Beauty Multi-Tasker: Olive Oil

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but am only just getting to it (obviously!).  My favorite top-secret-Ninja beauty item is (wait for it) OLIVE OIL!  Seriously.  When it comes to cooking, I'm on board with the whole Rachael Ray, dump-in-some-EVOO approach.  And I've discovered recently that the EVOO is the secret to the perfect calzone, but that's another post.  So olive oil (and I use the same grade that I use in the kitchen, although I've started buying a separate bottle for the bathroom) is a great beauty product as well.  Here a just a few ways I regularly use the EVOO:  My most favorite EVOO use is as a scalp / hair preshampoo moisturising treatment.  As I've said before, I have ongoing issues with dry skin, especially in the New England winter.  And my scalp gets so dry and tight and itchy.  So I massage a couple tablespoons of EVOO into my scalp, comb it through my hair, and wait anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours and shampoo normally.  This totally helps.  And for me anyway, it doesn't leave my hair all oily feeling, like one might expect.  I use pretty high quality shampoo and conditioner, and I've started using the Fekkai weekly protien hair mask.  And yet, all of this is sometimes not quite enough.  And I reach for the EVOO.  It's certainly less expensive than fancy hair treatments.  I've not done it, but I'd imagine that one could heat it a bit in the microwave for a more relaxing scalp massage, then wrap one's head in plastic wrap to hold in the heat.  This may allow the oil to penetrate even more--I'm not sure.  But it would be like the VO5 hot oil treatments I used to use in the early 90s.

Olive Oil is also a great cuticle treatment / mositurizer.  I have to say that I didn't think up this one by myself.  But I sometimes pour a little EVOO into a shallow dish and dip my finger in and massage a bit on the cuticles.  I'm not sure that it's necessarily better than other cuticle products (I'm partial to the Burt's Bees cuticle cream and also to the OPI Avoplex treatment), but it is, again, cost effective.  I guess that the big "con" is that it's not as portable as other products designed specifically for cuticles.

My new favorite use of EVOO is as an eye makeup remover.  I take a cotton ball (or cotton wool, when I'm Engllish) and dispense a small amount from the bottle right onto my cotton ball.  Then I gently massage it across the eye area.  For the most part, it works just as well as commercial eye makeup removers (and I do use the MAC eye makeup remover occasionally), but EVOO has the added benefit of really moisturizing the eye area.  I have dry skin anyway and could certainly use the extra moisturizing benefits.  Oddly, EVOO does not seem to dissolve mascara as well as some products designed specifically for makeup removal.  But I can live with that.  I mean, I'm going to cleanse my face as well, either before or after the EVOO, so the cleanser and water will take care of any remnants. 

So I know that EVOO is good for your insides in that it provides Omega-3s and is supposed to be an anti-oxidant and all that.  I'm not a scientist (although I am a doctor!  Hee hee), but I would speculate that EVOO may also be good or your outsides, your skin in some of the same ways--I mean, it seems reasonable that it might fight free radicals on the skin too.  Just a thought.