What We’re Missing with Beauty: It’s Not in the Products

Look, I won’t say that all the umpteen-million products targeting what we look like never do anything whatsoever.

I will say, though, that I believe it’s mostly all marketing.

Simpler’s Just Better

Yes, we should use sunscreen to protect our exteriors from ultraviolet rays. Yes, we should use products that shield our outermost body layers from harsh weather, including creams and petroleum jellies.

Yet most of the quick-fix creams and pills that cost fortunes don’t have any more practical value to skin, health, appearance, or overall wellness than the simplest products you can find—or that you can even make yourself.

Frankly, we really should apply the principles of healthy eating—what we put into our bodies—to what we put on our bodies.

The principles of healthy eating are pretty basic. We’ve all heard them. The most healthful foods and drinks have undergone the least amount of processing and have the least amount of additives.

Ta da.

Falling for False Promises: The Lure of the Easy and the Miracle

Hearing it doesn’t mean we do it, I know. Easy always wins. Prepackaged equals easy. Engineered equals irresistible taste.

And the marketing engine promoting all that manufactured food and beverage isn’t too different from the marketing engine pushing beauty treatments. Eating the simplest, most close-to-nature foods and drinking the simplest, most basic drinks is just like the internal-care aspect of beauty: There’s no money in it for companies touting miracle serums and creams and pills and procedures.

If prepackaged and engineered equals easy and irresistible when it comes to what’s marketed to us for eating and drinking, fancy creams and pills and treatments equal easy and irresistible when it comes to appearance—or what we hope they’ll do for our appearance.

Hard to resist a “miracle” that will strip years off our looks (in exchange for serious cash, of course). And paying for a product or treatment’s sure a heck of a lot easier than the internal effort we’d need to expend to actually transform our appearances in a more purposeful way.

Stripping Bare: Back to the Basics

I don’t consume as much media as most—and certainly not the kind that touts beauty solutions.

Yet I’ve certainly walked into stores and fallen for sales pitches about what I should buy and how if I buy this one thing I should really buy this other thing to go with it. Oh, and that thing, too. They complement each other.

And then I’d get home with all these jars and flacons and pumps and tubes and use the products as advised.

I operated this way for years, even, changing products based on whatever store I’d walked into last. Always buying and dutifully using several products promoted with promises.

Until the last few years. My skin—face, arms, legs, hands, you name it—had evolved over time into a raw, itchy, irritated surface that nothing I used and no advice I could get helped make anything but worse.

What was happening?

I blamed the problem on changing climates several years before it happened. I blamed it on getting older. I blamed it on the hardness of the water I’d used. Or the softness.

Until, at a loss, my skin hurting even to touch, I stopped all of that and went back to the simplest oils, creams, and jellies I could find on the market for washing, moisturizing, and protecting my skin. The fewer the ingredients, the better. What I bought I could probably even make in my own kitchen.

And after years of misery, my skin relaxed.

When I found the creams, oils, and jellies I currently use, the person in the store told me that, sure, they were cheaper, but that they didn’t have any antiaging or firming properties. She didn’t recommend them, she said.

Well, know what? I look a lot younger without scaly, red, bumpy, flaking skin.

What Really Makes Someone Beautiful

And if not younger, I at least look healthier. I certainly look more like a person who eats and drinks carefully, moves her body regularly, and who does all the other work that, I believe, truly translates into a radiant person.

What do I mean by that?

Here’s the thing: The journey to soothing my irritated skin had me looking around at the people I know and the people I pass as I move through the world. Really looking.

And what I realized is that the people around me who really radiated didn’t necessarily wear makeup, have elegant hair, sport perfect skin, or lack wrinkles.

In fact, far from it.

Genuine human beauty—the quality of radiance—comes from the inside. And I don’t mean someone’s attitude here. (Or not entirely.) That’s true, and cliché for a reason, but it’s not my primary point.

How we take care of interior radiates outward into how we appear on the exterior. What we eat, what we read and watch, what we do to maintain our social ties, what activities we undertake for community involvement, how we exercise and use our bodies, the time we spend in nature, and so on have vastly greater effects on our appearance than quick-fix creams and pills that cost fortunes.

The people I know—no matter their chronological age—who live lives filled with connections and purpose, who find fun in their day to day, who move their bodies and spend time in nature, who challenge themselves intellectually and keep learning and growing, who consume simple and nourishing foods and drinks, positively glow with happiness. They are gorgeous. Even if a magazine would call their hair “dull” and their eyeglasses “unfashionable.”

And if that isn’t an endorsement to me for stopping with the heavily marketed nonsense—an endorsement possibly even stronger than simply calmer skin—I don’t know what is. (And it’s a heck of a lot cheaper, too!)