The One to Avoid: Detox Patches

We gave you lots of suggestions for sneaky cheats for a January detox earlier in the month, and to be honest, what we left out was pretty telling.

Namely, detox patches. These things are the sort of snake-oil product that give beauty and cosmetics a bad name. Trumpeting their amazing powers from the rooftops, it's just smoke and mirrors. Place them on your feet at night and in the morning, OMG WTF, the pads will be toxin-tastic, from all the nasties that apparently ran out of the soles of your feet during the night.

Yeah. Right.

Don't believe me? Place a detox pad over the steam from a boiling kettle (or any damp, hot source) and hey presto! It'll turn dark as a pint of the black stuff. The secret here is heat and moisture, which is why you often put them on your feet - during the night, the sweat and warmth from the soles of your feet cause a chemical reaction to take place, darkening the pad. There's no detox benefits here. None.

It's also important to remember that if you'd that much gunk coming out of your body it would mean your liver (the organ that efficiently handles toxins in the body) wasn't working, and to put it very simply, you'd be dead.

One word: AVOID.