annieb123
Written on Mar 7, 2020
Good Clean Beauty is a tutorial and recipe guide to making beauty products at home with (fairly) easily sourced natural ingredients by sisterpreneurs Caroline & Isabel Bercaw. Due out 17th March 2020 from Quarto on their Rock Point imprint, it's 144 pages and will be available in hardcover format.
The writing and formatting are young, upbeat, and positive. The recipes are clean and appealing and made with safe ingredients. The book starts with an alphabetical glossary introduction of supplies and ingredients from activated charcoal to witch hazel. The rest of the book's recipes are grouped roughly by category: hair, body, makeup, eye shadow, and skin care.
Each recipe includes a short description, ingredients (both American standard and metric measurements included - yay!) listed bullet style in a sidebar, and step by step directions. Special tips and usage info are included, highlighted with a sidebar or asterisk.
The chapters are tab highlighted so that recipes can be easily found by using the page margins to find chapters quickly. There's an ingredient index, but the recipe index is not included, and is found in the table of contents. There are no resources or links lists for ingredients, but most everything can be found from online retailers. My only quibble with the book (and it's almost universal with the newer crop of cookery and lifestyle books the last year) is that there are very few photos of finished items and recipe preparation. None of the recipes are extremely complex, so the omission isn't terribly crippling and there are -some- illustrations. The photos which are included are clear and appealing and are in color (see cover photo for an example).
This would make a good choice for young/tween/teenagers who are interested in making their own cosmetics and beauty products for themselves or gift giving.
Four stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.