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what over 37,000 people have to say!

Carley's  HAND Cream

also works great on elbows and knees and even cracked heels.

Heavy duty

 Your creams have transformed my skin and this hand cream has a divine texture!    Buyer: iluvparis 

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We spend a lot of time studying ingredients. We are constantly looking for undiscovered or little used ingredients that will benefit our customers. That is our niche. Hardly a week goes by we don't get asked for a hand cream. We just won't release something unless we know it works.

Kokum Butter not only makes a rich cream for your hands, it has a rich history in India. Kokum Butter helps regenerate tired and worn skin cells and supports skin elasticity and general flexibility of the cell wall. It has been used traditionally in India to soften skin and restore elasticity and as a balm for dry, cracked, rough and calloused skin. We thought it might just be perfect for hands, feet, elbows and knees. So we tested it. We fell in love.

Now keep in mind it is legal in this country to put one drop of an ingredient into a product and name it after that ingredient. WE DON'T EVER DO THAT. It might be legal, but it isn't moral. Besides in our mind if a product works we will get reorders.

Kokum butter is a primary ingredient (a member of the Mangosteen family).

• So does this Kokum Butter moisturizer really soften hard calloused skin? YES

• Does it really restore elasticity? YES

• Does it help dry cracked/rough skin? YES

• Does it keep your hands moist without feeling greasy all day. YES, YES, YES

This is an intense moisturizer. Kokum butter is not a cheap butter. A bit pricey and hard to work with. But so worth the effort. We decided to make Kokum a primary ingredient. But it needed help. Most ingredients we've found find their success when combined with other ingredients. So we use a bit of Mango butter, a bit of Shea butter and more than a bit of Jojoba. Jojoba does something special to moisturizers. It helps absorption process. Unfortunately there is a world wide shortage of Jojoba. Prices have doubled in the last year and are still going up. Luckily we bought ahead to keep us stocked hopefully until this shortage lessens.

 More about the tree kokum butter comes from below.

Garcinia indica, a plant in the mangosteen family (Clusiaceae), commonly known as kokum, is a fruit tree that has culinary, pharmaceutical, andindustrial uses. The tree is also ornamental, with a dense canopy of green leaves and red-tinged, tender, emerging leaves. It is indigenous to the Western Ghats region of India, along the western coast. It is found in forest lands, riversides, and wasteland, and also gets cultivated on a small scale. It does not require irrigation, spraying or fertilizers. These plants prefer evergreen forests, but some also thrive in relatively low-rainfall areas. Garcinia indica is known by various names across India, includingamsol/aamsul, bindin, biran, bhirand, bhinda, bhrinda, brinda, kokum/kokam,katambi, looikya, sour apple, panarpuli or ratamba.

Further, the extract/concentrate of this fruit is called aagal in Konkani and Marathi. It is ready to use for preparation of sol kadhi when mixed with coconut milk.

The genus Garcinia, belonging to the family Clusiaceae, includes some 200 species found in the Old World tropics, especially Asia and Africa. Of the 35 species found in India, 17 are endemic. Of these, seven are endemic to the Western Ghats region (lying along western coastal India), six in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and four in the northeastern region of India.

Called kokum, kokam, or bin'na in parts of western India, the Garcinia indicaseed contains 23-26% oil, which remains solid at room temperature and is used in the preparations of confectionery, medicines and cosmetics.

The outer cover of fruit is dried in the sun to get aamsul or kokam. It is used as a slightly sour spice in recipes from Maharashtra that yields peculiar taste and dark red colour. It is a preferred substitute for tamarind in curries and other dishes from Konkan. It is also used in Konkani cuisine, in Gujarat, and some cuisines of South India.It's squash (concentrate) is used in preparing a drink (Sharbath) which is bright red in colour.

Recently, industries have started extracting hydroxycitric acid (HCA) from the rind of the fruit.

India's first national seminar on kokum or Garcinia indica was held March 4-5, 2005 at the Goa University, Goa. Those researching on the crop see it as having a bright future: it is rainfed, does not have any pest or diseases apart from the monkey menace, and is almost a "zero-attention" crop.

So what makes this so special?

What's in it? (in order of prominence)

Reverse Osmosis purified water: virtually all skin care products 'say' they use purified water. But the real deal is reverse osmosis purified water. This mean ZERO contaminants which means the starting point is pure. It's expensive to do (goes through 5 filters, which have to be changed often), but it is the only water we use. We use the waste water from this purifying process to water our flowers and landscaping. So there is no waste. Don't some products use distilled water? Yes but distilled water is expensive to make (heat is used to boil the dirty water and stream is collected). the problem we have with distilled water is it has a lower pH due to the extra ions added during the process. We prefer to work with pH neutral water. To me there is no more perfect water than R-O water. I remember the 1st time we made soap with it. As we poured the soap is was so creamy! It looked like home made ice cream right before it gets solid. It's one of our special secrets to how good our products are.

Kokum Butter (Garcinia Indica): As mentioned above this is a special ingredient. It is a hard butter. A PRIMARY ingredient.

Jojoba Oil (Simmondsia chinensis): is very similar to the oils in our skin. Technically it is not an oil but a wax ester. If you apply it to your skin it still won't absorb, but in a cream/moisturizer it absorbs extremely fast into the skin. We use this oil to carry the other butters into the skin. Jojoba is the workhorse.

Emulsifying wax: This is a vegetable wax that is used to combine the oils and water.

Glycerin (vegetable). What skin care product doesn't benefit from Glycerin? Problem is most store bought and even high end moisturizers use animal derived Glycerin. You don't even want to know how they make this glycerin. Unless the label specifically says vegetable it is almost always animal derived. Yuck!

Stearic acid: is not an acid, but another vegetable wax. Adds creaminess.

Mango Butter (Mangifera Indica) A luxurious Butter imported from India made from the seeds of the Mango Fruit tree. We use this butter purely for it's luxurious feel and absorbency. You'll only find this in the quality stuff and rarely a primary ingredient.  

Shea Butter (Butyrospermum Parkii) World renown for many incredible skin improving properties. The Shea tree grows spontaneously in the wooded savannahs in west Africa (Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso). The tree is stout, can grow up to 20 m high and its trunk can reach 1 m in diameter, bearing leathery oval leaves. It produces its first fruit when it is about 25 years old and reaches its full production at the age of 40 to 50. The fruit is harvested by the natives and hand processed to the finished butter product. Most Shea butter is commercially processed to remove the natural color and odor, or industrially extracted with hexane (a carcinogen). This yields more butter and is less expensive to produce, but it is odorless and white and has fewer of important qualities. The Shea butter we use is yellow and unrefined. Villagers in Ghana extract the nuts (which grow wild in the forest) by the traditional, solvent-free method, by grinding and heating, and pour the butter into a gourd shell.  It is micro-filtered to remove the bits of shells.

Cetyl Stearyl Alcohol (vegetable) this is a waxy vegetable ingredient used to give the moisturizers a bit of heft and contact feel.

Germall Plus (4/10’s of 1%) (diazolidinyl Urea, 3-Iodo-2-propylbutylcarbarmate) (a vegetable derived preservative to keep our product fresh) only needs 4/10's of one percent to keep our product safe. Look before you ask, no totally natural preservative really protects products from bacteria. We don't like using Parabens. and since we pH balance our moisturizers we are limited in our choice of preservatives. What's great about this one is so little is needed to afford protection.

Something different. Natural Essential oils: OK I have to admit we have been in a bit of a rut with use of Lavender.  Lavender is predictable and easy to work with and has some therapeutic benefits. But after some training in all natural perfumes, we decided to try something different. We start with a base of Vanilla, build up with middles of Ylang Ylang and  Nutmeg and top notes of mostly Blood Orange and a punch of black Pepper essential oil. We didn't want anything overpowering. So don't worry. It is a lovely scent. Natural essential oils of course are purely derived from plants. Most perfumes contain artificial fragrances artificially derived using petroleum by-products. Those will never be in our products. Plus in order to keep those smells persistent, most skin care products use Phthalates. Phthalates are just now starting to worry scientists.

Best if used within one year of receipt. I'll bet no skin care product you have bought from a store was made within the last year. Most of the products were made years ago. We find we can better control our quality if we make products as they are used. Fresh just makes for better skin care products. Our families all use our products. We only sell what we would use.

pH neutral: And why is this important? Although we use ingredients that have an acid pH, the finished moisturizer is pH neutral, like all of our moisturizers. We believe the skin is actually stressed by acids. Virtually all moisturizers on the market are acid. We wondered why? If acids are so good for the skin as these products claim, why does it feel so good to take a swim in the ocean? Ocean water pH is very much the opposite of acid. Slightly alkaline. Why is it recommended to keep swimming pool water slightly alkaline? There is a whole line of thinking now that promotes alkalines. We believe the skin and all of nature loves alkaline and hates acids. If the ocean were to all of a sudden become slightly acid, mostly it would be a dead body of water. Forget this nonsense of the 'acid mantle'. Our bodies when healthy, are pH neutral to slightly alkaline.

No animal ingredients or testing EVER! We also get assurances from our suppliers that all of our raw ingredients are not animal derived or any animal testing done there either.

Most skin care products you buy to use today, were made in large factories years ago and have been in storage. Everything we ship was made in small batches within a few weeks of shipping. Fresh matters!  Quality ingredients matter!

Most of our ingredients are as close to natural as possible. We avoid overly processed ingredients. Processing means heat and that destroys the goodness in these precious ingredients we use.