Rooibos

Rooibos! Rooibos! Rooibos!  Rooibos is also known as 'African Red Tea'.  It has a mild flavor.  It also has a rich, amber color which gives a natural shade to your lotions and creams.    It is also the only tea I'm perfectly fine drinking without any sugar added to it.  Its not 'sweet' in and of itself though.  It just doesn't taste bitter like regular tea.
   
{snippet adszooleft}Another special thing about the tea is that it DOES NOT deplete the iron in your body, nor does it have caffeine in it.  Its naturally caffeine free.
   
When it comes to using it for products, its has great properties for skin and hair.  Like other teas, it makes the hair shiny.  From online reports, it seems many companies are starting to add rooibos tea into their hair conditioners because of reports that Rooibos help contribute to the growth of hair. 
   
What may be happening is that Rooibos helps with breakage and split ends, which in turn helps retain hair… which in turn makes hair longer over time.
   
Now, I add Rooibos extract (tea) to the emulsion during the Cool Down phase.
   
Its full of manganese, magnesium, potassium, copper, iron, zinc.  Rooibos also has anti inflammatory, antiviral and antimicrobial properties.  However, from my tests and for the length of time I usually steep the tea (< 5min), Rooibos has a ph of around 6!  That's important if you want to use an additional product like Sodium Carbomer (Preneutralized Carbomer) to make a hair gel, for example.
   
From my experiments with hair gel, low PH ingredients break the gel matrix created by sodium carbomer.   Rooibos tea was the 1st tea I found that actually let a gel form from the addition of preneutralized carbomer.