![]() ![]() With record rain in NYC, I am more easily dehydrated and quicker to retain water. With climate crisis environmental change, none escape the web, and the effects show in the skin. Flint’s “Observing Indications of Three”3, the idea that to draw a conclusion there must be three different confirming manifestations, is a good guideline for objective witnessing. Face reading is an invaluable diagnostic tool.1 Margi Flint’s fabulous book2 offers diagrams and maps linking conditions and organ expression with skin marks, textures, colors, irritations, etc. The skin, our largest organ, is an incredible source of clues. Symptoms express one way but many times have their cause elsewhere. Herbal practitioners often act as detectives. Getting off hormonal birth control and syncing my herbal infusions with the cycles of the moon gave me a sense of rhythm and connection with the physical world that allowed me to be more embodied. I was dealing with emotions differently, allowing myself to feel, being more present in my body. I had started a new dynamic with the plants and myself. After a few months of taking herbal infusions with my already clean, green diet, my skin improved. ![]() It would take another ten years, digestive distress, internal searching, and help from my herbal teacher, Robin Rose Bennett, to put me on a pharmaceutical free path. It was a game changer to consider nourishing my skin, to stop peeling it away with retinol, and to see myself beyond the manufactured illusions of beauty culture and advertising. My doctors offered no answers but plenty of drugs.įor years looking in the mirror, I saw myself through the warped lens of the beauty industry, and I tried to wash my face clean. ![]() Hormonal imbalances were aggravated by diet, social and emotional issues, and a long history of antibiotic use. As a teenager, I had such severe cystic acne that people would come up to me to ask if I had been in a disfiguring accident. When there’s anything unusual happening with our skin, the unconscious cultural narrative says we are bad, unlikeable, unworthy failures. With beautiful skin we are told we will be more likeable, attractive, successful. Advertisements for ways to fix our skin sink into us as an everyday lotion, promising to soothe our anxiety as well as our skin. Culturally, youthful smooth skin is idealized, and wrinkled, stretch-marked skin is reviled. ![]()
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