The Dormouse and The Teapot team know that nothing makes you feel as gorgeous as a lovely afternoon tea, but did you know the ingredients of your 3pm treat can make you look as gorgeous as you feel ?

So when you make your next afternoon tea, set some ingredients aside and nurture your outside as well as your inside.

Before your pour a cup...

Tea treat for puffy eyes

Steep 2 bags of teas in hot water for 4-5 minutes. Caffeine is a natural diuretic, meaning that it pulls fluid out of your system. Tea bags can be used to help alleviate the puffy eye syndrome; it helps by constricting blood vessels to reduce swelling. It’s great if your use herbal teas such as chamomile, hibiscus as well. Herbal teas contain important anti-irritants that soothe and reduce eye puffiness. Now lie down, close your eyes, and place a tea bag over each eye; then cover with a soft cloth. Relax for about five to ten minutes. Remove the tea bags and examine your eyes. The puffiness should diminish. If the result is not to your liking, re-cool the tea bags and apply to your eyes again.

Milk bath

Pamper yourself with a milk bath. Heap into a muslin bag a cup of ordinary laundry starch oatmeal and powdered skimmed milk, lower this into the bath water into your bath tub and relax for 10 minutes. Follow by rubbing yourself with the bag for 10 minutes and pat yourself dry.

Plunder those sandwiches...

Cucumber tonic

Grated cucumber, applied over the face and neck for 15 to 20 minutes, works as an excellent tonic. Regular usage prevents pimples, blackheads and dryness of face.

Egg conditioner

To add body, bounce and shine to your hair whip up one or two raw eggs. Massage this mixture on your hair and let it stay for half an hour or so or until dry. Shampoo your hair as normal. The protein in the egg coats each hair shaft and adds body and thickness. Follow this procedure twice a month for bouncy, soft and smooth hair.

Save the sweets...

Strawberry mask

Mash 3 large strawberries and apply the pulp as a mask and leave it for 10 minutes. Wash it off with rose water. Strawberries are slightly acidic, containing Vitamin C. It leaves the skin sparkling and shining.

When we are choosing milk our preference at Dormouse is organic, local and non-homogenised.

It's only fairly recently that homogenized milk has become the norm in the UK. When the majority of our milk came from the milkman then it was all non-homogenized, when we gave up that great institution and started buying it in the supermarket, then we didn’t just change the delivery method but also made a switch to homogenization.

You may be suprised to learn that homogenization has no health or storage benefits to the milk. It’s only purposes are aesthetic and the fact that you don’t need to shake the bottle to mix the cream. Homogenizing milk involves the breaking down of fat particles to such a small size that the milk looks nice and smooth with no chunks of cream, but these smaller fat particles can permeate the intestines and end up in your blood stream causing high cholesterol. It has also been suggested that the tiny fat globules can carry the deadly enzyme xanthine oxidase which damages artery walls. Fresh non-homogenized milk from the farm with its cream floating to the top is natural and not a harmful form of fat. The larger fat molecules pass through the digestive system and nutrients are properly absorbed without fat entering the bloodstream.

So, what do you get by buying non-homogenized milk, you get the kind of milk that you will remember as a child. Non-homogenized milk has that cream line at the top, so that everyone (who likes milk) wants to the one who gets to open the next bottle or carton and get the lovely fatty creamy bit.

Apart from the creaminess and the nostalgia of it, there are a number of other reasons why we prefer unhomogenized milk.

A lot of people and a few studies believe that there are health benefits associated with non-homogenized milk. Homogenized milk is supposedly easier to digest and there is some evidence that it is more likely to trigger allergies, and that homogenization can contribute to atherosclerosis. None of this evidence is overly strong, but why pass any foodstuff through a process that adds no positive health benefits, and may or may not add negative ones.
In the kitchen, because it has bigger fat molecules, unhomogenized cream takes about half of the time to whip that homogenized cream does, which is handy.

Apart from anything else though, and most important of all, is the fact that unhomogenized milk and cream simply tastes better! So why not order a pint or two from your milkman today!