Low carb diets, including keto, are here to stay, and we admit we are also lower carb too in our household, which seems odd considering we harvested gallons of honey last year from our hives! We do eat our honey, we just don't live on honey like the bees do, plus we use the honey in other ways to support our health and healthy living.
Honey is a fantastic skin cleanser and exfoliating mask; we mix some raw honey with yogurt or whole milk, apply it to our faces gently, and in a few minutes we rinse it off. Grandma Eileen uses honey exclusively to wash her hair and she reports that her hair is soft and her scalp feels good too. She has sensitive skin and all those fragrances and additives in the shampoos irritate her skin and especially her scalp. Honey applied to damp hair post wash, as a hair mask does indeed make hair shiny and soft, and it works really well if you heat some coconut oil and mix that with the honey, then apply it as a deep conditioner. Afterwards, you rinse, do a normal hair wash and condition. Presto! nice soft shiny hair! As we age, our hair tends to become drier, and honey has helped the older folks in our family maintain their hair texture and shine.
Honey mixed with ground oatmeal makes a great exfoliating face and body scrub as well when applied to damp skin. There are many great recipes online and ideas for honey, and we've experimented with them in our household. Since a homemade mask or cleanser has no preservatives, there is less irritation, and better control over unwanted ingredients such as artificial colors or fragrances. Our mom likes the honey as a face cleanser and hair mask so much that she uses these regularly and has thrown away her store-purchased cleansers. Honey can sting if it gets in your eyes, so be careful there, but if you happen to swallow a bit, it doesn't matter at all. It rinses easily and cleanly too. One thing to take note: never add water to the honey jar because the extra water will allow bacteria and bad things grow in the honey. She uses a clean spoon to get the honey and mixes her cleanser in a small bowl, along with the other ingredients. If you make a batch at the beginning of the week and put it in the fridge, it's even more convenient. We read about people making honey and garlic poultices for skin irritations and while we predict that probably works, we remind everyone that adding moisture of any sort to honey will reduce the antimicrobial character of the honey, so anything like this, it's best to make daily batches and use them immediately, or small batches kept in the fridge for short periods of time to reduce the risk of nasty microbes.
Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic.
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