FIELD

Does shopping for skincare make you feel bad about your skin? Oily, dry, combo, aging, acne prone, sensitive. What’s the deal with all these skin types?

Bear with us. Have you ever taken one of those skin type surveys? We have, and by the end we felt old and wrinkled, blotchy and pimply, and overall pretty anxious about our skin. And confused. Your skin is always responding to all types of input, so what’s going on with your skin really depends on the weather, hormones, diet, stress, sleep… you name it. Our skin is not really a “type,” it’s more of an evolution of conditions. Sorting people into these simplified categories (not one of them flattering) is just an easy way to market products to all the lovely customers who have been told their skin is too oily, dry, sensitive, mature, sun damaged… and they better buy some products quick because they look like they got hit with the ugly stick. What a punch in the morale gut.

It’s like we have to be skin shamed so we then easily tumble into the marketing funnel of the beauty world, searching for the product or products that will fix all the issues we obsess over. Or maybe that’s just us.

And yeah, we sell skincare products. But we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t feel that they really work at improving overall skin health. You will see improvement with FIELD products, but know that you are already beautiful, and these skincare products are really just icing on the cake. Almost literally. But pulease, someone slap us if we ever make magic wand claims.

Beauty products should be simple and effective, and should be used as a part of a holistic approach to health and wellness. Like, a serum isn’t going to fix your skin if you go to the tanning bed every day, or if you a eat a crappy processed food diet. The best ingredients adjust to whatever your skin is doing that day, whether it’s a hormonal breakout or a bit of redness from a windy day. That’s why plants are so great! They have all this inherent defense built up that makes them adaptable to whatever nature throws at them. And they don’t give a hot damn what skin “type” you have!

Same.

Drink lemon water daily. Dry brush daily. Exfoliate weekly. Exercise daily. Meditate. Bathe. Write. Sit. Walk. Breathe. Fart. 

These days, every celebrity and wellness coach and casual blogger is telling you how to take care of yourself. There’s a blog out there with 50 self care ideas. 50?! Seriously? First off, ain’t nobody doing all of these things everyday, not even Queen of Goop Gwyneth Paltrow. One of the suggestions was to eat a cookie. Like anyone needs to tell US to eat a cookie, amiright (as long as it’s vegan.) But surrrrriously we have got to lighten up on ourselves. What kind of standards do we hold our daughters and nieces to, telling them that they need to do all these things just to make themselves well adjusted in mind/body/soul? Doesn’t it just create anxiety instead?

It’s not like we’re pooh-poohing all the advice. We do a couple of things mostly daily that make us feel better. (it’s all about farts and pooh-pooh in this post).

So do what makes you feel good, and follow the advice of one or two heroes if that works for you. But if you don’t get around to doing that yoga class or facial mask or juice detox, don’t beat yourself up about it. Accept that you will stumble on some days and soar on others.

You got this.

Why do feet stink? 

Your feet sweat – even more than your pits. Enclosing them in socks, shoes, or just warm weather, increases sweating. Bacteria love to eat sweat. More specifically, STINKY bacteria love to eat sweat.

So why do they smell… like cheese?

Some of these bacteria are the same found in cheese. So that’s why your sweaty feet can have that “cheesy” smell! (We won’t address foot fetishes in this post. Or any other post, sorry).

Alright wise gurl. So how come my pits don’t smell like cheese? 

Bacteria on your feet are different than those anywhere else on your body. That’s why foot odor is unique (as is pit odor).

You’ve got me real worried. Thanks.

If your foot odor is unusually strong and pervasive, see a doctor. Fungus (think athlete’s foot) or even disease can cause foot odor.

So great. 

Wait! We can help. FIELD Feet naturally combats odor caused by bacteria with botanical ingredients. Holla! 

She has been feeling it for awhile – that sense of awaking. There is a gentle rage simmering inside her, and it is getting stronger by the day. She will hold it close to her – she will nurture it and let it grow. She won’t let anyone take it away from her. It is her rocket fuel and finally, she is going places. She can feel it down to her very core – this is her time. She will not only climb mountains – she will move them too.

– Lang Leav

Organic v. Conventional? Does it matter?

On first blush (pun fully intended), hellz yeah seems like the sensible answer. Organic means a safer product, and one that creates less environmental impact than conventional. But essentially, it depends on the brand and how transparent they are about their ingredients. Going through USDA Organic certification is expensive and arduous, and is a process that a small indie brand likely can’t afford. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t care about the source of the ingredients. Many indie skincare and cosmetic brands go organic for the high percentage ingredients, like the base oils and butters in a balm, or the rose water in a toner. Even though the product isn’t “certified” as such as a whole, the bulk of the product is organic. These companies often require documentation from their ingredient sources that the ingredients be non-GMO and pesticide free as well, even though they aren’t technically certified. Being USDA Organic certified is great, but it’s a high bar and shouldn’t prohibit you from using some really great, safe brands.

Bottom line, as it always is… read labels and if you’re still confused, ask the company. Look at their About page and FAQs. If they don’t respond satisfactorily or have little information available on their website (some companies don’t even list ingredients at all!), then maybe you should move on down the cosmetic aisle.

What does it mean to empower your personal care routine?

What is important to you and how do you prioritize your beauty, skincare and personal product purchases?

One thing is for sure lately. Women ain’t taking no shit from nobody. Pardon the bad grammar.

According to the World Bank:

Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.

Do you make informed choices about what you put on your skin every day? After all, your skin is your largest organ. And this goes for women and men. Do you have a habit of reading ingredients on food labels but not on personal care labels?

Today we challenge you to read the ingredients of your favorite personal care product, be it a shampoo, lotion, body wash, facial cleanser… pick one. Then research the product on the Environmental Working Group Skin Deep website to learn about the chemicals in the ingredients (water is a chemical so let’s not vilify that word) and check the rating. If you can’t find the product, look up the individual ingredients. Does anything have a high rating? Does that concern you?

This is empowering your personal care routine. There’s a lot of greenwashing out there. Don’t let some clever marketing claim fool you into thinking a company’s product is safe for your health. Find out yourself.

Rock on with your bad self!

Love is love.

Kindness, altruistic love, and compassion are qualities that do not harmonize well with bias. Restricting the field of our compassion not only diminishes it quantitatively but also qualitatively. Applying our compassion only to certain beings, human beings in this case, makes it a lesser and a poorer thing.

– Matthieu Ricard

Have you exfoliated with a sugar scrub lately? It’s truly divine, and dope simple to make. This here is our favorite DIY sugar scrub recipe. The combination of ginger and citrus can be either relaxing or energizing, due to the adaptogenic qualities of the essential oils. Pretty cool, eh? You’ll want to eat this stuff with your morning grapefruit, but please don’t.

GINGER CITRUS SUGAR SCRUB

3 cups organic sugar
1 cup sunflower or grapeseed oil (adjust if you like it dryer or oilier)
8 drops sweet orange essential oil
6 drops lemon essential oil
4 drops ginger essential oil
3 drops mandarin essential oil

Mix it all together until the oils are well incorporated into the sugar. Store in an airtight container and use within 2 weeks.

Oh, and a coupla thangs.

One. Use a reputable essential oil company. We like Aura Cacia, Simplers, Eden Botanicals, and Mountain Rose Herbs. This matters, because a lot of cheap essential oils have found to be adulterated.

Two. Since you’ll be rubbing it all over that babe bod, try to use organic sugar and oil.

Three. Make sure you use a spoon or other scooping device and DO NOT get water in the scrub. This recipe is anhydrous, meaning all oil and no water, and doesn’t contain a preservative. Once you introduce water to the mix, you’ve created a breakfast bowl for microbes like mold and bacteria. Just sayin. Happy scrubbing!

They’re all the rage. 

So many beauty brands, including green beauty brands, are jumping on the ingestibiles bandwagon. Wha dat? Simply put, ingestibles are something you… well… you ingest. Yeah. This includes vitamins and herbal supplements as well as probiotics. These ingestibles claim to improve your skin from the inside out. And they probably can. But there’s a cheaper, easier, and I believe better way to improve your skin. More on that later.

So what’s the big deal? Why do we sound a bit skeptical? Well, it’s because none of these “new” ingestibles are actually new. They’re all supplements and probiotics that can currently be found in the market, but are simply combined and repackaged in a pretty container and marketed to the beauty crowd as a way to improve skin health.

But let’s be realz. Skin health (and yes, beauty) comes from within. Gut health is absolutely essential to skin health. But we’re not convinced that we should supplement the heck out of our lives. Supplements can play a role when we need an essential nutrient that we can’t get through our diet or lifestyle, like Vitamin B12 for vegans or Vitamin D for night owls (or vampires). Or probiotics – our antiseptic world zaps too many of these good bugs. Or if you have a specific problem, like dry skin, borage seed oil is a wonderful supplement that is chock full of GLA fatty acids which are great for skin health but difficult to find in nature. But for general wellness, a whole food, plant based diet that incorporates fermented food can give you the complete jigsaw puzzle and not cost hundreds of dollars a month for stuff you don’t need anyway if you’re eating healthy. No amount of supplements can fix a bad diet.

And another thing, and it’s kind of a big deal. All the natural elements found in plants work in symbiosis with each other. When we break them down into separate parts, we remove all the relationships that millions and millions of pieces of the whole have with each other. Isolation of elements is a very scientific approach that is the basis for modern medicine. But why take it out at all? Maybe a better term for supplements is “isolates.” Why not go straight to the source? Those plants, they know what the heck they’re doing.

So let’s keep the jigsaw puzzle together and eat more plants!

Oh, and if you want to learn more about eating for skin health, here are some super awesome books that can help:

Eating for Beauty by David Wolfe

Skin Cleanse by Adina Grigore

Eat Pretty: Nutrition for Beauty, Inside and Out by Jolene Hart