Letting go, or going back to nature

In my twenties, I was a fully paid up member of modern society, with faith in medicine, science, supermarkets, big corporations (and governments) and the claims on the back of beauty products. Over time, that trust has dwindled, though how much the abject failure of one institution I believed in during my childhood (I believed in god until I was ten or so, thanks to a good old C of E primary education) fed into the fall from grace of others is probably best left to psychologists to work out.

But as one by one, the blinkers fell away from my eyes, and I began to have more faith in a more holistic way of life, the one modern trapping I’ve been most reluctant to let go of was my faith in makeup. I’ve always had a  love love relationship with warpaint. Discovered, as a self-conscious teen with bad skin, stolen from my mother’s comprehensive vanity unit – she too has a love affair with Estee Lauder, indulged with gusto at Duty Free shops worldwide in the days when even Duty Free was believed to pass on savings to air travellers – it transformed me from a duckling to a swan in a dusting of pressed powder, slick of mascara, lashings of eyeliner applied to the inside of my lower lids, and a slick of burgundy lippie. I found myself suddenly interesting to boys, competing with other girls and generally, though not always, happier in my own skin (though only when covered with a layer of makeup).

Fast forward twenty or so years, and a casual remark from my son about how boring it must be to have to do the same thing to my face everyday to look nice, and I realise what a vicious circle it’s all become. A freeing day without the slap camping this year, and I suddenly realise I no longer care what people think of my face, have very little to prove to myself about my self-worth, or the way I look, and no longer feel the need to impress or compete with anyone, and it felt as it a chain had come loose in my mind. I was going to give it up for good.

That mentality is all very well in the middle of a field when you’re 89 sheets to the wind, but after a day back in the office attracting concerned second glances, and feeling rather naked, I somewhat backtracked. But after two weeks of wearing nothing but mineral makeup (I get mine from Bare Essentials) I’m pretty happy with the results.

 

  

  

  

 

Don’t get me wrong, it takes a bit of practice, dry skin with no moisturiser, and a light touch – as well as two or three shades darker than you think you need – to get good results from mineral makeup, but it’s been part of a general paring back of unessential beauty paraphernalia, that as I’d got older, I’d come to believe were normal and necessary- even natural.

  

  
With my skin little better than it had been as a teen – perhaps worse, now I have the odd bit of eczema to deal with as well as spots, the layering of lotions and potions had reached time consuming proportions, to little or no avail. But so reluctant was I to let go of my routines that even when a doctor suggested my makeup might be irritating my skin, I simply got irritated at her. “Of course it’s not”, I scoffed. “I’ve been wearing it for years.”

But my general mistrust of the medical profession has perhaps left me incapable of seeing the woods for the trees. As I’ve said before, I blame years of antibiotics not only for making my skin problems worse long term, but also for causing a host of other autoimmune health problems, perhaps even my children’s autism – Ava is now in the process of a diagnosis, caused, I believe in part, by microbial disruption of my gut, and by proxy, theirs.

It was this gradual revelation about the short sightedness of medicine that has increasingly made me distrust almost every claim made by someone with something to gain – which means profit hungry pharmaceutical companies, if not the beleaguered NHS.

But even with my increased knowledge of how easily disrupted the natural flora of the body can be, it never stopped me believing in skin care products, even though nothing, but nothing has ever been all that effective, if I’m totally honest with myself. And over time my eternal optimism has turned to slightly bitter cynicism. Facewashes that promised miracles and moisturisers that promised to turn back the clock may simply have been making my problems worse, not to mention antibacterial creams that might have caused an acne-bacterial arms race on my face. It’s time just to leave my skin be. 

Take sunscreen for example. For years, I been slathering on SPFs, topping them with bronzer and fake tan to give myself a healthy glow in an ineffectual- not to mention expensive- vicious circle. It took Jonah to be diagnosed as vitamin D deficient to realise sun cream might be a little bit of a con. Especially now the government is now recommending we take drops to compensate. Most people in the UK don’t get enough sunlight, necessary for just about every function in the body. So I probably didn’t need to wear SPF to work, and whether it’s saved me from wrinkles (not to mention melanomas) is debatable. 

In the old days people wore hats to protect their faces – and despite my efforts, which involved wearing sun cream then basking in the sun at every given opportunity, I was getting chlorasma on my cheeks – a patchy tan caused by hormones, notably the pill – it arrived in my thirties when I was on Yasmin, and has never gone. So I started wearing a hat, and rather than giving the kids vitamin D drops, as I had been to top up their supply, I simply made them wear one too, rather than coating them in cream. Neither of them is yet to be burned, although I will likely reassess on our family trip in September to Corsica.

But it’s this sort of modern idiocy that I am currently railing against. Like adding probiotics to pasturised milk, which I’ve been doing in an attempt to get some goodness into my kids. With gut bacteria a hot topic, and an imbalance of which believed to be the source of problems ranging from eczema and asthma – autoimmune conditions of the sort I started to suffer from after repeated does of antibiotics – to behavioural issues like ADHA, and notably autism – both apparently on the rise in modern society, I’ve become, as I got more informed, a bona fide yoghurt weaver, kefir mongerer, raw juice obsessive boiler of chicken carcasses, in order to get mine back on track.

Today, at Broadway Market in Hackney, Jonah and I came upon a stall selling raw, unpasturised, unfiltered, unhomogenised milk that contains vitamins, enzymes and bacteria normally destroyed by heat treating. Yes, it can also contain harmful pathogens, but since I’ve regularly added raw eggs to my smoothies, I have developed a better trust in grass fed, organic farming standards than supermarket spin, in these days of horse meat scandals, and governmental fearmongering, when let’s face it, they cover up some fairly sordid activity of their own. 

We tried it- the raw milk. Jonah, normally dairy averse, and generally fed nut milk in an attempt to avoid lactose, declared it delicious – and he said it made his tummy feel nice. And for me, suffering with radiating back pains all morning, suspected to be rheumatoid arthritis – yes, an auto immune condition linked to gut bacteria, the pain seemed to ease off a bit, temporarily, after the milk.

A quick Google research suggests raw milk might be good for all these linked conditions, even autism conditions too, but sadly the sale of raw milk has largely been banned, which, from a government that has failed to bring in plain packaging for cigarettes, rather feeds into my increasingly conspiracy-fuelled mentality. However, you can get raw milk from farm shops, some even deliver – so I will be adding it to my shopping list of natural, holistic alternatives, especially in the wake of the price of milk scandals that sees supermarkets running down payment to farmers below the costs of production.

In the meantime, the raw honey given to us by Tom’s aunt in North Yorkshire has done wonders for my aches and pains, and insomnia when taken before bed, and skin, since I made it into a natural face wash using coconut oil, honey and apple cider vinegar as salve to my anti-product beauty regime. So between that and the mineral makeup – made up of zinc oxide – a natural sunscreen, thus avoiding the need for more toxic chemical sunscreens on a daily basis – I’m feeling as though going back to nature may be winning out over science yet again, at least as far as I’m concerned. And if I fall asleep in it, as it often my wont, especially after a glass or two of plonk (good for arthritis, appaz) it’s apparently not a problem too, which is all good in my book.