Brief Breakdown of Return to Beauty
Return to Beauty is a 260-page beauty book full of skin care recipes for all skin types. It addresses common skin care concerns and gives you a way to treat them at home, inexpensively.
There are six parts to this book: Seasons, Sun Signs, Simple Solutions, Pregnancy, How to Give Yourself a Facial and Simple Solutions for Men. Each part is broken down further, making it easy to find the recipes meant for your skin type, skin concerns or astrological sign.
The recipes in this book are easy to follow, contain few ingredients (most only three or four) and do a good job at briefly explaining what benefits your skin would get by using the recipe.
Here are three recipes from the book.
What We Loved About Return to Beauty
It's apparent that Narine wants you to feel beautiful when you look in the mirror, as she shares her morning beauty mantra: I AM SO BEAUTIFUL. This isn't a book that's going to make you feel like you're life will change by making these recipes-It's more about loving yourself and being proactive with your skin care routine.
Return to Beauty is full of beautiful images of the fruits, vegetables, grains and other ingredients in the recipes. It's easy to look at a recipe and the image and get inspired to create.
We loved the breakdown of the seasons, providing us with recipes utilizing produce readily available by season. And if you're like most people and find your skin type varying slightly by seasons, it's easy to look at the other sections and experiment.
And knowing why we would want use a recipe is easy to see by the descriptions Narine gives us. For example, in one of her recipes, Lemon 'N' Honey Cleanser, we read, "Milk is the best cleanser for skin. Honey naturally exfoliates. The Vitamin C in lemon juice helps product a rosy complexion."
The last seven pages of the book contain a great index of ingredients. It gives you an alphabetical list of ingredients used in the book, the benefits to your skin from using the ingredient and the page numbers of recipes that contains this ingredient.
For example: "Tangerines are rich in vitamin C. With strong antioxidants, this fruit refreshes and reenergizes your skin."
This is great if you see certain ingredients in your pantry or refrigerator that are accessible. Simply look them up in the back and see what you can do with them.
Astrology Note
Narine has an obvious love of Astrology. It's mentioned quite a bit in this book, and there are actually 61 pages dedicated specifically to Astrological signs. According to Narine, your sign can give great insight to your skin's needs. She breaks up each sun sign with recipes specific to their sign.
For example, Narine says about those with the Taurus sign: Beauty Traits: Beautiful Neck, lovely skin, gorgeous bone structure, beautiful speaking voice. Trouble Areas: Throat, neck, eyes, facial muscles.
She says, "Taureans live with their minds more than their bodies...You use your eyes a lot at work, so they get puffy...you often come home drained." Another example is that Narine says Pisces Beauty Traits are small feet, fingers and hands, silky soft skin, fine hair and graceful.
So, we're not sure how we feel about this part of the book, as we're quite certain we could easily find a Taurus who doesn't need a puffy eye mask and a Pisces who has large hands and coarse hair. But, this love of astrology comes from Narine's Armenian past, and it's a nice introduction to the idea that your astrological sign could influence your skin's needs.
Regardless if you believe in astrology as a skin category, the recipes found in this part of the book are fantastic, none-the-less.
Final Thoughts
The book is a great hard covered book that has page after page of easily created recipes that we feel we'll never tire from.
