• Rosemary – stimulating
• Sage – cleansing
• Mint – refreshing
• Chamomile – calming
• Wild Pansy – soothing
• Calendula – soothing

In the picture are two combinations:

• Rosemary, sage and mint for a classic herb garden aroma and to gently revive and stimulate the senses.
• Calendula, chamomile and wild pansy to relax and soothe the skin.

Tie your chosen selection of herbs together with a piece of string, and drop the herb posy into your bath as it runs in. When tying up the posy you can leave a long piece of string and use this to attach the posy to the tap, so that it is kept under the hot running water.

What a lovely way to enjoy a bath, and as a summer/ autumn present for friends and neighbours. For an extra special treat you could also try our relaxing Herbal Bath bags which combine chamomile, sweet marjoram, rosemary and lavender with epsom salts for a deeply relaxing bath.

We’re planning to run herbal evenings starting in October, based in Leamington Spa, on the theme of making herbal beauty gifts. As part of a small group you will have the chance to learn about the key herbs used for beauty, make beautiful herbal products, and individually label and wrap them. These will be unique seasonal gifts that you won’t find anywhere else!

Television programmes like “Grow your own drugs” and “The Kitchen Pharmacy” have helped to create a resurgence of interest in the benefits of homemade herbal remedies and treatments. This is good to see as we have such a rich herbal heritage available to us. As well as creating some lovely Christmas presents, these evenings will be a chance to learn about herbs and get started using them in your own recipes – browse our herbal library, our home remedy collection, and go behind the scenes at Amiya’s garden laboratory!

We’ll be announcing more details at the start of September, including what recipes you’ll get to make, dates and price. Subscribe to our newsletter to find out more, or use the contact form to let us know if you’re interested. These evenings will be fun and personal, with each session having a maximum of 8 people. Hope to see you there!

• Nettle and Rosemary
• Rose and Chamomile
• Sage and Yarrow
• Mild Calendula

This offers an even more economical option as you can refill your bottle at home, and we’ve included a special reduced postage and packing offer to make this even more favourable! Just select the 1 litre option for any of our shampoos in the the online shop.

Amiya’s herbal shampoos are formulated to be gentle yet effective. All of our natural shampoos are:

• Free from harsh chemicals like SLS or SLES and parabens
• Free from artificial colours and fragrances
• Made with strong herbal infusions and high quality essential oils, many of which are organically sourced
• Handmade with care

Many mainstream shampoos strip the hair of its natural condition. Amiya’s natural shampoos provide a more gentle wash, leaving the hair feeling soft and healthy. Find out more about our natural hair care products, and what our customers say about them.

If you haven’t yet tried our shampoo range, you can try any of our shampoos in a smaller 100ml size as part of a trial set with our Wild Pansy and Marshmallow conditioner.

Shampoo and conditioner mini set 100ml (x2)
£8.00Price:
More Details

Wild pansy & marshmallow conditioner 250ml
£7.00Price:
More Details

Sage and yarrow shampoo 250ml
£6.50Price:
More Details

Nettle and rosemary shampoo 250ml
£6.50Price:
More Details

Calendula shampoo 250ml
£6.50Price:
More Details

Rose and chamomile shampoo 250ml
£6.50Price:
More Details

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Cornflower (Centaurea Cyanus)

Once a common sight growing wild in our fields, the cornflower is loved for its bright blue flowers. Today it is usually cultivated purposefully in gardens, rather than being found wild.

Although largely ignored by modern herbalism, it has a long history of use to soothe the skin, and in particular the skin around the eyes, due to its astringent and anti-inflammatory properties. In beauty preparations for the hair, it is also said to help darken fair or grey hair.

Recipe: herbal summer soother for eyes

In this recipe we’re going to use an infusion of cornflower petals in a soothing wash for the skin around the eyes. If you don’t have cornflowers, you could use chamomile flowers instead, or if you’re making the recipe in May/ June you could use elderflowers.

Ingredients:

• Half a cup of cornflower petals
• Aloe vera gel (either cut a fresh leaf off of an aloe plant, or use about a dessert spoon of pure aloe gel from a health food shop)
• Cucumber (about quarter of a large cucumber)

Cover the cornflower petals in boiling water and leave to steep for a couple of hours. Strain off the cool liquid. Cut and peel the aloe leaf (careful as its very slippery!) and chop into small pieces. Peel and remove the seeds from the cucumber, and chop into small pieces. Mix together the liquid, aloe, and cucumber in a blender until smooth. Finally, strain this mixture through a piece of muslin or a clean pop sock into a bottle. You can store this in the fridge and use within one week. It could be used in a spray bottle to refresh the skin on the face on a hot day; dabbed around the eyes with cotton wool; or used on a compress over the eyes while you lie back and relax.

Note: the eye wash is for use externally, not in the eyes.

You can find more recipes to make at home in our News area.

Sources:

• The Aromantic Guide to the use of Herbs – Kolbjorn Borseth 2006
  
• Hatfield’s Herbal – Gabrielle Hatfield 2007

Date:                  Saturday 24th July 2010
Time:                 12noon to 4pm
Venue:               Pump Room Gardens, Leamington Spa

The event is run to raise money for Zoe’s Place Hospice who are currently trying to raise £750,000 to build a new baby hospice in Coventry. There will be stalls, games, food – and lots of fun!

We hope to see some of our local customers, and meet lots of new people!

There can only be one winner though! The winning name drawn out of the hat is Patrish Cheshire. Congratulations to Patrish who wins a selection of Amiya products: Herb Gardeners Hand Lotion, Nettle & Rosemary Shampoo, Herbal Mini Salves, and a relaxing Herbal Bath Soak.

At the Amiya Natural Beauty stand, we enjoyed meeting customers both new and old. As well as selling out of our all-time customer favourite, Herb Gardeners Hand Lotion, we also launched our new range of natural skin care for the face to a very positive reception.

Here are a few photos from the weekend:

And my wonderful mum and friend, Christine Lovell, who helped out on the stand as well as exhibiting her beautiful oil paintings behind it:

Amiya’s herbal shampoos use more gentle ingredients, that cleanse the hair without the harshness. And frequent feedback from our customers is that they no longer need to use a conditioner:

“Your shampoo is the best I’ve used… I don’t even need to use a conditioner with it!”

“I go to the gym regularly and also use the pool. Your shampoo is perfect, it is gentle yet cleans the chlorine from my hair plus I hardly use conditioner now. Just fabulous, thank you!”

So why, you may ask, have we added a herbal conditioner? If your hair is coloured or damaged, it can need some extra help to improve its condition. And even if your hair is healthy, we just need an extra conditioning boost from time to time, whether in the cold winds of winter or summer sunshine!

Our new Wild Pansy and Marshmallow conditioner is now available in our online shop. And here you can find out a bit more about what makes this herbal conditioner so special:

• A strong infusion of wild pansy and marshmallow! The lovely wild pansy, also known as Heart’s Ease, pops up in the most unexpected places bringing joy with its tiny flowers of purple and yellow. I’m including it in the conditioner to help soothe the scalp, along with marshmallow to condition and moisturise.
• There are also honey and guar extracts to moisturise and soften the hair.
• And aloe vera to help soothe the scalp
• And last but not least, essential oils of lavender for its lovely scent and additional calming qualities.

As always, the product has gone through various stages of testing and refinement (thank you to our testers!) before its final safety certification. We hope that you enjoy the finished product!

Our Wild Pansy and Marshmallow herbal conditioner is part of our natural hair care range. It is available individually as a 250ml bottle, or in a smaller 100ml size as part of our Shampoo and Conditioner mini sets. You can buy these products and more in our online shop.

Amiya Natural Beauty has the great pleasure of having a stall this year at the Childwickbury Arts Fair, a unique event that sounds set to be a wonderful experience for the whole family.

You can watch the 2010 Childwickbury Arts Fair trailer to get a taster for what is to come!

Find out more about the fair, how to get there, and ticket prices.

Amiya enjoyed being part of the Christmas Fair at Childwickbury last November. It will be a great opportunity to see our Hertfordshire customers again, and unveil some new natural hair and skin care products we’ve been working on!

Visit our Events page to find out about other events that Amiya is attending.

As more of us turn to natural alternatives for ourselves and our families, we discover just how difficult it can be to understand the products we are buying, the ingredients they contain, and how to make the best choices. It’s something I wrote about recently in an article ‘Choosing natural beauty products without the fear factor’.

There is much debate about what is a “natural” beauty product. The bottom line is that if you go outside and harvest the ingredients, make the product in your kitchen, and use it in a week or so – this is about as natural as it gets! Yet in reality the demands of modern life mean that we need to  bring together natural ingredients with modern techniques, in this way we also benefit from many useful advances in cosmetic production.

At Amiya Natural Beauty, we seek to utilise organic, herbal ingredients to the maximum. If you were to poke your head round the door of my little “laboratory” in the back garden you would be met by the lovely smells of herbs infusing, esential oils being blended, and herbal waters being measured out. I then carefully select essential ingredients like preservatives, emulsifiers and shampoo detergents that are as gentle as possible. You can find out more about what goes in our products in our ingredients A-Z.

You’ll also find a growing collection of herbal beauty recipes for you to make at home. The beauty industry has become a place of too many secrets and far to much control over customers. That’s not what Amiya’s about! I want my customers to enjoy the natural hair and skin care products I make, and also be able to rediscover herbal beauty for themselves with simple recipes such as herbal hair rinses, hair oils, face packs and more. We’ve recently started publishing these recipes on our website and more will be added every month – you can get the latest ones (as well as product offers) in our monthly newsletter.