It bothers me when a customer comes into the OUMERE Boutique with a sure attitude about their failures with skin care. This defeatist mindset is usually along the lines of “I have tried everything and nothing works, I have bad/sensitive skin and I don’t think anything can help.”
When I ask them what they have used the response is a list of skin care products and esthetician treatments that would strip the paint off of a house.
If every time I bought a silk scarf I brought it home by tying it to the axel of my car, and then went to a tailor to fix it with the complaint that “no matter what I do I can’t keep my scarves from getting destroyed”, the advice would be obvious: stop doing dumb unnecessary things that are destroying your scarf. If I retorted back “well a mom blog told me to do this” or “I saw a picture online that told me to do this” or “a influencer on Instagram swears by this” then I believe the advice from the expert on scarves would be “stop doing dumb unnecessary things that are destroying your scarf.” The advice from an actual expert is the same no matter what you heard from those pretending be one.
Deception Conception
I have heard the spectrum of nonsense in skin care ranging from vampire facials, to face smearing beef tallow and then the subsequent confusion when skin looks like a discarded pizza slice instead of an edited social media image.
Skin care has become propagandized, and in its wake, the discontented individual, bewildered and exploited by a cacophony of charlatans, misled into self-blame rather than recognizing the damage inflicted by unscientific advice.
My advice is always the same: Your skin isn’t bad, your source of information is.
Or I might say, you’re not allergic to that ingredient, you are just using it wrong. Often a customer will come in and say that they are allergic to some oil or extract that’s really only found in skin care and not otherwise consumed. I will ask, how do you know? And the response is always “when I put this oil on my skin, I get a reaction.” Well, that doesn’t mean an ingredient allergy, it means you are using the ingredient improperly.
If I take a teaspoon of cayenne pepper and swallow it, my throat is going to close up, I’m going to cough and have a bad time for the next hour. But, if I sprinkle cayenne pepper into coconut milk with other spices and put it over vegetables, I have a very nice, pleasant and completely different experience. A healthy one. Using cayenne pepper the wrong way would make me think I have an allergy, but using it the right way suggests otherwise.
The Fork in the Road
A straight oil on the skin is the wrong way of doing skin care. Oils on their own can be inflammatory, clogging and devoid of skin care benefit. However, when mixed with other oils and extracts provides an anti-aging effect. The complexity of oils and their fatty acid composition is what took several years for the development of the Serum Bioluminelle. Furthermore, an oil on its own cannot hydrate the skin because oils contain no water. Therefore a water layer of extracts was created with the Bioluminelle oil layer to sit underneath to hydrate the skin.
The misuse of an ingredient will cause a skin care reaction that will wrongly indicate an allergic reaction, but really it is just a sign that the ingredient was too strong to be used on its own and needs proper formulation to be used correctly. You cannot have an airplane with just the wings, it needs the other components such as the engines, stabilizers, etc to work with the wings to make the plane fly. Just one component on its own does not create flight, it causes a crash and one ingredient on its own does not create beautiful skin, it causes disease.
Without thought put into skin care, you will receive a thoughtless gift. Acne, inflammation, and aging can all occur from using skin care wrong. Thoughtless skincare bereft of scientific merit is why I created OUMERE and the Mask of Vanity blog. I wanted to have skin care for myself that I created with my own scientific research and understanding because I could not trust what was presented to me, because everything that I was confronted with did not hold up to scientific rigor when it was actually tested and not just parroted. Before putting anything in my products I tested the ingredients myself to see if they held up to the claims made by “scientific” bloggers and influencers and they never did.
The best advice I can give from these findings is that it’s not your skin that’s bad, you don’t have an allergy or skin sensitivity. Your skin is just reacting to bad skin care.