Spring brings buds on trees, daffodils in the parks, and skin-care launches on the shelves of beauty stores.
We perused the natural newcomers, and found four especially fresh-faced options that make us feel renewed and luminous just looking at the labels. (And, during a test-run, they also proved their mettle.)
Here are the spring debuts we’ll be cleansing with, dabbing on, and beautifying with for clear, bright, and healthy-looking skin all season long. And beyond…. Have you tried any new products for spring?
When you have a science background and love beauty products, but go into banking, sometimes your heart calls you back. That was the case with Shahnaz Hussain, the founder of Tres Pure. The pretty (and still ambitious) New Yorker supports cooperatives in Uganda to farms in Tunisia, when sourcing the ethical, clean, and often super-expensive ingredients (we’re not going to lie) that make up her luxe line. (The popular product trio above is $145.) And while Tres Pure is made in New York, it has fans from London to the UAE, and has just started to catch on at home.
The natural products are simple—rice and adzuki bean is used in the scrub, carrot seed in the toner, and a blend of marula, chamomile, and other plant oils hydrate and brighten skin in the face oil (a best-seller). As Hussain says, “The simplicity of quality ingredients is the secret behind beautiful skin. And I think that’s what people really want.”
The performance-based “hippie tested, diva-approved” makeup brand just got a white-hot makeover—both the packaging and what’s inside it.Now the entire handcrafted, natural line contains skin-calming organic aloe, which “adds amazing luminosity, and a creamier, more blendable texture,” explains color director, Shirley Pinkson. You can really see the aloe’s magic in the foundations that absorb excess shine without disappearing your glow. (No mannequin skin!)
Spring brings three new multitasking Universalist Colorsticks ($33) for cheeks and lips (we heart the blood-orange No. 6). And we’re not the only one loving the brand reboot: W3LL PEOPLE will have pride of place in H&M’s new luxe retail stores, called & Other Stories, in London, Paris, Milan, and beyond, reaching scores of healthy beauties across the pond.
Women everywhere flipped over their moisturizers to read the list of ingredients.
“That first paper shocked people because it was the first time intact parabens had ever been measured in the human body,” says Dr. Darbre. And while the study did not show that the chemicals cause cancer, it sounded a serious alarm.
Why? Parabens, which prevent bacteria from growing in beauty and personal-care products, are able to mimic or interfere with estrogen in the body, and exposure to estrogen is one of the primary influences on the development of breast cancer.
Since then, several studies have detected and reported parabens in human urine and tissue. In response, many beauty companies have eliminated them from ingredient lists, though they’re still used in many mainstream products.
Now, Dr. Darbre has published two new studies that shed even more light on the ways parabens enter our bodies and how they affect our health.
Here’s what you need to know about the latest research (and before refilling your beauty bag):
1. Parabens are getting into your body. In March, Dr. Darbre and her team published the results of a study that replicated the original study done in 2004, with a much larger sample size. They looked at the concentration of five parabens in breast tumor tissue. One or more types were found in 99 percent of the tissue samples, and all five were measurable in 60 percent of the samples. “The take-home message was that we validated the earlier study with a much more substantial study. Parabens are getting into the breast, and they’re getting in in significant amounts,” she explains.
2. Yup, your skin is letting them in. The parabens identified in the study were primarily intact, meaning they’ve bypassed the liver. What does this mean? You’re not getting them from your food, they’re being absorbed through your skin.
Jill Platner is the healthy, chic New York woman’s go-to jewelry designer.
Platner’s fans, like Elena Brower and Schuyler Grant, love her for her gorgeous exacting metalworking, but also for her healthy approach to maintaining an inner and outer glow. She works out with Madonna’s former trainer and flame Carlos Leon, juices daily, and even recently hosted a Wellness Day at her Soho boutique, all of which leave little time for primping.
“I am very low-key with my hair and beauty rituals,” Platner says. We had her dish on the few products she does work into her beauty routine on a regular basis.
1. Davines Hair Products(Price varies) I love the natural ingredients and the texture they give my hair, especially since I prefer the ease of letting it dry naturally. I get them from my good friend April Barton’s salon, Suite 303 in the Chelsea Hotel.
2. Epicuren Clarify Cleanser ($25) When I work on sculptures, my skin gets coated in metal dust, and this really leaves me clean and soft. I love how nourished my skin feels after using it, and the herbal scent is amazing. I get lots of Epicuren products from my facialist Monique at Haven Spa in Soho.
Jill Satterfield, founder of Vajra Yoga, the brand-new School for Compassionate Action, and a fixture at the Tibet House, gives Well+Good three tips for holding onto what summer sanity and sense of relaxation we’ve acquired. So come fall craziness, we’ll all have a few of the tricks that accomplished yogis and meditators and the Dalai Lama have at the ready. Be them, now.
1. Savor, don’t gulp, a piece of summer fruit.
Take a bite of summer fruit, like a peach or a melon, and chew it slowly, allowing it to almost dissolve in your mouth. Normally, we eat so quickly. But if we take our time, we can really be transported into an awareness of taste, the sense of taste. Plus it’s way of pausing to enjoy last bits of what summer’s given us.
We’re going to guess you don’t need another excuse to get a massage. But if you can’t afford a weekly spa trip (and frankly, who can?), you’re going to have to get really good at sweet-talking your husband into helping you out now and then. Not easy, we know. But we have some new ammo—and we have a new study from Emory University to back us up.
Over a period of five weeks, study participants received a Swedish massage—characterized by long, flowing strokes—once or twice a week. Compared to those who didn’t get the lucky task of getting massaged in the name of science, those who received massage therapy had lower levels of stress hormones, including cortisol. They also experienced big changes in immunity, including increased counts of white blood cells, which play a key role in fending off illness and infection.
And it gets better: The benefits of massage lasted for several days, and each subsequent massage offered a cumulative benefit. In other words, a routine massage ritual is superior to an occasional rub.
“The act of massage itself has amazing biological effects,” says lead study author Mark Hyman Rapaport, MD, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. “Of course, a single session will do great things for the body, but regular sessions seem to be even more profound.”
Anyone who enjoys massage should consider indulging regularly, says Dr. Rapaport, who adds that self-massage (for those of you with a reticent beau) has the potential to be a beneficial—and cost-effective—option.
Got olive oil? A study published online this month in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that people who ate a Mediterranean diet enhanced with lots of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) may be protected against bone loss.
The study: Studies have shown that the the incidence of osteoporosis in Europe is lower in regions where individuals follow a traditional Mediterranean diet, which is rich in fruits and vegetables and includes a high intake of olives and olive oil. So, researchers in Spain set out to determine if olive oil consumption, in conjunction with eating a Mediterranean diet, prevented bone loss.
They selected 127 men, aged 55–80 and at risk for heart disease, who were already part of a larger, longitudinal study. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups. One group ate a Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil, another ate a Mediterranean diet supplement with mixed nuts, and the third ate a low fat diet. The participants followed the dietary plans for two years.
When canning made a comeback, foodies were salivating at the abundance of artisanal jams and pickles so ubiquitous that they were worthy of a “Portlandia” sketch. Little did they know, the trend would also help rediscover one of the healthiest foods around — fermented vegetables.
Sauerkraut and kimchi (a traditional Korean mixture of fermented cabbage and radishes), may not sound like the stuff of health-food legend, but they’re some of the best sources of probiotics and nutrients, especially when made with the traditional methods that are gaining ground with today’s artisanal food makers.
Thanks to smart marketing, yogurt is the food that’s synonymous with probiotics (the healthy bacteria that has been shown to help boost immunity and address digestive issues), but that doesn’t mean it has a monopoly on the beneficial-bacteria market. Fermented vegetables contain the same cultures, and are perfect options for the dairy-averse, vegans, or people who just want an extra dose of probiotics without the extra sugar that often comes with yogurt. (A cup of ‘kraut has 27 calories and 2.5 grams of sugar. Compare that to the same amount of plain, low-fat yogurt, which contains 154 calories and 17 grams of sugar.)
When I first met Horst Rechelbacher, founder of Aveda and, more recently (thank goodness), Intelligent Nutrients, we spent a lot of time talking about silicone. Silicone, most of you probably know, is widely used in personal care products across the spectrum—from the relatively clean to your standard-issue drugstore brands. It’s especially useful in makeup, primer, sunscreen and tinted moisturizer because it gives products a slippery sit-on-skin feeling that allows for even spreading, no rubbing, and produces a nice surface on top of which you can go ahead and make your face.
It’s also in a lot on conditioners and leave-ins, because it sits on the shaft of your hair and can take the guesswork (and manual labor) out of smoothing unruly manes, especially when it’s humid out. My experience is that repeated use of silicone on my hair makes it look like complete and utter garbage. My experience with my skin has not been quite the same.
As a refresher, most of the people I have spoken with who swear against it do so for one of a number of reasons. Because it’s occlusive (that means it sits on the surface of the skin and blocks moisture from escaping—but also blocks other things from going in); because it might be comedogenic (the research is equivocal on this one); and because it “doesn’t break down in nature,” says Rechelbacher (and others). On the other hand, dimethicone’s molecule weight makes it impossible, I believe, to migrate past the top layer of your skin—which is where it’s designed to sit, anyway. That’s how it “works.” But our research is ongoing at this point.
I know natural-beady diehards who swear by it and diehards who would, well, die before they used a product that contains it. We were in the latter camp. Now, we’re rethinking our position—but the jury’s still out.
No More Dirty Looks has historically said no to all silicone. It wasn’t on the list of our dirty 20-or-so in the book, mainly because the research we were able to find about its toxicity was unconvincing. At the same time, we can appreciate that many ingredients don’t have nearly enough scientific data published about their safety, and we definitely skew more toward “when in doubt, don’t.”
Nutritionist and personal chef Natalia Hancock knows that snacking is part of the human condition. “We’re programmed to seek out food; the trick is to munch on snacks that are healthy and easy.”
When creating Rouge Tomate’s bar menu (Hancock is the culinary nutritionist for this healthy Michelin-starred, Upper East Side restaurant), she rejected calorically dense bar nuts in favor of humble popcorn, a whole grain with a generous dose of fiber. But Hancock purified, and glamorized, this movie snack staple by replacing butter with olive oil and adding unusual seasonings.
Replace your $300 Kitchen-Aid with a $30 air popper
Why to sneak your homemade popcorn into the movies: According to Hancock, movie theater popcorn is usually popped in refined coconut oil, so it absorbs lots of saturated fat. A medium-sized movie popcorn is well over 1,000 calories and can have more than 50g of saturated fat. In comparison, one cup of air-popped plain popcorn is just 31 calories, and it doesn’t taste like styrofoam packing like the AMC variety. Two cups is a serving, says Hancock, but if you feel the need to pig out, popcorn is a safe food to overdo it on.
As promised here is the second half of my interview with the wise and wonderful Claudia Welch—along with a great video interview I found online. Loved reading everyone’s comments in Part 1, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you guys think of the book!
Since reading it I’ve been practicing many of the recommendations, and I honestly see a difference in how I feel. I don’t expect overnight miracles, but I’m hopeful that these practices are going to help regulate my periods and hormonal fluctuations. If anyone is interested in going deeper Dr. Welch is offering a live phone and online course in this stuff (that’s a link to sign up for a free call)—I’m going to try to sit in on a few if I can.
We’re curious: For those of you who have experienced imbalances, what—if anything—have you noticed affects this most? Is it stress, or food choices, or have you not made the connection? It’s so great to hear all your stories, and as Dr. Welch pointed out, we have such an intelligent and thoughtful community of readers here. The best!
Onto the interview…
Your prescriptions for rebalancing seem so simple, but they’re also quite specific. Tell us about a few that you’ve found very effective.
It is true that some of the prescriptions are simple. But simple can still be hard. If the prescription, for example, is: slow down, and we have been driving ourselves forward for too long, we may not know what “slow down” looks like, or how to get there from here. Sometimes “slow down” is the main prescription and it is often the most effective. But there are other, easier short term remedies that can be very effective.
When we have excess stress in our lives, our nervous systems become hyper sensitive. When they become hypersensitive, we are more likely to translate benign events as threatening ones. When we do that, more stress hormones are secreted, making our nervous systems even more hypersensitive. It is a downward cycle. If we could but calm down the nervous system, we could help break that cycle. And lo, there are ways and means to accomplish that very thing. And, behold, they are simple. Or can be.
One simple remedy is warm oil self-massage–called “Abhyanga” in Ayurveda. There are loads of nerve endings that enervate our skin–the largest organ of our bodies. In essence, we can calm the nervous system through the skin. It works. It is a bit too much to explain here, but it is described in an Appendix in Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life.
I also love 15 minutes of gentle Alternate Nostril Breathing practice, daily. I find it to be one of the most powerful remedies for hot flashes and hormonal imbalance in general.
High-intensity workouts are all the rage right now, but you warn that this type of exercise can be detrimental to some women—when do you recommend against it?
Eastern medicine recognizes that different constitutions require different amounts and types of exercise to maintain optimal health. Stronger, sturdier constitutions do well to engage in longer, harder workouts, while women with slight or delicate frames, do better with slower, er, less sweaty workouts.
There can be many signs that a woman is over exercising. When a woman, for example, is underweight or her periods are scanty, absent or irregular, these are some signs she is either under-nourished, over-exercising or simply outspending her resources in other arenas. In other words, even if she is consuming a healthy diet and getting regular and good sleep–both activities that serve to nourish yin in her body–her output may be exceeding her input. The energy she commits to exercise, work, run errands, etc. may be greater than energy she receives from food, sleep, sweet relationships and down time. In these situations, it would be much better for a woman to engage in gentle yoga, walking, tai qi or qi gong, than weight lifting, running, vigorous yoga or rigorous workouts.
Our bodies prioritize survival over reproduction so they will–100% of the time–allocate whatever nourishment we are receiving, first to our survival and to the organs and tissues that are crucial to survival. If there are resources left over, then they can go to nourish a healthy reproductive system.
Many of us in our forties and older, will remember Jane Fonda’s “make it burn” video workouts and feel like we are being lazy if we do anything less, but there are entire exercise forms in the East that focus more on moving qi or prana–our life force–internally, with gentle, minimal or even no physical movement. When we look at masters of those forms, they may barely move and never break a sweat, but are in incredible shape. These masters understand the value of irrigating our internal organs with energy, rather than simply our muscles, and we can see the results.
