System #24: Glowing skin
For a long time, I've been obsessed with trying to find ways to keep my face from aging and have finally found a key piece of information that has changed the way I see skin care.
Did you know that most of the nutrients that your skin requires actually get produced by the bacteria living on your skin? Things like hyaluronic acid, or niacinamide (vitamin B3), or vitamin A & E. Which means that if we have the wrong bacteria on our skin, we don't get the nutrients we need!
Our current way of doing skin care involves killing everything on our faces, adding expensive lotions that hold select nutrients, rinsing, and repeating...but what if all we needed to do was feed our already existing bacterial factories? That's when I realized how powerful natural approaches can be...when done right.
The Recipe
I have a friend, who's 48, white, and his skin looks flawless. He isn't specifically worried about his appearance, but his wife, from Sri Lanka creates a face oil she requests (erhm, maybe commands) he use everyday...
- 1/2 cup of coconut oil
- 1 teaspoon of black castor oil
- 1 dropper of tea tree oil
Thinking about how this single recipe could have given my friend an everlasting face, I came to realize what might be happening with this simple concoction. Each item on this list is antimicrobial in nature, though castor oil is the weakest of the bunch, with tea tree oil being the strongest; these ingredients destroy the facial microbiome but seed it with fats that our good nutrient-creating-bacterial-factories love allowing them to gain a foothold every day over the faster growing sugar loving bad bacteria that cause pimples, acne, psoriasis, and eczema.
This simple sweep, serves as a daily reset, and shepherds his microbiome much like fasting can do for your digestive tract...
But why use tea tree oil when I could just use antibiotics? It turns out bacteria, fungi, and viruses can't as easily gain resistance to tea tree oil (or coconut oil for that matter) because it's made up of dozens of compounds that each attack the cells in different ways making it much more lethal than any of our broad spectrum antibiotics.
Once again, nature wins...a lesson we're slowly starting to learn...