This may come as a surprise, but here’s a news flash…
You do not need makeup.
I fully believe that how much – and even whether or not – we use makeup is a choice that every single person gets to make. As women, we have been socialized and marketed to from such an early age that we have become ingrained with the belief that it’s an inescapable part of our female experience.
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And yet having said that… making the conscious choice to design our skincare and beauty routines around interacting with an array of botanicals represents one of the most pure expressions of self-care there is.
The best and most sustainable approach to holistic skin health is this – Prioritize Skincare First. Makeup can an absolutely lovely add on experience, but we need to properly care for and prepare the canvas we are using! If you think about it, our skin is the only organ we can see and interact with directly. Pretty cool, right!
A great way to gain some further insight on our relationship to makeup – take a makeup mini vacation.
That’s right, no makeup – just caring for and loving your skin the way it actually is. It has far more to tell us on the day to day than most acknowledge, and the simplicity created by a reset helps us focus on what to nurture once our routine layers back up to its original complexity.
During the early years of my health journey, I took nearly 5 years off from using makeup and it was a profoundly different relationship when I started to mindfully integrate beauty rituals into my life once again.
To fast forward back to the present moment, natural beauty is like a crowning jewel among my many joys: yet it represents the complete inverse of the old approach and belief system. Growing up, I used to use makeup with the core belief that I was broken and HAD to use products to ‘fix’ my face. Now, both skincare and makeup rituals are important because they help me to commune with the elements, and to deeper messages coming from my system.
In short, we should always let makeup be sacred – a Ritual of love + appreciation, a sincere moment of communion with self, set as an oasis amidst a busy day of external obligations. Not a burden or compensation for what we have come to believe that we lack.