How to Navigate the Skincare Market & Why We Love Seaweed

So how do you choose?

I like to think of my skincare products like I do my daily diet. After all, we as human beings are an accumulation of the things we consume and the choices we make on a daily basis.

 

There are two major things I look at when choosing my skincare:

1. To start, I always make sure my products are clean and nontoxic. Would you really want to eat PEG 100, dimethicone, propylene glycol, or polysorbate 60? Then why would you put it on your skin? These kind of ingredients are used to make skin products more slippery, occlusive, and absorb quicker into the skin. The amount of preservatives used in conventional products also helps them maintain a longer shelf life, reducing the need to make new, fresh batches more often. However, just like with the food we eat, the body goes through a process to break things down before using its raw material to create and build new cells. This is why reducing your toxic load is so important for the skin, both inside and out.The less your skin and body has to process out, the more efficiently it repairs and renews itself.

The Beauty Shamans formulations are made with sustainably harvested seaweed, isotonic seawater, coconut butter, algae extract, oil-soluble vitamin C, and essential oils. Everything is organic, wildcrafted, or comes directly from nature.

 

2. I also want to make sure my skin's diet, like my food, has a variety of nutrients that work synergistically with my body's biological processes. Broken down to the most simplistic terms, the rise in modern disease can be traced back to a mineral deficiency at the cellular level. The SAD (standard American diet), which is saturated with processed foods that lack vitamins and minerals, slowly but steadily damages the body's ability to manufacture amino acids (the building blocks of collagen), propel enzymatic actions, process hormones, and absorb usable nutrients. 

Eating whole foods that have been plucked from the Earth contains a substantially higher amount of organic minerals that the body needs to create energy, muscle tissue, collagen, and elastin and regulate cell turnover.

Part of why the world is seeing such high rates of obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic issues is because of the dietary habits that provide little to no value to the inner workings of our bodies. Our skincare products should be held to the same standard.

The oceans have been healing our skin and our bodies for centuries.

Hippocrates often suggested that patients bathe in seawater to absorb minerals needed to calm inflammatory conditions, improve digestion and heal the skin. Seaweed is a chlorophyll-rich sea vegetable that absorbs trace elements and minerals naturally found in seawater.

Any kind of natural product is going to assimilate more easily with the regular functions of the skin. What I love about using seaweed is that it has a dense amount of nutrients packed into each molecule. Unlike many promising miracle creams on the market, seaweed was never created in a lab, it's been here on Earth as a 'superfood' all along helping to sustain life as we know it. Below are some other amazing benefits of using seaweed on the skin daily.

 

Seaweed and Seawater Benefits:

• Contains all the minerals already found in the human body. In fact, seawater and blood plasma are 98% identical in mineral composition.
• Daily application of seaweed and isontic seawater becomes bio-available when applied to the skin, as our bodies recognize it as something usable for creating cellular energy.
• Rich source of beta carotene. Seaweed and marine algae are one of the richest sources of beta-carotene on Earth. Beta Carotene is the precursor to vitamin A which assist the body (and skin) with healthy cell turnover.
• Naturally rich in vitamins C, E, B, and K. As a whole food, seaweed naturally contains vitamins needed for the health of cell membranes, collagen, and our blood.
• Contains trace elements like copper, magnesium, selenium, potassium, iodine, etc. - Seawater and seaweed are a rich source of naturally occurring minerals and trace elements that create amino acids, the building blocks of life.
• Seaweed is soothing, hydrating, reparative, and cell-regenerating. Seaweed is the oldest and most abundant source of plant medicine on Earth, in fact, it is as old as the Earth itself (after all, Earth is a viable planet because of the presence of water).

 

We actually don't even know how old seaweed is without understanding the history of our own planet's birth. What we know is that saltwater and seaweed were here from the start and contain elements and properties that were needed before modern medicine was ever discovered.


What should you look for if seaweed skincare is not available to you?

Look for organic and/or wildcrafted ingredients. Check the ingredient list and ditch any with ingredients that don't seem naturally occurring in nature (for example, if there is a long word that sounds like the name of a dinosaur, it's probably made in a lab and will have short-term gains for the skin). Look for whole foods, herbs, flowers, coconuts, seaweed, fruits, and vegetable extracts on your ingredient list. Whole foods tend to have hidden nutrition that's not explicitly written on the label. The body may take time to assimilate natural products, but the results are more sustainable.   Ditch any products that contain "fragrance" as these are huge irritants for many people even though the word fragrance seems harmless at first.