What if I told you that healthy skin requires a minimalist skin routine? That all you really need is one or two products to keep your skin clean and healthy? Would you believe me?
For those of you who know me, you may understand, but the majority of people will not because for years, the beauty industry has brain-washed us into thinking more is better when it comes to skin health. But, I’m here to undo everything that the beauty industry has taught you because there are many things I’ve learned during my 20+ years of working in the beauty industry, and the biggest lesson is that the conventional beauty industry has failed us when it comes to skin health.
The conventional beauty industry has failed to teach us how the skin really functions, and instead promises topical cures for acne, rosacea, and even aging, when these conditions don’t even occur at the surface level. When you learn how your skin functions, and I’m not talking just the 0.1mm layer of skin that we see and treat topically, but also the other 0.6mm beneath that where all of the life occurs in the skin, your view of topical skin care will begin to positively change. You’ll no longer want to attack your skin or force it in any way. Instead, you will want to support its natural processes, nourish it, massage it and help it find its perfect balance.
Are you curious?
My hope is that after you start practicing the My Daily Recommended Routine, you will continue with this daily routines indefinitely. Externally, this truly is all your skin needs, regardless of your skin type or condition.
I know for some of you, that’s going to be hard to stick to because for years the beauty industry has sold us multi-step skin care routines. Every spa that I ever worked at when I first came out of school sold lines that preyed on the insecurities of women. In order to meet our sales quotas and not fear getting reprimanded by the boss, we were forced to sell ridiculous, completely unnecessary, multi-product routines in order for the spa to profit more. Yet while working at those spas, I always noticed that the women with the healthiest skin were ALWAYS the ones who did the least to their skin. And I used to wonder, “how is that possible”?, because in school, I was never taught about minimalist routines.
We think that more is better when it comes to skin care because we have been misled to believe that. I see Instagram posts of beauty cabinets full of 20-30 products but honestly, using multiple products causes more harm than good. When you begin to really understand how this intricate, intelligent organ that envelopes your entire body works, we understand that we need to stop trying to force our skin to act in unnatural ways.
We often forget that our skin is an organ. Just like our livers know how to detoxify and our hearts know to beat without us forcing either one of them, our skin is capable, believe it or not, all on its own of moisturizing, exfoliating and healing itself without the need for multiple skin care products. In fact, using multiple products just throws the skin’s innate ability for a loop and disrupts its natural function.
Imagine yourself running a 5 km marathon. Every 100 meters you have someone fully stop you in your track forcing you to eat something. They think they’re helping you by providing you with extra energy but each time you eat one of those snacks, your body gets weighed down and can’t run as fast. Will this help you win that race? Not at all.
You see, just like our heart doesn’t need us patting it in order for it to beat, and our kidneys don’t need us pounding on our back for them to work, our skin does not need to have us constantly reminding it to function. It is really important that we understand this so that we can stop trying to force our skin to act in unnatural ways and let it care for us and protect us in the way that it is designed to do. Our skin is so intricate, so intelligent, and in order to have healthy skin and age gracefully, we must respect it, trust it and listen to it. Your skin protects you and heals you all the time.
In fact, every so called flaw you see on your skin is your skin’s way of communicating with you. Premature aging, skin conditions, they’re all a reflection of our body’s inner state.
Now I want you to really think about that for a moment. Because if we are experiencing acne, or premature signs of aging, that’s our body letting us know that something is going on within. They are symptoms of a larger, internal program.
If we mask those symptoms using multiple products, or we start getting botox and fillers to hide of all of these so-called flaws, how can we properly take care of our body when we’re cutting off its way of communicating with us. By doing this, it’s almost like unplugging the fire alarms in your house and being asleep when a fire starts. There’s no warning, then all of a sudden we wake up when it’s almost too late, or sometimes, even after it’s too late. This is what we’re doing to our body when we ignore symptoms and ignore root causes.
Now going back for a second, when I talk about multiple products being unnecessary, I’m not suggesting that skincare products and treatments are not necessary. They most definitely have their place in a healthy skincare routine. The problem with the beauty industry is that there are too many steps, too many bad ingredients, and too many products that claim to help but are actually detrimental to the skin.
Ingredients like harsh soaps, surfactants, detergents, acids, peels, over-exfoliation, synthetic preservatives, and imbalanced pH levels all completely disrupt the skin’s natural functions and processes. These ingredients force the skin to act in unnatural ways to create a bandaid effect…. To mask the problem and pretend it’s not there, rather than look at the internal, deeper root cause. The natural processes that these ingredients all disrupt are important for maintaining hydration, cell turnover (which is your skin’s own natural ability to exfoliate itself), as well as skin healing and renewal. These ingredients also harm our skin’s very delicate microbiome that needs to be respected and taken care of.
These harsh ingredients also wipe away our skin’s acid mantle, which is our skin’s natural protective barrier. When you are using multiple products, or any of the ingredients I just mentioned, you are literally accelerating the aging process, and you’re also preventing your skin from healing. That’s why people spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on topical products in attempt to erase what they don’t like about their skin and yet these products rarely produce the results they promise, especially long-term. It’s a vicious cycle!
Your skin cleanses, detoxifies, moisturizes, hydrates, exfoliates, heals and renews itself from the inside out. Not from the outside in. So when we finally understand this, we can learn to stop trying to use products to erase what we don’t like, and instead, support our skin by using products that will stimulate its natural processes. Healthy, balanced skin naturally glows from the inside out, there is no doubt about this, and we want to achieve that inside-out glow, our inner glow.
