A Fitness Blogger Goes to a Clean Beauty Event

Last week I went to a clean beauty focused Q+A with Well + Good co-founder Melisse Gelula and Juice Beauty founder Karen Behnke. Talk about serious girl power right there, these ladies are freaking awesome.

I was first introduced to Juice Beauty via a career advice focused interview Well + Good did with Karen <-- Highly recommend checking out that interview if you're a #girlboss in training. Juice Beauty was the OG of clean beauty back in the 90's. Gwyneth Paltrow is also their Creative Director of makeup... so that's cool or something 🙂 This gal was the only fitness blogger in a sea of beauty bloggers. Uh, awkward. BUT it was really awesome to learn the basics of clean beauty, something I'm pretty clueless about. When it comes to beauty habits mine are pretty non-existant. What really stuck out to me about the conversation was how Melisse became interested in beauty via her previous interest in fitness. To elegantly quote her, We cleaned up our food. We cleaned up our fitness. Now I don’t want to use cheetos on my skin.

I’ll be total honest in saying that I don’t think I’m going to totally overhaul my skin routine anytime soon. It took me a long time to finally have acne-free skin at the age of 26 with the help of my dermatologist. I don’t want to mess with the good thing I got going.

I will, however, start paying more attention to what’s in the beauty products I’m using and when possible find cleaner alternatives.

If you’re new to clean beauty or curious as to what’s it all about, here’s what this clueless fitness blogger learned at the event:

3 Things I Learned About Clean Beauty

Why does it even matter?

I’m not surprised to learn that my skin absorbs whatever product is put on it. Be it skincare, or make-up, our skin is something that can absorb anything!

What did surprise me was learning that the FDA is doing nothing to regulate what’s in the beauty products we use, whereas they have taken a stand to ban what’s in the food we ingest. So, there are chemicals used in beauty products that are banned from foods. Even though FDA does not appear to be taking any significant actions against harmful chemicals laden skin products, it seems imperative to use such products with caution. It might also be worth considering taking advice from the dermatologists at 8 West (or any other similar centre) about skin-friendly products rather than using these potentially harmful ones.

Kind of freaky, especially when you think about lipstick which you obviously indirectly ingest or mascara which is used near your eyeballs. No wonder there are so many different skincare and make-up courses (cursos de maquillaje in Spanish) online that can help in perfecting the art of accentuating the beauty with the precision of the hand.

Everything’s not what you see.

Beauty products are filled with a ton of weird fillers, in addition to the active ingredients that are actually doing something when you use them.

What I found interesting about Juice Beauty is the fact that you have to shake some of their products since they don’t have extra chemicals in them. It’s like the difference between the all natural peanut butter you have to stir and the not-so natural stuff that is filled with chemicals to stop separation.

I was also surprised to learn that beauty labels have a few tricks they use to hide all the ingredients. If something has fragrance listed as an ingredient, that could be a catch-all phrase for tons of ingredients. So just because you read the label and think your beauty product is clean, doesn’t mean it necessarily is.

You need to dig deep into the content list to know exactly what all it has. Well, some people might be bothered by the packaging the cosmetics come in, whether they are biodegradable and sustainable like the packaging provided by Impacked Packaging marketplace, or not! While most companies do opt for such packing in order to not add to the carbon footprint, I am personally more bothered about the ingredients these fancy-looking products have in them and what kind of effect they have on my skin.

This website can be used to look up beauty products.

My mascara might be causing my reoccurring eye problem.

I’ve had this annoying reoccurring eye problem over the past year. Similar to a stye, I get these bumps around my lower lid. Instead of popping through the surface, they calcify below my lid. Sorry for the nasty visual if eye things make you squeamish.

In the past year I’ve had 4 or so steroid injections into my eyelid thanks to these bad boys and wasn’t allowed to wear contacts for a few weeks at a time.

It’s been an ongoing struggle to figure out what’s been causing this reoccurring eye issue since nothing drastic in my life changed — is it medication I’m on? Environment?My makeup?

Even though I don’t wear a ton of makeup, if I’m wearing makeup I always put on mascara

[Side note, I never ever ever wear makeup while working out UNLESS I already had makeup on for the day, or I know I’m having my photo taken. And even so, it’s very little makeup]

At the event I learned how mascara is typically made via incomplete combustion of carbon based products which is no bueno for you and certainly not good near your eyes.

Thinking about my reoccurring eye issue and the fact that I always use mascara got me concerned about what’s in my mascara, especially considering something that is applied near my eye is obviously closed to my eyeball and tear ducts.

As I said, I won’t be doing a major overhaul of my skin routine based on what I learned, but I’m looking forward to implementing some of the Juice Beauty products I received into my skin care regiment and I’m excited about using the mascara.

Your turn: Do you use clean beauty products? Is this something you look for in beauty products?