Five beauty tricks with your teabag

Tea is full of antioxidants that repair cellular damage, which can lead to wrinkles and health implications. That’s why it seems like such a shame to throw out a teabag after it’s served its purpose. Kevin Dharamaratne, restaurant manager and tea expert at InterContinental Hotel Sandton Towers, shares some of the hotel’s tea beauty secrets that will ensure you are ready for the outdoors this summer.

1. Soothing your summer sunburn: You should always try and avoid being in the sun without proper protection in the first place, but sometimes you just can’t plan for it, and you can unexpectedly find your skin burnt from too much sun exposure. A few wet and cool teabags applied to the affected skin will take out the sting. This works well for other types of minor burns, as well as reducing razor burn. Put some teabags in your bath water and soak your whole body in a tea bath if your sunburn is too widespread to treat with individual tea bags.
2. Relieve your tired eyes: Soak two teabags in warm water and place them over your closed eyes for 20 minutes to revitalise tired, achy or puffy eyes. The tannins in the tea act to reduce puffiness and soothe tired eyes, leaving you with less bags and your eyes looking revitalised. This also works to reduce under eye dark circles too. Dark circles are a form of bruising, which means that tannins can alleviate them in the same way.
3. Facial Toner: The astringency in tea can assist with the more oily areas on our face, so quickly wipe a teabag over your trouble zones and then blot with a clean towel. This will help to make your face less oily and is a quick substitute for a facial toner.
4. Stop foot odour: You can finally put an end to smelly feet by giving them a daily warm or cool tea bath. Just soak your feet in strongly brewed tea for 20 minutes a day and say goodbye to offensive odours. The astringency in tea closes up the sweat-emitting pores that create the smell in the first place, and the tannins kill stinky bacteria.
5. 5. Heal a bruise: Put a soaked teabag on a bruise to heal it faster. Ruptured capillaries, the smallest blood vessels in the body, create bruises. Since tannins constrict blood vessels, they stop the leaking that causes discoloration.

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