Coming from a long line of women who believed in natural beauty and simple skincare, my appreciation for clean beauty started early in life. The women who raised me were full of life and laughter and didn’t have much time or patience for complicated skincare routines. In the early days, my choices for skincare products were rooted in botanical ingredients — hippy-type rituals — so I naturally looked for keywords like ‘fresh’ and ‘natural’ before purchasing any products. Yet, after reading packaging ingredients which I could barely pronounce, and not wanting to be guided by marketing jargon alone, through many years of research, I reached a turning point which inevitably led me to a deeper understanding of cleaner beauty, and the eventual creation of Audre Leigh.
What is clean beauty, you might ask? The clean beauty movement takes the ‘all-natural’ products that we normally find in health food stores, infuses them with a little glam and turns them into “must-have-non-toxic-ultrachics” with the ultimate goal of keeping consumers safe from harmful chemicals from standard beauty products.
It turns out, we don’t really need all those toxins in our products and that many of the ingredients we use in our healthy eating habits are equally potent in skincare regimens. For example, organic maca powder often added to smoothies is a skin brightening ingredient found in our Root Clay Mask, while our Earth Cleanse face exfoliant is made with organic hemp, organic rice powder, chamomile and pineapple powders. Organic plant oils and extracts are incredibly skin-healing and make the next step to a more natural approach to your skincare that much easier. Using pure, organic ingredients means your skin is absorbing only what it should, and doesn’t have to contend with the synthetics and silicones in standard products, that offer nothing to your skin. The same goes for perfumes and chemically enhanced ingredients known to irritate skin, which offer literally no benefits.
So, with my own modern take, based on a curated list of botanical formulations, emphasizing an eco-conscious awareness towards ingredients and packaging, I breathed life into Audre Leigh. To me, clean beauty is happiness in a glass jar! A simple step towards skincare, for you and the world around you, feels good — and happiness always looks beautiful.
For more information on ingredients found in many household or beauty products that are known skin irritants or associated with endocrine (hormonal) toxicity, check out environmentaldefence.ca and join the movement of kicking toxins out of our daily lives!
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Shannon will be officially launching her clean beauty products on November 17th at Luna. Click here to register for the Audre Leigh Launch: A Beauty, Wellness and Karma Event
For more Audre Leigh products, check out our Prana and Savasana lotions on our online shop, made with organic and eco-certified ingredients or visit https://www.audreleigh.com/ for a wider selection of products!