White tea: beauty in a (tea) bag

Are you needlessly spending your money on commercial face tonics?

Don't. You don't need them.

Or rather, you can make your own for a few cents - and they'll work better than any store-bought concoction.

There are many ingredients you can use to make your own face tonic.

Vinegar, for example, is almost (but not quite) indispensable. It will optimise your skin's pH levels, soften it and keep infections away. (You'll learn all about it in a future post.)

There are, however, other, more "exotic" substances that are now readily available - yet remarkably few people use them for DIY skin care. 

White tea is one such marvellous substance.

In the past few years knowledge about the benefits of white tea has spread throughout the West. And clinical studies seem to prove that its purported benefits are more than the usual over-inflated fluff that inevitably comes with every fad. 

Here is a comprehensive list of the health (and cosmetic) benefits of white tea. As reported by Science Daily, it is even being studied as a possible "solution to the obesity epidemic".

It seems that white tea really does outperform even green tea when it comes to anti-ageing properties - and that's saying a lot! According to a 2009 study conducted by the Kingston University, in London, white tea extract outperformed all the other twenty "contestants", including green tea; and it did so by a landslide.

Have a look:

Anti-collagenase activities were exhibited by sixteen plants of which the highest activity was seen in:

white tea (~87%)
green tea (~47%)
rose tincture (~41%)
lavender (~31%).

N.B. Collagenase is the enzyme that breaks down collagen, which results in sagging, loose skin, and wrinkles.

Taken from this great website. 

You can read more about the cosmetic and health benefits of white tea on the following website which is a wonderful resource for information about the benefits of white tea (and all other types of tea, not to mention skin care in general):

"White tea may be even better for your skin than its green tea cousin"

If you are not drinking white tea yet, you may want to start now. At least give it a try. 

But when you do, do not throw the bag away, like a very beauty-conscious but utterly foolish friend of mine. Instead, wring it out, ever so slightly, and massage your face, neck and hands (and everything else you wish) with the bag.
(And if you take your tea at the queenly hour of five-six o'clock, so much the better! It has long been known that five-six o'clock is the time when the skin is more receptive to extraneous substances than at any other time of the day. This, however, is not writ in stone, so make sure you read our post about that in the near future.)

You can do this at any hour, with every tea bag you use. If, like many connoisseurs, you do not use tea in bags, then massage your skin with the leaves and finish the massage with a cotton dabbed in the liquid.

If you do this after your face has been cleansed, you may want to apply a moisturiser right away, before the skin dries. This is a time-honoured method for "locking" moisture in. It gives the skin a dewy look and multiplies the benefits of the preparation (cream or oil) you're using.