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The Bare-assed Truth About Commercial 'Skin Care'

The Bare-assed Truth About Commercial 'Skin Care'

Have you ever left a store triumphantly clasping the latest, greatest secret serum stuff, knowing that once it was finally massaged gently into your skin, that you truly will be doing bare assed selfies?

We've all been there and most of us have also been to what really happens next... You get home, open your prize carefully and start reading, only to toss the instructions (hopefully in the recycle bin or compost) after you have been completely bamboozled by all the pseudo scientific dickery stamped all over the instructions.

Next there is the choke when you see the teeniest amount of product within the huge heavy jar and wonder about your sanity at parting with $220 for this small swipe of body cream? 

Marketing and influencers are expensive

If it makes you feel any better, your $220 is working really hard. It is feeding a lot of satellites swirling around your body promise - 70% marketing, 12% chemicals, 1% packaging maybe 7% good stuff. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this equation if that's what you choose to do. I am not even saying it is actually correct!  For starters, these numbers are made up.

Every product is different, but not so much as you might think

Frankly, every product is patently different, but it is more in the marketing than the ingredients. Every beauty company has a different marketing budget, fills their jars with product spun their way and presumably has some set of honest beauty beliefs about what is good for you. And that's what theoretically underpins the pseudo scientific gobbledy gook on the instructions. But it's mostly marketing. Pure and simple. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Once you take out the marketing dollars, beauty products are simple

Looking after your skin isn't rocket science. Good food, exercise, water and the simple basics like pure vitamin E oil are all most people need. Most of the ingredients in beauty products are food or plant sourced and when you take out the marketing dollars, that is why it is so easy to find beautiful, sustainable products sold by sustainable skin care traders. Most are gloriously simple, local, small batch and increasingly chemical and plastic free. 

You will likely just need to also chop the '0' off the end of that previous price tag to pay for it. Try to feel good about it!


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