WHY ORGANIC SKIN CARE?

When we’re young, our body is programmed to maintain clear, smooth, soft skin, and we have to really ignore our skin or take it for granted to derail this program. As we age, however, our skin begins to work less efficiently, thinning out, losing elasticity, and sagging. Exposure to stress–environmental, physical, mental–only exacerbates this natural aging process. And mind you, when I talk about aging skin I don’t mean 50- or 60-year-old skin. These changes can begin at a much younger age if your skin does not receive proper care.

Proper care does not have to mean using lots of expensive and/or complicated products. What I’m referring to is organic skin care, a logical and relatively simple approach that holistically nurtures your skin’s natural ability to maintain good health. It’s about both those therapies that treat our skin from the inside out and from the outside in. Primary goals in organic skin care are to encourage the regular sloughing off and turnover of skin cells and to maintain the skin’s natural acid mantle, which is a combination of sebum and perspiration that your body secretes to protect and moisturize your skin’s surface. Achieving these goals can help rebuild damaged collagen and elastin (the chief protein in your skin’s elastic fibers) in order to maintain skin strength, elasticity, and resiliency. There are many methods for optimizing cellular turnover. Body brushing, cleansing with a facial mitt or buff, using deeply cleansing masks, and using alpha-hydroxy acids or AHA’s (natural organic fruit acids), can all help exfoliate dead surface cells and maintain efficient skin cell turnover. Your skin can get AHA’s through a wide variety of treatments, from peels to moisturizing lotions. To protect your skin’s natural acid mantle, which covers your entire body, use gentle acid-balanced cleansers to wash. And please avoid antibacterial or deodorant soaps, which tend to be quite harsh.

How The Detoxification System Works:

Consider this: Government regulations allow virtually any ingredient to be used in the manufacture of products that we use daily on our skin, hair, and nails, and in the water we drink. It only makes sense to get to the computer and your local library in search of healthier options.

The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) establishes the regulations and standards in the United States regarding the manufacture of drugs & food.³ The problem is that they do not pay as much attention to skin care and make-up as they should, thereby allowing some very harmful chemicals to be used in creating almost every product that is mass marketed.

Some of the harmful ingredients that are used frequently in manufacturing the most common non-organic skin care and make-up items include:

• Mercury
• Dioxane
• Nitrosamines
• DEA
• Cyclomethicone
• Ammonium Laureth Sulfate
• Alcohol, Isopropyl (SD-40)
• Polyethylene Glycol
• Polyethylene eth

Most of these compounds are absorbed easily by the skin, yet the body has no way of ridding itself of them. The toxins remain in your intestine and eventually get spread through the body and can damage organs throughout your body.

Read Product Labels & Learn About What You’re Getting

If you want to protect your body from the harmful ingredients that are used in most commercial brands, you should check out organic skin care products and organic make-up. Of course, you will need to get in the habit of reading product labels, just as you probably do already when it comes to the foods that we buy.

We are all concerned about our health and well being, which means that it is important that we are proactive in choosing products that are good for us. Choosing organic skin care products and organic make-up does not have to be a tedious process.

Once you have become reasonably familiar with the “bad” ingredients that are so commonly used in skin care products, you will learn to recognize the difference between synthetic & natural products. Becoming a more informed consumer will allow you to make smart choices while shopping for your organic skin care products.

It may get a little frustrating when you’re initially trying to decipher labels because there are so many ingredients listed. One thing you can use that will help you to decipher product labels is to break each label into thirds. Focus on these ingredients first, because they usually make up the majority of the product.

The rule is that the ingredients should be listed in descending order according to the amount that they make up the formula. For example, if you have a product that is 88% aloe and 90% water, the water would be listed first, the numbers show there’s more water than aloe. Alphabetic listing does not override this.