CyberDERM- The Sunscreen Company TM: Mindful Awareness: the Beauty and Food Connection

I’m a bit behind the times in that I just downloaded the movie Food Inc. off of my Netflix. If you have not seen it, it’s a pretty raw look at the food industry and how we source what we eat. I have to admit to being a bit skeptical about the whole organic food movement and the 100-mile diet. I always think back to when I studied in Tuscany and the way I cooked there: i.e. if you prepare your own food from fresh ingredients and you make it with love, what else do you need? I see the multitude of flaws in that logic now and in watching a movie like Food Inc., I get the value of being vigilant about what you consume. It’s a complex issue and the documentary format is pretty adept at teasing out the important threads and leaving you with enough social angst to make an impression.

As someone who runs a beauty company, it’s pretty easy then to draw a connection about what we eat versus what we apply to our bodies. It’s odd that I have been so mindful about we put in cosmetic products but I hadn’t adopted it into an entire lifestyle approach. In fact, I think part of me pushed against it during the whole green-washing period of the past few years. It’s hard to have the message pushed on to you by some external company that is going to profit from it (I see the irony in writing this from a company blog, trust me). I prefer to come to any kind of awareness on my own terms and through my own process of discovery- it’s part and parcel of my millennial generation I guess. Having said that, I thought it worthwhile to draw some parallels between being mindfully aware of what goes into food vs. cosmetics and come up with some basic principles. Basically, I love anything that you can put in a bullet point.

Bullet 1: Don’t be perfect.

People sometimes mistake m ability to see shades of grey as being wishy-washy. I just don’t personally like dogma. I think you have to do your best to be conscientious but all or nothing principles just leave a lot of room for judgment. Life is a process of evolution. I think both companies and consumers should be allowed to evolve as you learn things. If you are ready for another Oprah precept, when you know better, you do better but do not point fingers in the meantime. Unless you are a company that intentionally and knowingly does harm, in which case my finger is pointed directly at you and it’s going to start jabbing.

Bullet 2: Dispassionate Realism

When I saw the way chickens and cows are killed, trust me, I got a little bit emotional. Having said that, sometimes it pays to step back from anger and fear and then go about doing some of your own research. For example in the beauty industry, there is a lot of hot debate about ingredients like parabens. Some in the medical community or in the industry still stand by them. In truth, the science about parabens is not definitive yet one way or the other so then I turn to my dispassionate weighing of pros versus cons. In my mind, there is some potential for worry because there is a level of doubt about them. I then consider is it a risk that I have to be willing to take. Are there consequences with trying to do without them? Not really. There are alternatives that you can use to properly protect your products against ‘getting buggy’ that do not have any issues. Case closed- no parabens for me, thank-you, but I came to it in a reasonable and objective way.

Bullet 3: Bring some humanity back.

This goes back to my statement about not having faith in the brand messaging of those ‘green’ types of companies. It’s not to say that a corporate conglomerate like Walmart can’t make impactful social change. They absolutely can and to a large extent they can make the biggest changes! It’s still easier to trust companies though that seem to have people behind them. People that have real voices and personalities. We are pretty good as people at gaging whether something seems real to us. To that end, find the people behind companies and ask them questions! What are their principles? How credible are they?

I think if you keep to these types of principles, living a mind-ful type of lifestyle becomes more accessible for everyone. It’s not something that is just trendy or for an elite few. It does not always fit so nicely into a perfect Facebook update but it becomes something real that can improve you and your family’s life.