Our Skin. Our Health.
Did you know your skin is your body’s largest organ, accounting for about 15% of human body weight? Wow! But, that’s not all. The average square inch of skin contains 65 hairs, 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels, and 1000 nerve endings.
Essentially, your skin is a two way membrane with six primary functions:
1) Protection - your first line of bodily defense from the external environment.
2) Sensation – your nerve endings react to touch, pressure, heat, cold, vibration, and tissue injury.
3) Heat Regulation – your skin regulates body temperature through sebaceous glands.
4) Storage and Synthesis – acts as a storage centre for lipids and water as well as a means of synthesis of vitamin D and B by action of Ultra Violet light on certain parts of the skin.
5) Excretion - urea is eliminated when you sweat.
6) Absorption – oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide enter your skin in small amounts.
Because of this, medicine by ointments and patches are used by doctors. Cosmetic and skin care products can also enter the skin. As a matter of fact, our skin literally soaks up the ingredients of every soap, cream and deodorant we use, as well as any mineral and chemical present in our water, and these substances end up in our bloodstream to affect our health.
Just the thought of it makes me crazy!
How many times did we use a cream only because it smelled good?
Did we check the label?
Probably not.
We watch closely for adverse skin reactions, but do we know the long term effects of substances absorbed by our skin?
We spend billions buying bottled water because we don’t trust our water sources, and we wouldn’t ingest tainted water, but what about our shower? The same water we won’t drink gets absorbed through our skin and ends up in our blood stream anyway!
What’s a person to do? We’ve already started talking about organic products. The way I see it, we should:
- Go more garden than gasoline. Substitute mineral oil or petroleum-based products with almond, sunflower, safflower oils, cocoa butter, lanolin, sesame seed oil (contained in the BeverlyD Hair Body & Bath Treatment), or jojoba oil (contained in BeverlyD “Appreciation”).
- Instead of the common softening ingredient ethylene glycol (which has been classified as toxic in some government tests), soften our mane with natural humectants such as honey, chamomile, or glycerin (contained in BeverlyD Detangling Conditioner).
These natural products have been used for hundreds of years. One thing we know for sure is that they do not have long term negative effects, or our ancestors would have noticed!
