Most women purchase skincare and cosmetics to nourish and nurture a desires to look or feel better. We all want shiny hair and glowing skin, and it’s easy to get sucked into marketing claims for products that promise they can help you achieve this! It’s not uncommon to ask for countless recommendations, trial and error and rack up hundreds of dollars in the attempt to find the perfect moisturiser, or the best mascara– which is never the same for any two people anyway. We all have different skin, and different ideas of what will make us feel more beautiful.
As a result of the marketing, or perhaps getting sucked into the marketing, we women allow the skincare and cosmetics industry to flourish. We invest our money and beliefs into products and end up relying on them. What most of us probably don’t think about when buying these products, is their cost beyond their price. What about the costs to the environment and our earth? And what about costs to our bodies and our health?
Just as we plan, salivate and place emphasis on what goes into our mouths at meal times and therefore into our bodies, what we put onto our face and body is important too! Beauty products are filled with various fillers, binders and chemicals. We use these products daily, sometimes twice, but rarely consider the way these chemicals impact our health and our world.
Commercial skin care and cosmetics are loaded with chemicals that enter our skin as we rub them in. These toxins have a harsh and disruptive effect on the everyday, necessary metabolic processes of the body. Our skin has no filtration system for chemicals and toxins, it simply trusts that we are doing the right thing. This differs from chemicals and toxins we ingest from processed foods, as enzymes exist to help our bodies with the digestion process.
Many skin care and cosmetic products contain ingredients like:
- Sodium laurel sulfate – an ingredient in transport engine degreasers
- Formaldehyde – a human carcinogen
- Paraffin – a bacteria preventer, that works like putty, clogging pores and filling holes
When you know the facts, avoiding these chemical-laden products is a no-brainer. Detoxify your beauty load by using products that have few ingredients. The best cleaners and moisturisers to choose are oil-based because they’re more cost-effective, you don’t have to use as much, and they’re multi-purposeful.
Using oil on the skin works because our skin and bodies are naturally oily. Our bodies routinely excrete oil through glands in the skin to protect us from bacteria and germs. We need to balance and clean our skin’s oily canvas with more oil. Chemically, oil dissolves oil because like dissolves like– cleansing your face with oil releases and lifts the oil on your face from the day, and rehydrates it with clean oil.
Oils we love
- Jojoba Oil: One of the best cleansers and make up removers. Jojoba is the closest thing chemically, to the oil on the surface on our skin (sebum).
- Rosehip Oil: A fantastic facial moisturiser that is also great for scars and sunburn.
- Coconut Oil: Great for moisturising dry hair ends and rough elbows, knees and heels
Written by Kate Levins (Adv Dip Nutrition). Kate is a holistic nutirtionist with a passion for wholefood cooking. Clinically her areas of interest are women’s health, skin health, specialised dietary support and whole body wellbeing.