I’ll admit it: Â I love to splurge on luxury beauty items. Â There’s just something about a Yves Saint Laurent Touche de Eclat concealer, or a jar of luxurious Eve Lom Cleanser that feels elegant and special. Â Yet occasionally these luxurious purchases make me feel a little guilty, especially when I consider the number of people out there for whom the extra $20 USD between a drugstore brand and a high-end one could make a world of difference.
That’s why I’m thrilled that I recently found The Life Soap Company, a brilliant beauty company centered around the idea consumers no longer have to choose between the right thing and the luxurious thing.  For $20 each month, the company will send you a bar of one of three soap varieties:  Sol, Peace, or Love.
Each soap is primarily constructed of saponified oils of safflower or sunflower, which has been shown in a published study from the American Society of Nutrition to hydrate the skin by restoring fatty acids.  Palm and coconut oils are also in high concentration in all three soap varieties; palm is an excellent source of the antioxidant vitamin E (The American Society for Nutritional Sciences), whereas coconut oil has been shown to treat xerosis (dry skin) at a rate comparable to mineral oil in a randomized double-blind clinical trial (Dermatitis).
And as for the site announcement…
Despite my ambitious cravings to start covering other topics than beauty and skin care, I’ve received dozens of e-mails requesting that I stick to just those on FutureDerm.com, with an added emphasis on reader questions and insightful product reviews. Â I’ve also been asked to update more frequently, and so the site will be updated daily from now on.
With that said, my interests have also grown.  While I absolutely love beauty and skin care writing still, I have also found a strong attraction to researching nutrition, fitness, and other weight loss-related topics recently, so I am going to explore these on a new partner site, A Diet A Day.com, beginning on February 21, 2012.  However, I will be keeping FutureDerm to just what my readers seem to love best:  that is, beauty-related questions-and-answers, skin care, cosmetics, hair care, and product reviews.  Thanks so much for hanging in there while all of this was being figured out!  🙂