10 illustrations that shows how is the depression

10 synthetic chemicals harmful to health and the environment

Every day we use soap, detergents, body lotion, shampoo, conditioner ... and for the women lipsticks, eye shadows, eye and lip pencils, kajal, enamels and mascara of each color. But have you ever wondered what's inside these products?

Many of these synthetic chemicals are skin irritants, skin penetrators, endocrine disrupters and are carcinogenic. As our body’s biggest organ, your skin is your most important immune defense barrier as well as your largest organ for eliminating waste.

This is a short list of the most dangerous ingredients used in cosmetics, let's take a look and try to memorize it:

• Formaldehyde: is found in many everyday products and unfortunately is also widely used in the preservation of cosmetics. Products such as foundation cream, shampoo and enamels contain formaldehyde, which besides being a preservative substance is a powerful bactericide. Although it is been ascertained its carcinogenicity, formaldehyde continues to be contained in a wide range of products, even if at very low concentrations.
  
  
• Parabens: the six main parabens that we can find in the market formulations are methylparaben, ethylparaben, propylparaben, Isobutylparaben, butylparaben and benzylparaben and are used as preservatives in moisturizers, sun, in toothpastes, shampoos; cleansers, deodorants, in shaving gel, in short, in many cosmetics for everyday use, even in so-called "natural products" and "organic." These substances penetrate through the skin and remain intact within the tissue, accumulating. Although they are legally authorized in the EU, even parabens are seriously suspected of being carcinogenic.
  
  
• Quaternium-15: is always part of preservatives. It is present in many cosmetics for make-up, in shampoos but also in moisturizing lotions and sunscreens. It is harmful because it releases formaldehyde it is toxic and leads to sensitization.
  
  
• KATHON CG: is another preservative, a broad spectrum antimicrobial action, colorless and odorless contained in skin cosmetics, in personal care products and household products. From a toxicological point of view, the Kathon CG, has been classified as primary irritant in spite of having a great use. We can find it on the labels of synonyms as grotan, EUXIL or ISOTIAZOLINA.

• MEA-DEA-TEA: they are the initials of monoethanolamine, diethanolamine, triethanolamine and are present in many cosmetic compounds. We find them mostly in products that make foam then shampoos, soaps and bubble bath and give rise to nitrates and nitrosamines, so they are carcinogens.
  
  
• PARAPHENYLENDIAMINE (PFD): this substance is the most important dye used for permanent hair colors. Very often it gives rise to sensitization so that this substance has been banned in many European countries.
  
  
• TOLUENE: it is the solvent that is used to spread the glaze easily. Unfortunately it has been linked to nervous system disorders and can also cause kidney damage.
  
  
• FRANGRANCE: all cosmetics generally have a pleasant smell. We tend to think that the fragrance within the products for personal hygiene is quite harmless, but it is not so. 95% of chemicals used in perfumes and cosmetics fragrances are synthetic compounds derived from petroleum and since the perfumes have a low molecular weight, can penetrate more easily into the skin and can cause allergies or breathing difficulties.
  
  
• HYDROQUINONE: reading the labels of products for lightening the skin is easy to find in this compound, a phenol which happens to be harmful, irritating and dangerous for the environment. Even if they have been forbidden to use it as lightening the skin, the drug continues to be used in hair dyes, although at low concentrations.
  
  
• ALLUMINIUM: we find inside many products, alimentary or not, and of course could not miss between components of many cosmetics, in particular deodorants and antiperspirants, which may contain up to 20% of aluminum salts in the form of hydrochlorides of aluminum and zirconium hydrates. Prolonged use of these substances is linked to the risk of breast cancer onset as the aluminum salts are capable of significantly damaging the DNA of cells, stimulating their degeneration into cancer cells.

It’s impossible to avoid every single synthetic chemical, but you can do your part in limiting the amount of toxins your body is exposed to. Be sure to check out the EWG’s Skin Deep Database to research toxic chemicals that could be in your cosmetic and personal care products.

This video shows all these information

Most people choose to make their own natural skincare products because they want to use chemical free products that are kinder and safer on their skin and to take advantage of the wonderful benefits natural ingedients can bring.

If you are interested, we will start a workshop about how to create hand-made natural products, enjoy us!

https://www.facebook.com/events/353564985033796/

Don't have time to train?

Time. Apparently, this is the fourth dimension. Time is an important part of our lives, especially because we don’t have it for a lot of things.

For example, to train. A lot of people do not train, because they do not have time to train. Those people will never have.

The sport does not work by setting aside time for it.

For basic needs we don’t „make time" We organize our lives around them.

You have to train to be healthy!

Health does not only mean that we are not sick, but that mentally and physically we are fine.

Our whole life's physical and mental development: continuous physical work and continuous learning.

For a true athlete there is no such a thing that no time for training, because the activities are part of life as breathing and eating.

For Smoking, boozing, partying, everyone has the time. To do sport less than 10%.

There are tricks how to force ourselves. For example, training with a partner, who is actually going to be there, not just walking around and do nothing. Or a personal trainer because for our money, we will certainly go down. For example you even can join to a training group, and do it together:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1771671576446242

If you do it alone, much worse, but simply you have to do it and not playing on the phone, then actually you really won’t have time cause of that. A good way to get a regular exercise plan.

The training doesn’t have to be strict like hell: it is good if we go with companies with whom we feel happy.

Those who do not have time to train, they shouldn’t change their schedule, they should change to way of their thinking.

Without putting the sport in an appropriate priority, it’s hopeless.

What does it mean to be a volunteer

Hello everyone one more week!

Taking advantage of the starting of the activities at YEU Cyprus, our organization, through Cultural Caravan, our project about non-formal education, I would like to make a little description of what does it mean for me, Juanjo, the concept of volunteer.

My first experience as a volunteer it was in a primary school in England two years ago. As a first contact with voluntary work I was a bit lost at the beginning. I was in a 3rd and 4th year classroom and my level of English was not good at all. Sometimes the teacher gave me some tasks in order to help the children, but some other times I felt a bit useless in the classroom. Because of my English, I never took the initative to be more useful during the class hours. Honestly, this part of the experience wasn´t good for me in these moments, but now I realize that it was a great experience in my life. Now that I feel more comfortable with the language and because of the EVS experience in Cyprus, I´m enjoying much more the feeling of being a volunteer.

For me being volunteer as part of the EVS program means to live in another country, means to share your life and experiences with the people that surround you, means to get into a new culture with new people, means to be an open minded person in order to be able to appreciate and understand things that happen in these specific environment. But above all, for me being volunteer is to do your best to help other people and to grow up yourself as a person in a professional and personal way.

So far I´ve lived a big amount of great experiences in my time in Cyprus, and I´m sure that also my mates of journey in the EVS experience. And this is what really enriches me, this amount of good moments, situations lived with other people and the thought that probably all this won´t happen again in the same way.

To conclude, just to say that we still have lots of things to discover and enjoy about the volunteer service and although sometimes not everything works as one would wish, in the end we have to keep and save the good moments of this experience!

Studying "Elliniká"

Learning a new language is always a challenge that can be worst or better according to the resemblance that the language have with your native speak.

Through a foreigner eyes looking at the Greek language, it looks pretty difficult.

The first obstacle is the alphabet. A bunch of letters that means nothing to you and that look like much more with Chinese characters then with words. It’s like having six years old again and starting from the first grade. Try to read something is so hard and is always very slowly. Every small step that you give is always combined with a choke of strange sounds that inside you are praying for being just a little bit similar to the original ones.

The writing is the same thing and at least you can enjoy the pleasure of write every letter carefully and with a lot of patient and time, like you were drawing something very special even if you don’t understand the meaning of what you are writing about.

You feel shy when you try to speak and one of the things that you have to accept is that mistakes are very normal in the beginning and you have to do them a lot until you say it in the right way.

Another complicated thing is when this new language have sounds that don’t exist in your mother tongue. It is something new that you never listen before and that look like impossible to reproduce. When the human being is growing up it starts to lose his capacity to learn different sounds.

Then you really have to improve your memory. Vocabulary is very needed to be able to speak, so as fast as you memorize each word, you’ll be better and you’ll learn faster because you’ll understand everything much easier.  

Although all the obstacles that you have to face, in the end is very gratifying when you start to get the conversations; the meanings; and especially to because closer of the native speakers of the language that you are learning.

In the end that is a language do, it put people closer. 

How to choose your perfect vacation according to your mental state

Unfortunately we had known the Cipriot Summer in Nicosia: 43 degree, the wind is like the air that come out of your oven when you open it, the "cold" water of the shower is like lava. The only way to survive is think about our weekend and our holiday. 

Travel can give us strong psychological benefits and it helps us to be better people but there isn't a „no one-size-fits-all dream holiday”. The type of break everyone should take is strickly linked to our mindset. 

The philosopher Alain de Botton explains this idea in his book, The Art of Travel. De Botton argues that we should ideally have “psychotherapeutic travel agencies” to help us figure out what we want from a holiday. This would help avoid those holidays that fail “in a quiet and essential psychological way”. Lastly, the philosopher offers a list of destinations depending on psychological needs. If you want discover his recommendations, watch this video.

The clinical psychologist Linda Blair, author of “The Key to Calm” says there cannot be a prescribed holiday for everyone. She suggests that those who are stressed should take shorter breaks more frequently, as opposed to one long holiday. “You’ve got to bring down those chronically high cortisol levels as often as possible,” she says. And those with such anxiety should aim to return to familiar destinations, as “all change is stressful, even good change.” Meanwhile, someone who’s just retired might go on a vacation for several weeks. Blair says it takes three weeks to break a habit, and so a long holiday would get the retiree out of the mindset of waking for work at a set time. “You’d come back much better equipped to start fresh,” she adds. 

The travel writer Judie Fein, says that a vacation is not a luxury but a necessity: “Our lives are completely out of balance, and a vacation is an enforced way to change the rhythm of your life, to expose your mind and heart to new things. It gives you some perspective.”

Do you want to know people like you, who love to travel? Do you want to listen and take suggestion from them or share your travel wishes? Passionate travelers is the group for you! Passionate Travelers aim is to gather all the people who have travelling as their passion and who are willing to share their stories with others. On 4th August there was the first meeting, a lot of people from different country (Cyprus, Romania, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Syria, Poland and Hungary) joined the event.

Each meeting has a specific topic such as North Africa, South Asia, Latin America, etc.. So, if you are interested in discovering a new culture, if you visited these countries, if you lived there or maybe one of them it's your native country, then come! 

This is the web syte fhttp://passionatetravelers.wordpress.com follow the news on facebook https://www.facebook.com/passionate.travelers/home.

Ελληνικά μαθήματα

We started our daily greek lessons the last week, so we already had 7 lessons, which means 35 hours of learning greek. I have to say, it is not the easiest language, but the lessons are good, the teacher is nice and the group is perfect, so nothing can stop us, we will master greek... or at least reach level A at the end of the course. 

I would like to show you how much did we learn, or at least how much did i learn. ( I hope it is okey and there are not a lot of mistakes...but hey, i am still just learning it)

I tried to put a lot of things in this conversation what we already know, but of course there are more than this. Please feel free to write the corrections of the mistakes if you find one. 

- Γεια σος.

- Γεια σου. Πος σε λενε;

- Ειμαι ο Μπενιαμιν Τομπαι. Εσας;

- Με λενε Ελενη Παππα.

- Χαιρο πολυ κυρια Παππα.

- Απο 'δω η Βερα.

- Γεια σου.

- Καλημερα . Τι κανετε;

- Καλα, ευχαριστω. Εσυ;

- Μια χαρα.

- Ειμαι για το μαθηνα, Τωρα μαθαινω ελληνικα στο Πανεπιοστημιο Κυπρου και σπουδαζω μηκανικος.

- Απο που εισαι;

- Απο την Ουγγαρια.

- Που μενεις;

- Μενω στην Κυπρο.

- Που ακριβως;

- Μενα στην Λευκωσια.

- Αυτο ειναι το σταθερο;

- Οχι.

- Εχεις κινητο;

- Ναι, το κινητο μου ειναι χχχχχχ.

- Ευχαριστω.

. 

- Εντάξει.

- Εδω ειναι η ταζη σας.

- Ευχαριστω. Γεια σας.

- Γεια σας.

- Γει σας.