ALMONDS!

I have had incredibly dry skin since we moved to Seattle. It's weird because it's actually pretty humid here, I never expected my skin to be so dry. We had actually gotten rid of our humidifer before we left Minneapolis because we figured we'd never need it (we were wrong!).

I used to consider my skin "dry" when I had to use baby oil after my shower a couple times a week, and put lotion on about as often. Now I am putting baby oil on EVERY time I shower (if not, it is actually painful!) and I put lotion on whenever I have time, which is about 4 times a week. And after all that my skin is still red and itchy, but at least it's not cracking and painful.

Well after using all that baby oil I wasn't surprised when I finally used up the bottle I have had for the past five years or so - a bottle of Johnson & Johnson Vitamin E Baby Oil. Since it wasn't quite doing the job, I thought I'd try something else, so I planted myself in the lotion aisle at the co-op yesterday while my husband did the grocery shopping and read all the labels and tried all the testers and finally ended up buying the cheapest one to try it out (pictured at left - I read that almond is the most nurturing oil for dry skin, and this one also has peanut oil, olive oil, lanolin and NO unnatural fragrance). I noticed two things in the aisle at the co-op: 1) all the oils there had color to them, while the Johnson&Johnson oil I had been using was completely clear and 2) none of the oils had a suspicious "fragrance" listed on the label, like the Johnson&Johnson Baby Oil. So I'm hoping this stuff will work better, since it's colored and doesn't have anything weird in it.

Well I used it today and I'm not sure yet if it works better (although it is a LOT thicker), but I am having another problem - it's distractedly YUMMY smelling. It smells like almonds! It reminds me of everything almond that I have ever loved - swedish oatmeal cookies, almond jello, etc. So I'm definitely not going to try the coconut, because I like coconut even better than almonds and may find myself chewing on my arm if I try the coconut. I may switch over to something more innocuous like rose or jasmine. But I do like almond smell better than baby oil smell (at least for me, since I am an adult and not a baby), so for that reason alone I like it better already. Plus hopefully it'll be a little more helpful with the dry skin problem.