Vancouver Magazine
Opening Soon: A Japanese-Style Bagel Shop in Downtown Vancouver
The Broadway/Cambie Corridor Has Become a Hub for Excellent Chinese Restaurants
Flaky, Fluffy and Freaking Delicious: Vancouver’s Top Fry Bread and Bannock
Protected: The Wick is Lit for This Fraser Valley Winery
Wine Collab of the Week: The Best Bottle to Welcome a Vancouver Spring
Naked Malt Blended Malt Scotch Whisky Celebrates Versatility and Spirit
Coyotes, Crows and Flying Ants: All of Your Vancouver Wildlife Questions, Answered
The Orpheum to Launch ‘Silent Movie Mondays’ This Spring
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (March 27-April 2)
What It’s Like to Get Lost on a Run With a Pro Trail Runner
8 Things to Do in Abbotsford (Even If It’s Pouring Rain)
Explore the Rockies by Rail with Rocky Mountaineer
The Future of Beauty: How One Medical Aesthetics Clinic is Changing the Game
4 Fashion Designers From African Fashion Week Vancouver to Put on Your Radar
Before Hibernation Season Ends: A Round-Up of the Coziest Shopping Picks
This skin cream is so potent, it should be illegal.
The amount of money we often spend on our creams and cosmetics may rival the GDP of a small country, but the question is: do they work? Brands and price tags don’t always equate with quality and effectiveness so when you find something that’s perfect, you make note of it, you worship it and you pray to the beauty gods that they don’t take it away (Principessa’s dry shampoo as a notable, tragic example).Vancouver’s Ferlow Botanicals, a home-grown, all-natural company, falls into that category with their MSM + Hemp cream. It landed on my radar when it was first prescribed for my daughter’s unrelenting eczema; when it immediately and magically cured it (after she’d suffered from it for years), I offered myself up as guinea pig and tried it on my face. Again, redness and small patches of dryness dissipated almost immediately. I then mailed some back to family members (where living with Calgary’s dry air is like having an ongoing facelift) and they, too, were strangely cured of all their skin afflictions and emerged blemish-free in the next Chinook wind.The secret? Hempseed oil, rich in Omega 3 and 6 essential fatty acids, makes an excellent natural emollient that’s chalk full of anti-inflammatory properties, while MSM feeds skin cells and helps repair tissue. This stuff rebuilds damaged or red skin while simultaneously nourishing it (and if you have eczema, it’s the only thing, in my experience, that works on an ongoing basis—and that includes cortisone). Plus, it’s so natural you could eat it, although we don’t recommend taking your hemp this way.MSM + Hemp Cream ($20/60 ml) available at Kitsilano Naturopathic Clinic, #307, 2902 West Broadway; Kitsnaturalhealth.com. Meanwhile, the rest of Ferlow Botanicals’s range of good-for-you products will be available online as of next week.