hair care

Skin Care Review: Squalan Natural Skincare

May 22, 2018 by Claire Fitzpatrick

Upshot: I like this brand.
Favorite: The Eye product
Least Favorite: N/A
Overall: Feels great, sinks in, not oily, ingredients are nourishing, non-toxic, don’t expect miracles.
Reveal: Ioanna and I are partners with Alive Cosmetics. If you purchase from them and you tell them where you found them, we get a small percentage of commission.

Just a Customer

As much as I like natural products, I actually use very few skin care products.

When I was a teenager and a young adult, in order to control breakouts, while my friends used all manner of acne wipes and creams, I used to just wipe my face with warm water. Worked fine for me.

As I got older, I just used whatever natural body lotion I had lying around to put on my face. I never had a special “facial” line. I didn’t think I needed that.

Taking risks

About 15 years ago, I decided to go rogue and went red with my hair. I won’t tell you what brand I used. Sufficed to say it was commercial and bad for me.

It was a departure from my usual “go natural” approach, but my husband loved it and I thought it was fun. But it was really harsh for my hair; and, at exactly the same time, I began to experience contact dermatitis on my temples.

I lived with it, which was probably stupid (it was stupid). During the ensuing years, my naturally brown hair began graying, so I stayed with the red less for rogue purposes and more of an, “I’m not ready for gray,” attitude.

In an effort to find a balance, I switched from nasty chemical red dye to henna about 4 years ago. I thought if I used a natural product, my contact dermatitis would go away.

But no, it did not go away; it actually spread. I now have it on my forehead.

It’s really embarassing for me; but lately I’ve been practicing stepping into uncomfortable territory. I have pictures that I’ve been taking as I test the Squalan, so I’m going to show you a progression of pics below as I go through the review.

So anyway…

When I came to Amsterdam and started the practice last summer at Nieuwe Achtergracht 61, I rented the space from Daiva Luksyte, owner of Alive Cosmetics.

We shared our mutual love of natural products. Hers was particularly focussed on skin care, and she decided to start her own business selling her favorite skin care products. It was in this capacity that she let me know that if I sold any of her product in my capacity as chiropractor, I could earn a commission.

That’s nice, I thought. However, I didn’t want to sell the product to my patients without knowing anything about it, so I put the offer on the back burner, so to speak.

I met a cosmetic expert

Time rolled on, and the winter holidays came around. Daiva had a holiday party for her renters: me, massage therapists, and a skin care specialist named Ioanna Tsaousidou, an absolutely charming beautician from Greece.

Ioanna and I got to talking, and we decided to test some of the products that Alive Cosmetics sells so we could recommend them with authority. She published the results of her review on her blog, The Colourful Bouquet.

The next post here will be a guest post from her on the subject, as a Part II of our review of Squalan. Hers is more from a beauty expert’s point of view. Mine is more of a natural health geek point of view.

Squalan[TM] Skin Care

Squalan’s primary ingredient is squalane, an hydrogenated (therefore, oxidatively stable) form of squalene, Squalene is an isoprenoid compound similar to beta-carotene in structure[1].

It is found a variety of both animal and plant products; in Squalan’s case, according to their website, they derive theirs from sugar cane approved by Ecocert.

Squalane is an intermediate metabolite in the synthesis of cholesterol. Topically, it can act as a natural protection from UV rays. Clinically, it may help lower overall cholesterol and is thought to be a potential treatment in anti cancer therapies[2].

According to the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Cosmetic Database — a MUST for your natural health care resources — the ingredient is minimally toxic (see this link)[3].

Squalane is an emollient, which means it can act like an anti-inflammatory on certain types of skin conditions such as papulosquamous disorders, which, for me, would differentiate my skin irritation with contact dermatitis.

In the latter case, a protein rejuvenator like keratin or collagen would probably be more appropriate [4].

But for me…

But for me, I wasn’t sure what was causing my rash. Evidence of henna causing contact dermatitis, until recently, was considered a very rare event if it was not mixed with other chemicals or when minimal pesticides are used [5,6]. Because that seems to have changed a bit, I will research more pure forms and more information.

But for now, not only did I want to see if Squalan helped my skin feel better and look younger, but did it help my rash?

February 2018

Before photo.

Ugh. I hate looking at it. Sidesweep is a good thing.

I started by using the Eye serum and the Moisturizer facial oil.

The Eye serum is awesome. It was light, it only took a tiny bit to nourish my eyes, and it didn’t sting if I messed up. Look at the bottle. It’s 3 months later and I still have this much.

The Moisturizer was a bit heavy, though certainly not as heavy as my body lotions/oils I’ve used in the past. I mostly used it at night and after a shower, because in the morning I looked like I’d been running around the neighborhood once or twice.

April 2018

I used the two of these for two months, before I met up with Ioanna again in April to go over our findings. At this point, my skin looked like this:

Not much better. My eyes look a little brighter, though.

So, I added these two products to my repitoire a month ago: Pure and the Cleanser

I’m not used to a cleanser, so it felt okay. It took a while to remove my eye makeup with it, but my skin did feel tighter. I continued to use the Eye serum, but I switched the product on my face to the Pure facial oil.

I definitely liked it better on my face. I started using the Moisturizer on my shoulders and arms, upper chest, and it was much better there. Not so well on my legs — too light.

May 2018

So, here’s how my skin looked yesterday:

Maybe I’m looking too long at it, but my forehead looks a bit better, I think. My face and eyes look about the same, but I like the way they feel.

I am sticking with the Eye serum. I love it. The Pure facial oil is also nice, and deserves more of a trial, I think.

The Cleanser? It’s not bad, but I’m not a cleanser kind of person. However, I’m going to also give it more of a trial before I settle on mensa-mensa status with it.

Moisturizer, for me, too heavy for my face, but as a light moisurizer for chest, back and arms, not bad! If you don’t need much moisturizer for your legs after shaving, it’s okay. But I need more.

Tomorrow, I’m going to a local dermatologist to get a second opinion, and I may have to stop using Henna on my hair.

Oh, gosh. I know I like natural, but I don’t think I’m ready to go gray yet. Let’s see…you’ll know when I know! Will she go white?

Stay tuned!

I’ll post Ioanna’s review next time. In the meantime, you can read it for yourself on her blog, here.

If you want to help support Ioanna and me in our business efforts, and you’re moved to purchase any of these products, do us a favor and go here to Alive Cosmetics. Daiva is a true blue merchant anyway; its a nice mission she’s on. Be a hero and let them know where you heard about their products.

Talk to you soon!

Footnotes:

[1] Kelly GS. Squalene and its potential clinical uses. Altern Med Rev. 1999 Feb;4(1):29–36. [PubMed]

[2] ibid.

[3] this is not to construe that the EWG Skin Deep database endorses the product in any way, shape or form. I am simply reporting on the feature ingredient.

[4] Sethi A, Kaur T, Malhortra SK, Gambhir ML. Moisturizers: The slippery road. Indian J Dermatol. 2016 May-Jun; 61(3): 279–287. [PubMed]

[5] SCCS (Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety), Opinion on Lawsonia inermis (henna), 19 September 2013. [SCCS]

[6] National Center for Biotechnology Information. PubChem Compound Database; (accessed May 22, 2018). [NCBI]

How are you stepping into your 2018 goals? Start with last year’s

December 12, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

How are you stepping into your 2018 goals? Start with last year’s.

Most experts say that we quit our New Years’ resolutions (NYRs) within the month of January. I think we place a lot of weight – no pun intended – on January 1 being the start of our “whole new me.” Our bodies don’t really know that it’s January 1. It’s just another day to our health.

So right now it’s mid-December. We’re starting to negotiate with ourselves.

“I’m going to park myself beside this chocolate fountain because starting January 1, it’s a whole new me.”

“I’ll cut back on dairy and grains after January 1 because I’m going to so many family dinners that I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

Or even…

“I’m going to join the gym on January 1, but I’m going to start January 15 because it’s going to be so crowded in the first two weeks because of NYRs and I don’t want anyone to see me.”

Look at that last one. WE KNOW that NYRs fail! Yet we still make them! We are the most clever, talented, heartfelt, creative, emotional, and illogical beasts on the planet!

Okay. I’m not going to fight this particular tide. But what I am going to do is to make a suggestion: If you want to know how to stick to your NYRs this year, you have to start with two things: your “why,” and last year.

Look backward.

Que the time machine. Look back to this time in December of 2016. Besides the obvious sociopolitical changes (don’t look back at the politics right now; you’re going to turn to salt!), you had an ideal for yourself that you were going to go get!

Did you?

What were your wins?

Mark down your successes. What were your goals for 2017 that you actually made happen? Type or write them down. What were you able to tick off your list? What changes did you create that actually came to pass?

Once you get this down, make an inventory of the conditions, both inner and outer, that allowed this change for yourself. How did you do it? Where did you find the strength to make it happen? Who helped you? What helped you?

Now think about these wins. How do they make you feel when you think about them? Accomplished? Proud? Draw on that good feeling and use it for setting your goals for 2018.

Write this down: Success breeds success. The feelings the success you have over the accomplishments of this past year is crucial to creating your success in 2018.

What did you not do?

Take a look at what goals that you failed to accomplish in 2017.

Take a good, loving, honest look at them.

Did you fail because you just stopped trying? Did you set them too big? Did you believe that they could happen? Did they feel too hard to do, or did you feel like you weren’t up to the task?

Maybe it was something else. Did something change in your world that had to take priority? Were you faced with challenges that called your energy away from the task you set for yourself before the challenge?

Maybe it wasn’t time.

Maybe your innate intelligence told you that the goals you didn’t accomplish in 2017 were goals that actually had to be put aside until the proper time.

Maybe you had to take care of a health challenge before you could take on the goal you set for yourself. It might be that you did the right thing by putting it off. Maybe you and your body just wasn’t ready this year.

In any case, if you are quiet and really give yourself time to listen to that inner voice, your inner voice will be honest with you. Your innate intelligence will deliver the truth if you give it the honor it needs to speak to your inner self.

When you finally come up with the answers, write them them down so you can look at them. This will help you clarify how to craft your goals for 2018, and help you look for pitfalls to your future success.

Above all else, be patient with yourself.

Adopting a lifestyle in which you honor your body and spirit takes mental practice. You can’t be expected to learn to play the piano in two weeks. Give yourself the emotional room to make an honest commitment to your goals.

Have a blessed holiday week!

Here’s Five (Plus A Bonus!) Ways to Healthify Your Hair

July 6, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

Want to healthify your hair?

I know, healthify isn’t really a word. But why would you not want to healthify your hair?

I was questioning if I should chime in on this whole hair thing and all. I don’t have naturally long, luxurious, thick hair. My hair is very fine, and as the years pass, I find I have less of it than I once did.

But I have to tell you: the hair I have now is WORLDS healthier than the hair I had when I was younger. It’s not even close.

I figured out these well-earned secrets like I have learned most of my hard-earned lessons in life: from 40 years of doing the wrong thing.

I am GIFTING YOU my 40 some odd years of trial and error here. So, save yourself a couple of decades and read on!

1. Don’t wash your hair every day

My friend on Instagram, who has GORGEOUS hair, by the way, validated this for me last week. If you wash your hair every day, you’re asking for breakage.

Do you remember the movies in which the actress would say they can’t do anything that evening because they were “washing their hair?”

That used to kill me, because I used to wash my hair every single morning. I was so paranoid that my hair would look greasy and oily that it became just the opposite.

I used to have ridiculous split ends that no amount of conditioning could fix.

It wasn’t until I became an entrepreneur that I figured out that washing my hair less frequently helped it stay healthy.

When you work for yourself, you delegate all your time very judiciously. There’s no one else to do it for you, so you have to really regiment your time well…right down to the amount of time it takes to make a meal, to work out, to commute to work, to get ready for bed.

In the beginning, when I wasn’t yet very good at it, my choices started to look like this:

I can either shower or eat breakfast.

When faced with that choice, if I showered/washed my hair the day before, unless I did something extremely body-intensive that morning, breakfast won.

My hair started to get healthier without my even noticing.

I wash my hair two…maybe three…times a week now. I actually schedule my high-intensity exercise around my wash days so that I don’t have to wash my hair more.

2. Make sure your diet is healthy and includes healthy fats and proteins.

I know. So obvious, but it has to be stated.

If your body doesn’t have proper fuel for its nervous system, your bones, muscles, etc…It’s going to conserve its energy and allocate resources from “expendables,” like your hair. Less effective nutrition = nasty hair (skin and nails, too).

Before I really knew something about nutrition, back in the 80s and 90s, I used to get my eating tips from popular books and vegetarian magazines. It’s not that they were wrong all the time – a lot of their advice I still use today. But back then, fats – all fats — were considered evil.

The covers of these magazines almost always featured a big plate of pasta tossed with colorful nightshade vegetables and silken, “low fat” tofu.

Make sure you get a healthy balance of Omega 3-6-9-7, fats and foods rich in proteins in your diet. If you work out, use undenatured minimally processed whey protein or, if you’re a vegetarian, use an appropriate pea-hemp protein.

Run from saturated, processed, hydrogenated fats and deep fried carbs.

Here’s an overall lifestyle tip: if you’ve seen it in a commercial, chances are that you shouldn’t eat or use it.

3. Use hair products that are all-natural, and sourced organically.

You have to do your homework here. It’s hard to find products that don’t have cancer-causing chemicals in them. Two brands I can recommend off the bat are Acure and Aubrey Organics.

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If you want to geek out on this stuff like I do, this is a MUST USE source: Environmental Working Group.

I refer to this site all the time. They have a database that details exactly how toxic a chemical is, so you can go to the store armed with knowledge. YOU MUST make this one of your go-to pages!

4. When you wash your hair, towel dry it BEFORE putting conditioner on.

This has been huge for me. I don’t know why, but one day it dawned on me that my hair was so wet, the conditioner just thinned out. So I towel dried my hair before I put the conditioner on, in the shower.

While my hair was in a towel, I shaved my underarms. I took the towel off, I saturated my hair with the conditioner, and I went about shaving my legs while the conditioner was on my head.

That leads to # 5:

5. Leave the conditioner on for 5+ minutes, then rinse for 10 seconds.

Don’t just do the 60-second wait. Schedule your shower tasks around the conditioner. Leave it on for at least 5 minutes, and when you rinse, don’t rinse your hair until it squeaks! Rinse for 10 seconds (give or take a second). You know… one Mississippi…two Mississippi…etc…

Here’s a bonus round:

Bonus:

[pullquote align=”normal”]Let your hair dry about 85% before you put a dryer to it. Use a high-powered ionic hair dryer and dry it completely. [/pullquote]

When you’re out of the shower, towel-dry, brush your wet hair, and go about putting your lotion, deodorant, perfume, makeup…let your hair dry on your head.

When its about 85% dry, use a hair dryer that is over 2000 watts strong. If you want straight hair, use the flat head funnel adaptor; if you want curls, use the round knobby adaptor. Dry your hair COMPLETELY. Then use the cold-shot button to set your hair with the cold air.

If you do these things, you’re going to see immediate improvement and obvious results in 3-6 months.

I know you have a tip. Please share!