Meg dips her toe into the sticky secrets of skincare to remind us that beauty is much more than skin deep, it’s body deep… read on for an explanation…
I watched Janey* eat her fast food lunch of cheese covered pizza as she told me about her skin care routine. She’d recently bought a pot of high end beauty crème (they don’t seem to merely call it moisturiser these days) with some fantastic active ingredient or other (didn’t catch that either, I was mesmerised by the cheese dangling off the oily pizza slice).
When I’d managed to return to my senses, I couldn’t help but wonder how it is that many people completely disregard what they put into their mouths as being any factor in determining how healthy and beautiful their skin is. To me this seems akin to putting kerosene in the gas tank of a luxury car, polishing the duco with the best grade wax available and expecting everything to be fine and dandy. Then I remembered that I too had once been one of these people, obliviously shoving anything and everything into my mouth then buying all manner of skincare products that promised beauty redemption in a pot, dispenser, gel or mask. In this day and age, it’s the way most of us have come to view beauty.
Skincare companies know our deepest insecurities and they tailor their products and promises accordingly. Specifically, they strive to appeal to our deep seated yearning to possess more vibrant, younger looking skin, be more beautiful, have more confidence, be a better person.
Wait… did I just type that last bit?
Yes, unfortunately I did. Many women somehow (often unconsciously) seem to think that becoming a better, more worthy person can be achieved by buying this product, or slapping that product onto our faces. But that’s another story; let’s get back to Janey and her pizza.
The simple fact of the matter is, we are what we eat. And if our face is made of pizza, chocolate biscuits, fried food and other processed horrors, can we really expect that it will look its very best? Do we really imagine that some cream or treatment (no matter how much is promised by the brand) is going to make all our skin and beauty problems disappear with a simple, topical application?
I’d like to say no, that this a ridiculous assumption. We are smart enough to understand basic nutrition, savvy enough to get the luxury car/kerosene analogy and not silly enough to fall for the siren’s lure of the cosmetics counter as a means of beauty salvation. However, there seems to be some kind of unbridgeable divide for many between what we rationally know and what we actually do.
The real truth is that vibrant skin and genuine beauty are gained from eating healthy foods. When we provide ourselves with the right nutrients, minerals and vitamins, and stop putting so much junk into our bodies, we allow our skin to naturally do what all those supposed miracle products are meant to achieve.
Acne, dryness, premature ageing, skin allergies and a multitude of other dermatological conditions can be managed effectively by developing a beauty routine for the inside of our bodies. Fresh fruit, vegetable and green juices daily are a great place to start. They deliver hydration and a huge boost of nutrients to the body quickly and effectively.
By all means continue with the outside beauty regime, everything helps, but if you are ever tempted to start relying on the outside stuff as your sole skincare effort, remember the old luxury car analogy and take another look at what you are eating.
Beauty doesn’t come in a pot, it comes packaged in a green leaf, a tasty fruit, fresh colourful veg. It is contained in mineral rich wholefoods and vitamin packed natural foods. What we put in our mouths has far more amazing and longer lasting effects than what we slap onto our faces. We just have to convince that silly, irrational part of our brain that refuses to believe this.
*Not her real name, we’re not that mean.
We’ll be covering natural skincare in a five part series in future instalments of this blog. We’ll show you some amazingly effective natural skincare tricks and treatments, developed for both the inside and outside of the body. Hopefully we’ll manage to convince you that spending hundreds of dollars on skincare is completely unnecessary and not worth it. Take THAT unmentionable multi-million dollar beauty product empires!
Photo by Yi Lingg
Great blog! What you eat really does show on your skin, I wish women didn’t buy into the marketing for all the useless cosmetics they buy.
Wow, that really got me thinking. Now I have to try convincing the irrational part of my brain that what you say has much merit.
I enjoyed reading that.
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