Have you ever had a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) share? If you have, you can relate to our situation in fall 2012.
We had just gotten our first CSA share in years, and, well, let’s just say that the pumpkins were booming. We had pumpkin coming out our ears. And we still have pumpkin in our freezer from that time, and the pumpkins are rolling in again.
In other words, we need to use up some major pumpkin. There are, of course, plenty of ways we can do that. The most obvious usage is in food, like my pumpkin lasagna, but I can come up with something more creative than that. Which is how I came to paint my face orange with pumpkin and honey.
Pumpkin, you see, can also be used in skincare. In fact, according to the website I found this pumpkin/honey recipe on, it does wonders for your skin. We needed to use our pumpkin up, and this recipe, unlike so many others, only had two ingredients. It could also be made entirely locally: the other recipes I found all involved sugar, cinnamon, coconut milk, etc.
I used last year’s pumpkin and this year’s honey to make a pumpkin face mask, then used my fingers to paint it on. It was slippery and c-c-cold due to the fact that the frozen pumpkin hadn’t thawed as much as I’d thought it had. When I smeared it on my lips, it tasted like the honey in it.
Then, as the recipe required, I set the timer on the oven to twenty minutes and went to wait with orange slime drying on my face. Twenty minutes passed. Gobbets of pumpkin slid down to my chin. The mask began to dry, so that every movement of my face felt like it stretched my skin tighter over my fles. Finally the timer went off. When I tried to wash my face the mask didn’t come off so much as liquefy, but I got most of it. (I found some in my hair later.) Then it was time to test the results. Pressing my fingers against my cheeks found that they felt firmer and, I don’t know, somehow more structured than they had before. They continued to be so some twenty-six hours later. And I still have at least one more evening’s worth of pumpkin in the fridge, just waiting to be used.
Pumpkin Honey Face Mask
We found this recipe here.
¼ cup pumpkin
1 Tbs honey
Combine in small bowl. Apply liberally to face during the evening. Wait 20 minutes, then wash off.