and RUN with it, you tend to have a lot of ‘Aha’ or even more accurate ‘You don’t know what you don’t know’ moments. And when you are like me and you do things like post on social media about the brand new product ‘X’ that you are coming out with before even making it because you got a 3am idea, it works out really well (eh hem..). I have actually been extremely lucky in this area for the most part except of course for the epic lip balm fails which I have talked extensively about. The good news is, there’s Google, and I am not reinventing any wheels here so it is fairly easy to solve most of my problems. I just have to break through my middle name, ‘I was born knowing everything and every idea I have is immediately awesome and going to work.’ It’s shorter in Italian. The good news is I will be equipped with enough info to have an honorary PhD in skincare product manufacturing (is there such a thing?) when this is all said and done.  

All of that to say (man I’m long winded!) that I really want to emphasize what these products are all about and what your expectations can be with them. I have discovered that there is indeed a reason there are 547 chemicals in every product on the shelf. Because when we became a civilized society and started opening things like Super Wal-Marts with 35,000 skincare products (per aisle) and consuming mass quantities of things we didn’t need, manufacturers got smart. They realized that their products really needed to be able to sit in a drawer for 500 years with 300 other products and not turn into a science project. What better way than to introduce science itself into the products!!?? Let’s see…we will need something for preserving, and stabilizing, and binding, and texturizing, and destructurizing, and restructurizing, and living through a nuclear holocostizing, etc. You get the idea. So now we have science projects all over our houses, not in the form of something that has gone through the natural decomposition process like last month’s enchilada dinner that got forgotten in the back of the frig, but rather because it was made that way to withstand the test of…well…infinity.

I’m here to tell ya, Body Food products will not stand the test of infinity. Actually I went to an especially hellacious (as in temperature) street fair last month and looked at my Pumpkin Pie lip balm a week later (unfortunately as someone was opening it and slathering it all over her lips, she seemed to like it just fine) and it was grainy and separated. Not dangerous or yucky by any means but not the silky smooth salve I had poured into the tins (DANG LIP BALM ALL TO HECK!!). Well, I got my lesson in ‘tempering’ butters…really just how you need to treat them with regards to heating and cooling so as not to have the fats separate out into crystals, YADA YADA!! Now this doesn’t mean you cannot carry the lip balm with you in your purse in 90 degree weather, it just means that if it heats up and cools down a bunch of times it might get a little grainy. I can combat that a bit on my end by cooling it rapidly after making it so as to freeze the lipids into position and they will be less likely to separate out, but I’m sure you get the idea. And some of you are like ENOUGH WITH THE SCIENCE TALK ALREADY!!!

The great news is, in my inadvertent effort to be lazy and having invented my ‘no heat’ method of lotion making, I was actually doing myself a favor, because the less heat these butters are exposed to, the less likely they are to separate…capeesh!? So that was an epic WIN with the lotion.

At any rate, I wanted to share some of this with you because I want you to have reasonable expectations with these products (and any other similar chemical free products). If your goal truly is to cut out some of the yucky stuff in your life, there is a catch…so to speak. They need to be kept in a coolish, dryish place and need to be used within a year, more or less. They are not going to be perky if you leave them in your car in the dead of summer while shopping or if you bury them in a drawer for 5 years and forget about them. They need love, they need attention, and they want you to use them EVERY DAY!! Is that too much to ask? :)

So…life lessons for today, eat McDonald’s Fries (or not), stop slathering yourself in science projects, take a chance with delicious, healthy, no yucky stuff Body Food products, and treat them kindly, understanding that they were not bound together with alien titanium found at the Roswell site coupled with hydrochlorothiazide chlorohexidine petroleum diacetate. Say that five times fast. (Only had to spell check one of those…MAN I’m good!!!)