A day at the spa is a fun way to pamper your body and make your skin glow, but it can be an expensive proposition. The good news is you can create some of the same effects by just opening your cupboards or reaching into your vegetable crisper. It just goes to show that skin care products don’t have to cost your weekly wage.

Homemade beauty remedies are nothing new and a lot of the same things that are good for the inside of your body are also great for your skin.

Of course, that also means that any food that you’re not supposed to eat shouldn’t be used on your skin either, because it will absorb into your body and could cause an allergic reaction. Even if you don’t think you have any allergies, it’s always best to test any new product (even homemade ones) on a small area of skin and wait 24 hours to see if you have any redness or irritation.

Donna Wood Eaton, owner of Cedar Spring Herb Farm in Harwich since 1982, has a Chartered Herbalist degree from Dominion Herbal College in Vancouver, British Columbia. She makes a full line of facial and body care products that are registered with the Safe Cosmetics Compact in which company owners pledge to avoid harmful substances and to fully identify everything in their beauty products. She teaches classes in gardening, herbalism and how to make your own natural products.

We asked her advice for the best food or garden ingredients to use to create skin-care products. Honey was at the top of her list.

“Honey is fabulous for the skin,” Eaton says. “Bacteria cannot survive in honey, so it’s especially good for skin that has a tendency to break out. If you steam the skin first to open the pores and then put honey on, it goes in and chokes off any bacteria that might be