Love List: Luscious Skin Care

Hi Radiant Queen,

From time to time I love to update my favorite organic beauty products. A few months ago I got the best gift ever! Annmarie Gianni sent me a slew of her healthy potions and lotions from her new skincare line. Ya know why I say it was “the best gift ever”?

One: Because her products blew my mind (not easy to do). Annmarie literally harnesses the power of Mother Nature in a bottle. Vazoom!

Two: Because her gift was unconditional. She didn’t ask me to do anything but “enjoy.” Annmarie and her husband, the fabulous Kevin Gianni, noticed how hard I was working promoting Crazy Sexy Diet. They were so proud of all I was doing to uplift the lives of others that they wanted me to enjoy a bit of pampering, no strings attached. Um, really? I was so touched!

Note: Lots of folks send me products for review. When I launched my periodic Love Lists, my mailbox exploded. As you all know, I only write about things I adore and use myself. Translation: You can’t buy move LOVE. When I tried Annmarie’s gems I immediately thought, holy shitake! I have to spread the word because this shit totally rocks! As a matter of fact, I love these products so much that I joined her affiliate program.

Sisters, if you’re looking for something new, give this chemical-free skincare line a whirl here. They’re an all-natural, organic blend between shaman magic, Medicine Woman wisdom and a potent herbalist cocktail, (Hey Bartender! I’ll definitely have another). As Annmarie says, “the line brings the ancient healing energies and awareness directly to you so that you may radiate your own natural beauty.”

Here are my favorites. I’ve been using them daily for about a month and my skin is less dry and more glowy. Also, my makeup doesn’t cake or get caught in my near-40 creases as much as it did when I was using other cleansers and moisturizers.

I love the Aloe-Herb Cleanser. It leaves my skin fresh, clean and hydrated. Plus it smells like heaven in the springtime.

I love the Neroli Toning Mist, which I apply after cleansing and before moisturizer. It smells like angels blowing air kisses.

I love the Herbal Facial Oil. After washing and misting my face, I apply 1-2 pumps of this oil. At first I thought it would make me breakout or look like a grease slick. Oh no, Mon Ami. My skin drinks it in like a nourishing oasis filled with antioxidant bliss. This oil may just be the fountain of youth!

I love the Anti-Aging Eye Cream. Who knows if it will keep the facial crows in check? I like to think it just might. It’s cooling, calming and totally rejuvenating. Filled with cucumbers, green tea, echinacea and something else I can’t pronounce.

I love the purifying mud mask. It tightens and tones my skin. It also makes me look like a warrior princess and it’s a terrific way to frighten the UPS guy.

I love love love the coconut body oil. My legs and the back of my arms love it too. So do my cracky elbows and heels.

I’ve also tried Ayurvedic facial scrub. It’s a like, not a love. I smelled like Indian food and got more up my nose than on my face. I probably need to give it another shot.

Annmarie has lots of other groovy products to play with. Browse away, love lady! (My gift to you: 10% off any product. Use coupon code: sexy.)

Crazy Sexy Personal Beauty Tips

1. Drink ½ your body weight in ounces of purified water daily. If you’re a daily green juice Goddess, you can drink less.
2. Eat a varied plant-based diet high in raw organic foods, green juices and green smoothies.
3. Dump animal products, fake foods, sodas, coffee and energy drinks.
4. Sweat your prayers and shake your ass-ets. Move your God Pod 3-5 times per week.
5. Rest. Sleep is something we never catch-up on. Try to get 8 hours of uninterrupted slumber between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.
6. Dry brush. Your skin is your largest organ. Keep it bright and unobstructed with daily dry brushing.
7. Positive re-programming. A healthy and glowy body isn’t just about what you eat and what you put on your skin, it’s also about addressing what’s eating you. Face what’s holding you back in an honest and authentic way. Move through your darkness into your brilliant light (so bright we need expensive sunglasses). Practice EFT, journaling, check-ups from the neck ups, meditation, and visualization and smile therapy. Look in the mirror each day and say, “You are gorgeous inside and out, upside and down.”
8. Spend time in Mother Nature and align your inner rhythm to hers. There’s a time and a season for growth, renewal, refuge and silence. In our fast-paced world we often go against our inner grain. Stop, drop and remember.
9. Go to church. And by church, I mean nature. Spend time outside in the sunshine, breathe deep, hug a tree, do sun salutes in the rain, sit and meditate like the Buddha, get dirt under your nails by planting a garden and feed the birds. Enlightenment will come.

Peace and pretty,
KC

PS – For 10% off, remember to use your coupon code “sexy” here. Hurry, expires April 6!

Love List: Hot & Healthy Beauty Products

Hello Gorgeous!

You are what you eat, but you’re also what you put on your skin. Everything we lather on our pores is absorbed into our bloodstream! So if you wouldn’t gobble it up, think twice about rubbing it on your beautiful bod. Have you ever looked at the ingredients in your beauty products? Can you even pronounce half the words in the ingredient list? My pal, Stacy Malkan at the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, has helped to open my eyes to the dangers of the chemicals in our makeup bags, showers and bathroom cabinets.

It’s time to vote with your dollar (and trash bin while you’re cleaning out the junk that may be lurking in your home) by investigating everything from your mascara to your bar of soap. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database is super helpful in weeding out the yucky stuff. Just type in the brand name of a product and voilà! You’ll get the facts on what to keep and what to toss. It’s so easy!

Here’s some food for thought, the average consumer babe uses between 15-25 personal care products per day! Many of those products contain hundreds of dangerous synthetic chemical compounds. Chemicals like parabens, which are synthetic preservatives found in shampoos, make-up foundations, shaving gels and even food, have a chemical structure similar to estrogen that interferes with production of the body’s natural hormones and more importantly, containing potential links to cancer.

Unlike (most of the) food and drugs we ingest, the cosmetic industry requires NO pre-market safety tests, monitoring or labeling. That’s right, due to gaping loopholes in federal law, companies can put virtually ANY ingredient into personal care products. The European Union has made major advances in the regulation of cosmetics in the past several years and has banned the use of substances classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction in cosmetic products. Unfortunately, the US hasn’t yet followed in these footsteps! With statistics like 1/3 of all men and half of all women will have cancer by 2050, it’s important to investigate how exposures in our daily lives increase the risk of cancer.

Here’s some of my fave natural beauty products. Add yours in the comments section so that we can educate each other on what’s hot and healthy!

Makeup:
-Peace Keeper Causemetics Lip Paint & Gloss
-Lavera Mascara
-100% Pure Mascara
-La Bella Donna Lip Gloss & Eye Shadow
-RMS Cream Eye Shadow
-Glo Minerals Medium Concealer
-Vapour Foundation & Concealer
-Larenim Powder
-Cheeky Lip Balm & Lip Gloss

Face & Body:
-Nutiva Coconut Oil (perfect body butter post-shower)
-Simply Divine You Glow Girl Body Butter
-Dr. Alkaitis Makeup Remover
-John Masters Pomegranate Nourishing Facial Oil
-Alba Botanica Sea Salt Body Scrub
-Farmaesthetics Nourishing Herbal Cream
-Dr. Bronner’s Magic All-in-One Baby Soaps
-Pangea Pyrenees Lavender with Cardamom Body Oil

Nails:
-No Miss Nail Care
-Almost Natural Nail Polish Remover
-Acquarella Nail Polish

Hair Products:
-Nurture My Body Shampoo & Conditioner
-Max Green Alchemy Scalp Rescue Pomade
-Korres Shampoo & Conditioner
-Giovanni Natural Mousse
-Intelligent Nutrients Finishing Gloss

Making a commitment to finding the healthiest products for your body impacts many different areas of our lives. In addition to being good for you, natural products are better for the planet! Plus, natural products aren’t tested on our animal pals. Pooches, bunnies and other loving critters will thank you too!

What healthy products do you love? Please share with your fellow crazy sexy sisters!

Peace & lip-smacking gloss,
Kris Carr

Photo Credits: 1, 2, 3, 4

Dear Cover Girl: We Want Non-Toxic Products

I love to wear makeup, feel sexy and look my best—I just want to do it without rubbing cancer-causing chemicals on my body.

Does that make me a stick in the mud? Am I anti-beauty?

Cover Girl (by Procter & Gamble) seems to think so. The mega makeup brand has launched a new “Dare to be Beautiful” ad campaign, complete with $50,000 cash prize and a host of celebrities led by Drew Barrymore (see my Love Letter to Drew) who will “defend beauty’s honor” – apparently from environmentalists and feminists like me.

“Some people have tried to make beauty an ugly word. They say it’s cold, false, intimidating. We say: stand up to that! Stand up for beauty that makes you LAUGH, that makes you THINK, that makes you get out there and create some beauty of your own!” states the Cover Girl “Declaration Cloud.” (via Virginia’s beauty-schooled blog)

Instead, how about this: stand up for beauty that ISN’T TOXIC to our bodies and our souls; for beauty that is HONEST about what people really look like, and contains SAFE INGREDIENTS that won’t damage our health and our children.

Is that too much to ask of beauty?

Is it too much to ask Procter & Gamble to give it a rest with the patronizing ad campaigns, and take a look in the mirror? They might notice a few flaws that need fixing. For example:

P&G recently agreed to reformulate Herbal Essences shampoo to reduce 1,4 dioxane, a cancer-causing petrochemical. Good first step, but new product tests also found high levels of 1,4 dioxane in P&G laundry soaps Tide, Ivory Snow and Cheer.

Tests by the FDA and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics found higher levels of lead in Cover Girl lipsticks than many other brands.

Cover Girl makeup is a leading user of quaternium 15, a known allergen and skin sensitizer that can release formaldehyde (a carcinogen) into products.

Considering the mind-boggling volume of P&G products—and their plans to add a billion new customers in the developing world—cleaning up these problems would go a long way toward reducing the planet’s toxic load.

It would go a long way toward protecting our health and defending beauty in the world. So what do you say, Cover Girl? Let’s rock it with some non-toxic products!

UPDATE: In my last blog, I wrote about the Axe craze and the lame NYT story that failed to mention concerns about hazardous chemicals in male body sprays. Well, the state of California is certainly concerned. Last month, they slapped Axe’s parent company, Unilever, with a $1.3 million fine for polluting the air with volatile organic compounds.

Why I’m a Beauty School Drop-In

By Virginia

I soap my hands up with cleanser and hover over Stephanie’s face. “Go on, get in there!” says our teacher, Miss Jenny. “You won’t hurt her.”

I press on Stephanie’s shoulders and start stroking up her neck and over her chin and cheeks. That shoulder move is key; we learned that if you touch your client’s face right off the bat, they’ll jump out of the bed. Next I start circling into the folds around Stephanie’s nose and all around her forehead until she’s covered in a thin layer of foam.

After spending four weeks with Stephanie as classmates at Beauty U, I know an assortment of random facts: She has a one-year-old nephew. She curses her oily skin. She just had two dates with a new guy, but there was no spark.

But suddenly, she stops being Stephanie (aunt, skin-obsesser, dater of spark-less dudes) and becomes just a face — an upside down series of planes and curves that I need to cover in cleanser and wipe clean with a cotton pad. It’s like when you say a word too many times in a row and suddenly can’t remember what it means.

Per Miss Jenny’s instructions, I repeat the cleansing and apply toner. When I finish, she opens her eyes and is Stephanie again. We laugh.

“Remember, we’re promoting relaxation,” says Miss Jenny. That means you want your client to totally unwind and let their guard down. But if Stephanie and I were training for any other profession, I wouldn’t have much reason to scrub the underside of her nose. And I’m learning that it’s a weird feeling to be responsible for someone else’s relaxation when you’re feeling anything but that yourself.

By the way, I know you didn’t ask, but here it is: I have a college degree. And I’ve spent the last six years as a pretty successful freelance writer. I’m telling you that because it tends to confuse people when I explain that I’m in a ten-month night school program at my local beauty school, training to become a certified esthetician. When you say “beauty school,” everyone thinks of that song in Grease and associates beauty school with something that high school “bad girls” like Rizzo and Frenchie do because they aren’t smart enough or rich enough to go to college.

Everyone is not completely wrong. A lot of my Beauty U classmates didn’t go to college and currently work service industry jobs (waitress, daycare worker, home healthcare aide). They’re hoping an esthetics or cosmetology license will be their way out and up. In the current recession, there are also a fair amount of women who are out of work or looking to bring in extra income. (By the way, Stephanie is a guidance counselor.)

I’m not a career changer, though. Like most women, especially, upper-middle class 20-something women, I’m a beauty consumer. I’m enrolled at Beauty U because I want to know exactly what I’m buying when I shell out for a facial, a haircut, or a tube of lip gloss.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, American consumers spent almost $85 billion on beauty products and services in 2008. That’s an awful lot of eye shadow and manicures. I didn’t keep receipts, but I’m guessing I chipped in at least $1,200 of that—between three or four haircuts ($120 a pop, plus products), five or six mani-pedis ($40 each, plus tip), an occasional bikini wax ($50, plus tip), and a whole mess of goodies from Sephora, Whole Foods’ Whole Body section, and my local CVS. Depending on your own personal beauty routine, I either sound high maintenance ($120 for a haircut? It’s New York City), like a slob (only two bikini waxes a year!? Sorry, they hurt like hell), or average, which is how I like to think of myself. And as a just-about-average beauty industry consumer, it made me sad to learn that while we’ve been dropping all that cash, the average salon worker earns just $8 to $15 per hour…including tips.

No, they are not sweatshop wages, and yes, there are super fancy stylists earning much more. But even high-end estheticians earn an average of $15 per hour, 40 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, which is only $31,200. Before taxes. And these are jobs that don’t offer much in the way of health insurance, retirement plans, or paid vacations.

Plus, that doesn’t take into account the human costs. Like, what happens when the cleanser I lathered all over Stephanie isn’t subjected to pre-market safety testing? Just ask Blog Posse member Stacy Malkan: Since the FDA doesn’t require beauty products to disclose all of their ingredients or prove they’re safe, most end up containing gender-bending chemicals, and carcinogens , which salon staff absorb for hours, days, and years at a time. Consumers absorb a steady stream in smaller doses; I apply at least nine products before I leave the house every day.

But what about the other hidden human costs? How does a 13-year-old feel when her mom brings her in for a bikini wax? For that matter, how do any of us feel about ever-more-constricting beauty standards that demand perfection from our every (hairless, invisible) pore? The beauty industry has successfully blurred the line between indulgence and necessity so that treatments that were once viewed as luxuries—manicures, facials, bikini waxes—are now viewed as essential. And while our self-esteem takes a hit, I’d argue that this quest for perfection degrades salon workers too. These are the people we pay to get up close and personal with the parts of our bodies that we hate the most. No wonder most of us prefer not to make eye contact.

Once I started thinking about all the ways women pay for beauty—with our wallets, self-worth, and health—I kind of couldn’t stop. I don’t think we should have to give up on our favorite beauty indulgences. Honest! I just called to confirm yet another $120 hair appointment. But I decided to go to beauty school and spend 600 hours learning to excavate pores, apply makeup, and wax bikini lines in order to get a better understanding of what we’re all really paying. Check out beautyschooledproject.com to see what I’ve uncovered so far.

Virginia is a writer by day, beauty school student by night. She owns 14 tubes of pink lip gloss and hates to brush her hair. You can visit her at her blog .

To Color or Not to Color…

I’m now choosing NOT to color my hair… not anymore. For the past year or so, I’ve begun cleaning out every possible source of toxin in my world, in order to create an ideal body and environment for getting pregnant. I switched to all organic bedding. I threw out chemical-laden cosmetics and body care products. I bought the best-rated water purifier I could afford. I eat an extremely healthy organic, all vegan, high raw diet. I even had my amalgam fillings removed! The last thing was coming face-to-face with the most challenging change yet — don’t laugh, but it was my hair color!

Until now, neither the world nor I had known my true color since I was, seriously, eleven years old. I was a blonde for so long that it had been inseparable with my self-identity. But no more. That’s right, I’ve gone all natural in the hair department. Not only are the harsh chemicals for color-treating hair potential toxins for pregnant and nursing mothers, but — more significantly — those same chemicals do so much damage to hair that you must use even MORE chemicals (polymers, basically) to make color-treated hair soft and silky. There’s more truth to the Barbie metaphor than people realize… I literally had blonde, plastic hair!

So as a big part of my going green, I went brown! Haha! When I decided to go natural, one of the defining moments for me came after spending a lot of time on Kris Carr’s forum, MyCrazySexyLife. It absolutely broke my heart to see so many young women with health challenges. It was at that point I realized a clean diet is not enough. All stressors have a cumulative effect on the immune system; I want to do as much as I can to reduce that accumulation. A little here, a little there — it all adds up, and then leaps into the stratosphere when you make a dramatic change like going vegan or stopping the monthly chemical bath required to change hair color.

I realize that reducing total environmental toxicity (internal and external) can never guarantee I won’t get cancer, but I can’t help but feel that it helps — it’s a numbers game, after all. I know there are toxins out there that I cannot really control (most notably, air pollution — not just from cars, but outgassing from toxic chemicals in carpet, paint, adhesives, and other construction materials that are all around us). So to combat all these things I can’t control, I’ve gone total mad-dog against all the things I CAN control. I’m eating an ultra-healthy diet, getting lots of exercise, making sure I rest and have good quality sleep, and using the healthiest hair and beauty products. It might not be an issue you hear about very often right now, but I expect we’ll all be hearing about it more as time goes by and data come in about the additive effects of toxins on the body.

I am avoiding as many synthetic chemicals as possible, not only because it’s bad for my health, but also because they are bad for the environment. Many people forget that the environment suffers, not only when coloring products wash down the drain and into our water supply, but also from the impact of all the other products needed to maintain the colored hair so it doesn’t look processed (shampoos, conditioners, hair balm, gel, etc). All of these have a detrimental environmental impact. So, for me, coloring my hair was more than just a little procedure every few weeks. I can no longer rationalize what I was doing using that logic.

The fact that some hair treatment processes don’t touch my scalp doesn’t let me off the hook either… it still damages the shaft of my hair. Bleach-damaged hair is so porous that it requires a chemical soup of products to make it appear healthy. My hair feels so amazing now. Gone now are the days of seeing so many frizzed-out rogue hairs flying around my face. No more breakage! No more brittle ends snapping off (hair isn’t supposed to do that)! My hair is now fuller, beautifully soft and shiny and healthy — my husband calls it “luxurious.” It now feels right, both literally and figuratively.

What’s funny (and was unexpected) is that, since going back to my true brunette self, I feel more natural overall than I have in 20 years. My overall attitude and aura are noticeably different. I now walk by a mirror and I feel beautiful. It’s still quite new to me even though I’ve been working on this transition for over a year. And, even though it’s not my ideal length, I’m proud of it and I know it’ll get there eventually.

I should mention that I DO believe there is a natural, sustainable way to color your hair, and that is with henna, which is generally used for coloring hair darker brown, black, or red. I’ve not experimented with it yet because I’m happy with my natural color. But, as I age, when I start getting a lot of grays, I might give henna a try. We’re also starting to see specialized hair salons cropping up that offer organic and less toxic alternatives to traditional treatments. It would be great if these innovative green businesses really caught on, so look in your area and consider giving one of them a try.

So how about all of you out there? If you color your hair, or have ever considered doing so, did toxicity play any role in your thinking? Please share your story!