What if the ingredients in your products are making you sick?
What if the ingredients in the products you’re using are making you sick? There has been speculation and evidence (depending on who is presenting it) linking harsh chemicals in our ingredients to ailments. A friend of mine asked one day, “why would the company put those chemicals in our food or products if they knew it was harmful to us?” Great question. I believe they don’t always know in the beginning or they theorize that it’s safe in a certain quantity for “majority” of people. By the time they find out they are causing more harm than good, they aren’t willing to change anything until forced to do so because of greed. We see this all the time, from companies disposing harmful toxins into the towns water system to something as simple as using a body powder and it causing cancer.
This is the reason for “The Tea” to keep you informed and empowered with the information you need to make the best purchasing decisions for you and your family.
We had the opportunity to chat with Dixie Lincoln-Nichols founder of Inside Outer Beauty Market, who is a Biological Scientist, Health Educator and Coach. I’m so excited to finally share this interview with you. We usually share bite-sized articles because we know you’re busy ma, but this is a long one…enjoy.
Joelle:
Can you tell us a little bit of how you got into this and a little about Inside Outer Beauty Market?
Dixie:
Absolutely! Prior to starting and starting a beauty market, I was a Biological Science and Health Educator. I taught for 14 years, so obviously the body and science have always been an integral part of who I am. I love the body and I also love beauty. This gave me the opportunity to merge and blend both loves to bring something that I felt was useful, absolutely needed, and timely on the market. So what led me here was I had a company, a prior company called 60 beds and we had just three products.
I launched the product because I had a bit of a background in product mixing. My grandmother taught me how to extract coconut oil because we used it for our skin back in the Caribbean. I grew up in this extremely small village in Trinidad and Tobago with less than 300 people.
My grandparents were not rich, but we were comfortable. Most of our health and wellness ingredients came from our yard, full of the herbs and the produce that surrounded us with what we use for ingesting, and for topicals on our skin. I was six years old in the kitchen, extracting coconut oil with my grandmother. I always loved those moments. But it was Lisa Price, the founder of Carol's Daughter, that really gave me an insight into "wait a minute, this is something that can be done". And I started really immersing myself in the properties of essential oils, herbs and extracts.
I got in kitchen, and I formulated these recipes and then I took them to a lab to manufacture them. They gave me, what I considered were great products, but then once the products had launched, I started doing some deeper research into what was in the products. And that's when I came across some of the ingredients, little too late, I came across some of the ingredients that were not quite wholesome. And so I dug even deeper and started peeling back the layers in terms of what our products consisted of and what they were capable of doing to our skin.
This research caused me to pivot. I shut that company down, left my job and I embarked on a self-care sabbatical. I really needed to find self-care and to really figure out what it is I needed and wanted with my life and what direction I wanted to go. Self-care sabbaticals are so great. I recommend them for everyone because along the way, you discover so much about what you are meant to do in this world and how you're meant to show up.
It was the return and the investment that I gave to myself. So it looked like traveling and looked like becoming a health and wellness coach. It looked like studying at the school of naturopathic medicine in the UK, it looked like living in London for a little bit.
It looked like making new friends and homeschooling my daughter for a year. All of that to me was self-care sabbatical. Looking at my finances, looking at where I want it to go in my life and things that I wanted to do. Incorporating meditation and really amplifying the areas in my life that needed care and that needed attention. This time allowed me to do that and, please don't get me wrong, I'm still in a self-sabbatical because I'm always tweaking and not perfecting, tweaking and you know, just making better whatever I can with whatever resources I'm able to.
That sabbatical led me to where I am today because it was becoming a self-health and wellness coach and studying at the school of naturopathic medicine, that really brought me to this place.
I noticed black women were spending over $7.6 billion annually on beauty products. I also noticed that the clean beauty market had emerged. And I said, this is where I want to be. This is where I need to be. This is what I've been working for. This is what I have been searching for. And so I decided I would take my blog, which was then called Inside Outer Beauty and just turn it into a marketplace. And that's the story of the Inside Outer Beauty Market. We sell curative, toxicant-free beauty wellness, personal care, and household care products to support the body inside and out.
We don't look at beauty as slapping on some makeup and putting a lipstick on or getting facials and nails done, even though that's part of it. We also focus on beauty from the inside, from within, because everything that manifests on your skin starts internally. We want to look at it on both sides, both internal and external simultaneously, and bring that to consumers.
Synthetic Ingredients in Food and Products
Joelle:
There's a lot of dangerous ingredients out there. Would you say there are some more dangerous than others or some that just really get you fired up and angry that we can tell the audience to look for and stay away from?
Dixie:
Oh my God, there's so many that make me fired up and angry. There are some that are more dangerous than others. We've got toxins that are produced biologically by the body that the liver is responsible for converting and removing from the body. And then we've got toxicants, which are synthetics, that are produced by men, and they're introduced into products, whether it's cosmetics or food, and toxicants are harmful to the body, of all living things and to the environment. Now I'm not saying it will inevitably be harmful to you, but it can potentially be harmful to your body.
For example, where breast cancer is concerned and any other type of cancer, you don't want anything exacerbating or increasing the risk of a gene to become active.
It's all about lifestyle. And if we're putting things on our skin that are getting absorbed into our skin, that could be potentially harmful to ourselves and how our genes function, we want to inhibit that and mitigate those risks as much as possible.
There are several known synthetics that I think everybody already know about. You have the parabens and the phthalate and the sulfates. These are dangerous for the body because toxicants can cause neurotoxicity, which means, interfering and damage to the brain. It can cause DNA damage; it can cause infertility issues or reproductive issues.
Some synthetics are carcinogens, which means that they are cancer causing, some of them cause allergies, allergies to the skin, which means they're allergens. The list goes on and knowing that these are in the products allows customers to become informed.
It's all about really informing customers so that they can go to the counter and spend their money as consumers, knowing that "Hey, I know what's in this. I make a choice to purchase it, whether it has synthetic and whether it doesn't." Arming them with the tools that's needed, and that comes from education that comes from awareness, telling them, "Hey, parabens are preservatives and they're associated with hormone disruption. And it mimics the hormone estrogen, which can create so many horrible effects in the body".
60 to 65% of everything you put on your skin is absorbed into your body and we use 11 – 25 products per day on our skin. It's the liver's job to detoxify and remove excess estrogen from the body. When the liver uses up what it needs to for the body, the excess estrogen is there and needs to be removed. A lot of times because the liver is on overload, it can get dumped back into the blood. Studies have shown that it is "this" excess estrogen, that's slightly changed when it's dumped back into the blood that's associated with estrogen-sensitive breast cancer.
There’s also progesterone-sensitive breast cancer. So again, when we're talking about hormone disruptors and ingredients that are interfering and mimicking your own, you're on dangerous ground. You never know where on the scale of potential harm, you may fall, but we love to err on the side of caution and we feel like better be safe than sorry.
Why put it on your skin if you don't need it, there are so many products on the market that are eliminating and removing these types of chemicals.
There are organizations out there that you can tap into like Think Dirty app and EWG, the Environmental Working Group, where you can plug those ingredients into that’ll tell you what the potential risks are so that you are aware.
Reading Labels
Dixie:
Know your products ingredients and learn how to read product labels. When you go to the store and you pick up a product, just look behind it, don't be overwhelmed. There are websites. Google, how to read a product label. You'll find tons of information in terms of what to look for so that you can to say "I'm not going to get this. I'm going to get this. This one looks okay". And look for companies that are transparent, that are listing their ingredients because they're not afraid to. If you come across a company on the internet and you don't see any ingredients listed, I would pass if I were you. Transparency is key. We want you to know what you are purchasing. And again, it's all about being an informed consumer.
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