In this episode, I’m speaking with Nadine Artemis, author of Renegade Beauty and Holistic Dental Care. But most personally impactful to me is that she is the woman behind Living Libations, an obsessively natural skincare line that has been creating and promoting pure products for over 30 years. My family and I really love and frequently use her product line.
Today, Nadine and I cover many topics, including the truth about sun exposure, along with a new paradigm for thinking about the benefits and risks of being in the sun, her favorite recommendations to keep your skin healthy, and the most common skincare myths she busts with better recommendations you can start right away.
Get 10% off Nadine’s skincare products https://int.livinglibations.com/?a_aid=5b283c33f0e53 using code Energy10
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Nadine and I discuss:
- Should we really avoid the sun as aggressively as mainstream dermatologists recommend?
- 2 little-known dangers of sunscreen that have nothing to do with added chemicals or endocrine disruptors
- The app Nadine uses to track her vitamin D exposure every day of the year
- Some of the beneficial compounds (other than vitamin D!) when we get daily sun exposure
- The connection between the sun, melatonin, and our mitochondria
- A pattern of sun exposure that has been most strongly linked to cancer in scientific studies
- Specific foods that can protect us—or make us more susceptible to—the sun’s rays
- How to work with your internal sun protection, melanin, to gain more benefit and less risk from sun exposure
- A new paradigm of thinking about sun exposure that takes our overall health into account
- Topical use of melatonin and Nadine’s favorite way to prepare it for hair growth
- The Fitzpatrick skin type scale and why knowing your unique skin type can help you make the best decision for the amount of sun exposure you need
- Nadine’s opinion on retinol and tretinoin, her top 4 ingredients for keeping your skin super healthy as you age, and the biggest skincare myths
- Is it ever appropriate to use essential oils without a carrier oil? And the effect of essential oils on our skin’s microbial balance
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to the Energy Blueprint podcast. In this episode, I have on the show for the second time, Nadine Artemis, who is the author of Renegade Beauty and Holistic Dental Care, and she’s the creator of Living Libations, which is my family’s, especially my wife’s, personal favorite line of skincare and personal care products. It is a uniquely pure and pristine line of products. No synthetic chemicals, no bad ingredients. Just best of the best pure ingredients in every single formula. Nadine is as much of a geek about personal care product ingredients as I am, and I just love that about her.
She’s on the show to talk about her wonderful formulations. We’re going to talk a lot about– I think the majority of the podcast is actually a lot of her thoughts on sun exposure, how to do it safely, misconceptions people have around sun exposure, and how to get the benefits of sun without being harmed by it. I hope you enjoy this conversation with my friend Nadine Artemis. Nadine, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the show. It’s been way too long.
Nadine Artemis: I’m so happy to be here with you today. Thank you for having me.
Ari: Check this out. We were just chatting for 5 or 10 minutes before we started recording, but I didn’t show you all these things I have next to me. I have this. For people listening and not watching the video, these are Nadine’s products. Best Skin Ever. This is probably one of our favorites. We have used these products, and I’m not just saying this because I’m an affiliate of yours, but we have literally used these products for, I think it’s been four or five years since the last time we were on a podcast together.
Nadine: It was that long ago. Wow.
Ari: I think so. We’ve traveled all over the world with your products. My wife never goes anywhere without taking, especially this one, Best Skin Ever Seabuckthorn. Her and my kids are crazy about this one. That’s the highest compliment that I can possibly give somebody is that we– I’m one of the most discerning people that you could imagine when it comes to anything I put in or on my body, and we religiously use your products.
Nadine: Oh, I love that. Thank you. That is so beautiful to hear, and I love, too, that it’s good for the whole family as that’s how we create it. I’m so hardcore about what goes in and on my body, so we meet.
Ari: Yes, exactly. You can see, looking at the ingredient list, that there is nothing even remotely questionable in this. You go on Amazon and you look at personal care products for skin, skin creams, anti-aging creams, and you see all these just long list of chemical names, and it’s like, “What is this stuff? I got to look up what this thing is and what the safety profile is on it.” I’m going to digress into a whole other shtick from what we’re intending to talk about here, but people think–
I remember as a kid growing up assuming that when I saw this long list of chemical names and ingredient lists of products that, oh, all of these things must be tested very thoroughly and checked to make sure that they’re very safe. We have long-term safety trials on all of this stuff showing that it’s all perfectly safe. They’ve even probably tested all these combinations of this chemical plus this chemical plus this chemical.
It’s just funny to look back on the time in my life where I made those assumptions now knowing the reality of how little testing goes on, especially when you start talking about combinations of different substances. We have basically zero data in most cases, and then we can get into a discussion of non-monotonic dose relationships where some of these compounds are even quite harmful in very minute doses. Sunscreen is a good example of this where compounds that are widely used in sunscreen products have– we have pretty good data showing that they’re endocrine-disrupting and that they’re harmful, and yet they’re still everywhere in sunscreen products.
A lot of these assumptions that we grow up with just turn out to be wrong. Anyway, all of this is to say that it’s a joy to find somebody who makes skincare products with only pristine ingredients.
Nadine: Thank you. It’s truly my pleasure, and I had the same experience growing up because I just would bathe and read the oils on the back of stuff even when I’m in the bath, and you just assume those words and that language, and that it’s all just normal. Then I got to 18, and I always had a curiosity. My bathroom was crazy. I was even mixing those bottles, but I got a book on how to read and dissect labels at the supermarket, which was mind-blowing at that time. I feel like it’s a lot more common knowledge now, but it was like brown sugar is white sugar with molasses. All brand has basically cardboard fiber, or cheese and soup wouldn’t have the 20 other ingredients in it.
I saw that, and it was literally like that. I’d look at my skincare products in the bathroom, and a lot of it was Body Shop at that time. It’s the late ’80s, and we think it’s green. Then I’m looking, and it’s the same petroleum promise land. I was like, “Oh my God, it’s the food. It’s the cosmetics,” but in that moment, literally, I was like, “Oh my God, that means I get to make my own stuff because I feel like that’s all I ever secretly wanted to do anyway when I was growing up was mix things. Then it gave me such purpose and clarity to really go for what was totally pure.
Should we avoid sunlight?
Ari: I want to talk to you about something related to skincare that I know you’ve been delving deeply into for many years now. It’s an area of interest and a passion that we both share, and that is sunlight. Sunlight is almost a bad word when it comes to the skin. Among most conventional dermatologists, the recommendation is pretty simple. Essentially, avoid sun exposure on your skin. If you do get sun exposure, make sure that you have sunscreen on. We have this relationship with the sun, which is this star in the sky, this ball of fire in the sky that our ancestors have evolved under for millions of years, yet we modern humans are convinced that it’s toxic for us and that we need to avoid it.
Just understanding things from an evolutionary context in the way that I just said makes that idea sound totally absurd and extraordinarily implausible on the surface. Something has to be wrong here, and usually, it’s not the evolutionary rationale. Having said that, there is a sizable body of evidence on ultraviolet radiation. Obviously, we know it can damage our skin. We know it can cause DNA damage. We know it can cause sunburn. In some cases, there’s a body of evidence showing it can contribute to certain types of skin cancers and, hence why most dermatologists are widely recommending people to stay out of the sun.
What’s your take on all this landscape? On a big-picture meta level, how do you understand what’s going on here?
Nadine: You laid it out really well, and it is a very nuanced landscape, so to speak. Some things that society says right now are right, and some studies aren’t. Even the studies, if we look at the studies, they’re so faulty. I’m going to speak generally here, but of course, in my book and stuff, I do footnote everything. We’ve got the studies and the dates in the journal, so just know that. There’s so many angles to unpack here.
Ari: We have all the time in the world, so just start with one. Don’t even worry about brief answers. Let’s spend some time on this, unpacking different aspects of it.
Nadine: If we go to the full general thing, you’re so right. The sun and our evolutionary nature. We’ve grown up together, so to speak, through our ancestors and present day. Our skin was literally designed to be exposed to sunshine, just like every single living organism on the planet, except maybe the fish in the deep scattering layer or something, that literally get no sunlight, but everything literally corresponds and connects and thrives and lives because of the sun. Somehow we think it’s this death star, and we can’t even walk from the mall to the parking lot without sunscreen on, or the advice of.
So many beautiful, well-intentioned people in beauty realms, or probably not the healthcare realms, but healthcare if we think of– somehow I was thinking dermatologists weren’t part of the healthcare, but they are. Whether it’s doctors or beauty people or estheticians, the number one thing for anti-aging is apparently stay out of the sun. That’s the advice you hear time and time again. I’m here to say otherwise because our skin needs the sun. It’s one reason why everybody’s obsessed with red light right now because when we deny the sun, we’re denying the full wavelength of all of its juice and its joy juice.
I’m sure we’ve all been burnt by the sun and it can burn but that doesn’t mean we should just shun it forever and put on this SPF 50. We do want to expose our skin to the sun and if at the end of all this, you feel a bit shy, then put a hat over for your face or then don’t go for it with your face and you can work your way to that. Our skin was designed for that. We have thousands of vitamin D receptors everywhere and those vitamin D receptors need to be brimming with vitamin D. The type of vitamin D that we create when our skin is exposed to the sun’s rays is different than a vitamin D supplement.
Vitamin D supplement and we do want vitamin D from our foods, but it’s a fat-soluble situation, it’s still useful, especially like myself. I live in Canada, and I’ve seen supplementation of vitamin D really help people through cavities and that type of thing. It is a different type of D, and it’s not the whole picture, and we’re still going to need to have our skin get some of those rays as well. UVB is the one that creates vitamin D and UVA is one that can create sun damage. A lot of the dermatological studies on the UVA were done in a lab with lights and looking at that phototoxicity so to speak and that’s very different than being in the sun.
When we apply SPF and sunscreen, we are literally then receiving the sun’s rays split. The sunscreen or SPF will block your skin from receiving UVB but it will still receive UVA and without UVB, the sun’s rays get a little more damaging. Being in the sun with sunscreen, forget even all the chemicals and the endocrine disruption, will literally give you no vitamin D because you’ve disconnected from the UVB and you will only get UVA isolated. Then that’s a bit sun-damaging.
How indoor lighting can increase the risk of cancer
One of the studies I have in my book is a Cochrane Review study and that’s where they review studies and then put them all together.
This one reviewed about 14 studies on sun and skin and then put them together and then merged those findings. The long and short of that was the more sunscreen use, the more chance of getting moles, freckles, and various skin cancers. That throws some of that out the window. Then what we’re seeing from other studies like in the New England Journal of Medicine, even back as far as I think this was ’89 or ’90, they talk about your chances of developing melanoma increase the more artificial sunlight you’re exposed to, the less recreational outdoor time you’re exposed to, or the farther you live away from the equator.
Ari: Say that one more time, because I think you said artificial sunlight, you mean artificial indoor light, right?
Nadine: Thank you. Like fluorescent lighting. You’re working, you’re exposed to that fake light all day, and then maybe you go to Cuba for one week or something. We don’t want to have that kind of living with the sun either. Knowing all those things, that does upend a lot of dermatology, a lot of like what we think is causing the cancer, because those are very serious cancers. The studies are showing it doesn’t necessarily seem like it is the sun. Then on the flip side of that, It’s probably gone up a bit now, but there’s about 3,000 studies. this is about 10 years ago, so I think there would be more, showing that a lack of vitamin D can create various types of cancer.
We’ve got this lack of vitamin D creating cancer, and then it’s the sunscreen solution that could be creating a cancer environment or artificial lighting. I feel like really in the past 10 years as well, as a health community, we’ve learned a lot more about their circadian rhythm. We need the sun for that. Let’s also think about the sun as this thing that tans us or doesn’t tan us, and then maybe that’s all that we think it’s good for. When we just think of the tanning or the not tanning, we’re forgetting all the other nuances throughout the day.
It’s good to get a circadian app. I have one called D-Minder. It just helps you know from your exact longitude and latitude where the sun is in that day, month, year, or time, the whole sun picture. Then you can even track your tanning with it. You can know, “Oh, I’ve been out for an hour, so now I have this many international units of vitamin D.” That’s very handy because D is something that we need continually. You can’t just be in the sun once, okay, got my vitamin D, or have a course of a bottle, and then you’re done, because it’s literally a constant thing that needs to be supplied in the body to keep thousands of genes expressing themselves properly and not going down that disease pathway.
There’s this so there’s artificial light and then we forget that there’s sunlight, We haven’t created our living rhythms around the sun anymore either. That’s where we can see other vulnerabilities to cancer. There’s a few things we’ve talked about, just because we’re going to keep going, but we’ve got sunscreens beyond the endocrine disruption are literally just giving you the UVA and damaging. It’d be like going into your car, let’s say you’re a truck driver and every night at 5:00 you’re on the westbound highway and you got that sun coming through the window. That arm would be way more freckled because the window is blocking the UVB, and then you’re just getting the UVA on its own. That’s like sunscreen.
Ari: I think sunscreens do block UVA, right?
Nadine: Yes. Sorry, no, they just block the UVB. They’re giving you just access to that damaging ray. Now, if you’ve got a lot of sunlight in your house, that’s fine, because you’re not like sitting in it all day long. It’s just lighting up the whole atmosphere. We do need daylight to just also help regulate our– which nothing to do necessarily with obviously tanning but just to regulate our circadian rhythms. There’s the sunscreen, the SPF that’s blocking what we need from the sun and endocrine disruption, and ingredients like oxybenzene which are allowed in the US sunscreen but not Europe. That ingredient is one of the main active ingredients and it is not carcinogenic until it’s exposed to light.
That’s one of the main ingredients in US sunscreen and it’s an endocrine disruptor and all that stuff. We don’t want to access the sun through sunscreen. We do want to get in touch with our circadian rhythms. We do want to block artificial light and we do want to create a relationship with the sun, which starts with dawn. If you’re up at that time, go find the sun and watch it rise. If you can be watching that or out walking your dog at that time, for the first couple hours of morning, even if it’s cloudy, you’re getting all this information that we don’t even know about yet. Yet we do know some of the stuff.
The melatonin - cancer prevention link
There’s 12 types of cholesterol that are created when we’re exposed to the sun which is vitamin D which is a type of cholesterol. It’s a cholesterol sulfate, it’s water-soluble. It’s not really a vitamin at all and it’s a precursor to a steroidal hormone. Then there’s lumisterol and I can’t remember any of the other ones but I just find it super fascinating that we’re creating that. We’re also creating antimicrobial peptides, cathelicidins, and then the other really cool thing about watching the sun in the morning or being out is that we’re getting our melatonin signals and we’re creating melatonin by getting that red light in the morning.
That’s one of the really fascinating things that I’ve found out in the past couple of years. You probably know this, but I did not know this about the mitochondria. I always thought our melatonin production was this thing about nighttime and it’s excreted through the pineal gland and it’s all about darkness and sleep. During the day and hopefully in that morning when we’re getting exposed to the sunlight or red light or your red light panel, then we’re creating that daytime mitochondrial melatonin. I didn’t even know that the mitochondria produce melatonin. I thought it was all in the pineal gland.
Ari: This is a relatively new scientific discovery mostly Russell Reiter’s research. Most people don’t know it. In fact, I even interviewed a photobiomodulation expert recently, and even he was unaware of it.
Nadine: That’s super cool. I learned, I think, from Dr. Seheult, MedCram, and he has a great two-hour lecture on YouTube. It’s so fascinating, and it makes sense. We’re generating that melatonin in the morning. It’s mitochondrial. That is the body’s greatest antioxidant, stronger than glutathione, and it’s ancient. It seems like melatonin and mitochondria have been dance partners for thousands of years, and why it’s so key to keep the–
Ari: More than thousands, millions.
Nadine: Millions, did you say?
Ari: Millions, yes because mitochondria exist in much more primitive animals than humans, so this relationship evolved, and mitochondrial-derived melatonin exists in [crosstalk]
Nadine: Talk about evolutionary biology.
Ari: Animals much more that existed long before us.
Nadine: That’s so cool. Why it’s so important in the mitochondria is because it acts like the most awesome cooling fluid. I think of the conversion of energy to the ATP process creates a lot of free radicals and oxidants, and then the melatonin comes in like a cooling fluid and creates the antioxidants. When we’re deprived of the daytime creation of melatonin and mitochondria, then sleep isn’t better. Then what we also learn is that cancers of the tissue, like colon or breast, or prostate, those cancers, the tumors grow at night in bodies that are deficient ixn melatonin.
Ari: Melatonin has known anti-cancer properties. Red and near-infrared light. It’s funny, I’ll say red and near-infrared. Russell Reiter, in his research, refers to it as near-infrared, but then I think he puts it at 680, 670 nanometers, which is really more red light. I think it’s probably not a precise wavelength, but a broader wavelength range that includes red and near-infrared. As you’re implying there, the logical extension of melatonin’s anti-cancer properties would be by consuming it in supplement form in the context of cancer, or it’s known to help combat certain kinds of cancers in studies.
Presumably, by supporting your body’s own natural internal melatonin production, you would also– it’s very logical to say this likely has a role in combating cancer, and there’s various mechanisms that would lead to that if melatonin is playing a key role in combating oxidative damage, which we know it is by recharging those internal antioxidant stores. In that context, it’s worth noting that indoor lighting is uniquely devoid of near-infrared light. Basically, all of the lighting that comes from our indoor lights has essentially no near-infrared. The old-style incandescents did, and halogens do to some extent, but all the modern LED and fluorescent-based lighting that we have in our homes are devoid of it.
If we’re spending most of our time away from the sun under indoor lighting devoid of near-infrared light, and the near-infrared light is critical in this story of internal cellular melatonin, mitochondrial-derived melatonin. Melatonin has these anti-cancer effects and other roles in the cell. People are picking up on this train of logic here.
Nadine: Yes, exactly. This is why if you’re seeing the video, I’m yellow right now because I have my incandescent amber bulbs. I can’t stare at normal light anymore and I just put up a podcast light because it’s just like I am not used to blue light at all. We just don’t have light. We have luckily a very light-filled home during the day, even if it’s not sunny and then everything’s red or amber at night.
Harms of intermittent sun exposure
Ari: One of the other things that I want to come back to is I want to say you mentioned Cuba.
Nadine: Just randomly.
Ari: In your example, but what you were bringing up is actually an important issue. This is what’s in the literature called intermittent sun exposure. As opposed to, let’s imagine two groups of people. One is somebody who lives where I am right now in California, who is an outdoor worker, like a gardener, landscaper, construction worker, something like that. They spend hours a day outdoors with parts of their body exposed to sunlight. The other person is somebody who is an indoor worker. Just to exaggerate the point here, let’s imagine they’re an indoor worker up in Canada, where you are, or up in Seattle, let’s say, where it’s rainy and gloomy for a big chunk of the year.
Then during the winter, they go to Hawaii and they spend a week baking in the sun in Hawaii, but they’re normally in their house or in their office, not getting sunlight or it’s impossible [crosstalk]
Nadine: There are fluorescent lights in their office, in front of their monitor all day.
Ari: Right. That pattern is a pattern of intermittent sun exposure, where you are not getting it regularly, but then you go get a lot of it. That is the pattern that has been most decisively linked to skin cancer in the literature.
Nadine: Yes, it’s that holiday burn, and if it’s repetitive in the same spot. Let’s hopefully talk about also how can we engage with the sun safely. Also what we bring, it’s a relationship, as is everything in life. We’re just relating to the entire cosmos, so to speak. We have a relationship with the sun, whether we have one or not, even if you ignore it, you’re still in a relationship with it. If you bring a body that’s just fueled on Coca-Cola and Fruit Loops, then you’re bringing that depleted nutrition and that skin and those cells to the sun as well. You do want to be hydrated in the sun and then put the right things on your body and in your body.
You’re cooking with olive oil instead of palm, so to speak [chuckles] because everything gets baked in. You want to have clear, clean skin and the right things on it, and not be drinking Coca-Cola and then jumping into a chlorine pool and then having a tan with some Bain de Soleil.
How diet can affect the skin’s reaction to sunexposure
Ari: Are you aware of any more specific lines of research around how one’s diet influences one’s skin reaction to sun exposure?
Nadine: Yes, I do touch upon it a little bit in my book, Renegade Beauty, in the sun chapter. As we thought, pigments in foods probably help. Then they did studies showing that rich-pigmented foods do act like an internal sunscreen. Even from a chlorophyll, just the liquid or plants rich in chlorophyll or the red algae is really good.
Ari: Awesome.
Nadine: Take that before you get into the sun and it really helps. I was actually in Hawaii a couple of years ago and this 70-year-old classic guy, you can just tell he’s lived at the beach for a long time. He was having a conversation with somebody. He was just talking about how he has the red algae and he gets up there every day. I just thought, “Oh, that’s so cool to hear.” We can create an internal sunscreen. Then, yes, depending also on like what we’re eating or if we’re on the birth control pill, or if we’re eating a lot of Mazola, soy, corn, canola oils, then even without the sun, we’re going to have issues with hyperpigmentation.
Then that plus the sun could create way worse melasma or hyperpigmentation. The root cause of that isn’t the sun, it’s what’s inside our bodies. That you can even get hyperpigmentation without.
Ari: Even the skin pigmentation issue, the omega-6 to 3 ratio in the tissues has been shown to be a factor in how the skin responds to sunlight.
Nadine: Exactly, and if we’re filled with rancid omega-6s, it’s not good.
Ari: There’s even cases of people almost having what they feel, what they subjectively experience is– often people will describe this as like having an allergy to the sun. They go out in the sun, and then they break out afterwards. Their skin gets [crosstalk]
Nadine: The hives.
Ari: They get pimples or hives, and it’s like they have an allergic reaction. I remember looking into this several years ago, and I remember seeing quite a bit of research linking that specifically to the omega-6 to 3 ratio that’s in the two.
Nadine: Oh, that is so cool to know. I didn’t know that they’d pinpointed it that specifically. That’s good.
Ari: It’s probably not only that, but that’s one of the factors that’s been [crosstalk]
Nadine: Good thing, because we got a few questions about that a year in client care. We have other suggestions, but that’s really good to look into.
Everybody Loves the Sunshine
Ari: What about on the skin? What have you found? I know I have, let’s see, this right here. This is your product called Everybody Loves the Sunshine. I actually haven’t used this, but my wife uses it frequently, and it’s golden tanning oil. What went into this product? What’s the thinking and the science behind it?
Nadine: Oh, I love creating that product. Back in the ’90s, I had gathered all these amazing oils and going into the sun. Also, that was the beginning too of me going. Growing up, it was always like, “Don’t be in the sun, and here’s all the goop you had to put on.” Meanwhile, I would always be like– I was at a school and we weren’t allowed to tan. We’d always be hiding and then we’d put foil in our books and just sit with the sun hitting the foil so we could get tans and stuff. Where was I going with all that? Oh yes, what are we going to put on the skin? In the ’90s, as I’m starting to formulate and get into all this stuff, I wanted to really test this stuff out.
I actually was down in Sedona in July, which is very hot. That’s when I made the beginning of Everybody Loves the Sunshine, looking at the rich pigmented oils like calendula, sea buckthorn. There’s such a beautiful blend of ingredients in there. I can’t even remember it all. The skin healing substances like rose and palmarosa and frankincense and geranium and sandalwood and all of those essential oils, we couldn’t say this on the website. They all have studies showing that it repairs the cells from going down malevolent pathways, which is when the cells start to get abnormal and do those things and create skin dysbiosis.
Those oils and those essential oils bring things back to a normal balance. Then we’ve also got oils like jojoba olive oil– olive oil is not in there, but those kinds of oils are coconut. You can’t make an equivalency between one of those oils and an SPF because SPF is literally a word that’s just regulated for synthetic ingredients. However, jojoba, olive oil, coconut, they all have a relative SPF of about a seven, eight, nine. Metaphorically I’m saying that because we can’t totally relate them, but they do provide just a little– if you can only be on the sun for 15 minutes, it could take it to 25, 30 for you.
It can edge things up if you’ve got that going on. In Everybody Loves Sunshine, we’ve got jojoba and coconut and then the rich seed buckthorn berry. We’ve also added that red raspberry seed oil. Red raspberry seed oil is really neat because it shows to scatter the rays. It can help to burn somewhat, although I wouldn’t go out with just raspberry seed oil on for five hours. All that being said, the Everybody Loves Sunshine helps you bring in a deeper tan. It could help prolong your time in the sun and it definitely would help if you had too much time in the sun and then you need to calm things down.
It’s not a sunblock, it’s not a sunscreen, it’s not an SPF. It’s there for you and some people, that’s all they need because they’ve been in the sun for a while or they have a Mediterranean background and that’s all they need. Then we have the same version, Everybody Loves Sunshine with zinc. It’s the same formula and then we’ve added zinc. Then what zinc does is that classic mineral where you see the lifeguard with the stripe of white on his nose, that is zinc. Of course, we blend it and we’ve got pigments with it. We try and downcast that white cast so that it’s not that white.
Actually, a lot of people wear it under their makeup and stuff, even though I’m like, “Let the skin be free, you don’t need the sunblock,” but it’s okay. Anyway, that will literally block the sun and that is good because if you are surfing or you’re going to be out in the sun and you can’t be wearing a hat or a t-shirt, then that’s where I like the zinc one. For kids, it’s good too. Kids need sun and pregnant mamas need sun. The number one cause–
Ari: Sorry, go ahead.
Nadine: The number one cause of juvenile diabetes is pregnant moms being deficient in D. Tan those bellies, apply Everybody Loves the Sunshine or the Seabuckthorn Best Skin Ever, you will have, I guarantee you zero stretch marks if you do that, get that belly out into the sun and then get your baby out into the sun. Obviously just little increments. Then when they start running around, kids are a bit different because they’re not tanning. They’re not generally just lying ready to receive the rays. They’re running around. The sun’s going to hit them differently, the tops of the shoulders or the nose, and just under the eyes.
Think about that a bit or get them exposed and then shirt up or put the sunblock on, but give them that time. When you have an app that really tells you when the violet rays coming in, then you can really plan. Let’s say it’s July here in Canada, the vitamin D isn’t going to come into the sun till 9:00. In May, it’ll probably be, I don’t know, 10:00, 10:30 in the morning. You’ve got at least till 10:30. For all the women that want to be anti-aging or whatever, you’re good in the sun no matter what until the UV comes. Have that red light, get that original red light. Have your red light mask, but get the real light on your skin. It’s so good for the microbiome.
Those wavelengths that are cosmically made, not made in a device, are so rich beyond our knowledge right now. We know a lot what’s going on with the wavelengths, but 100 years from now, we’re going to know more and we’re still not going to know what beauty that is and what information we’re getting. Then you know when the UV is coming in and then give yourself half an hour, give your kids half an hour to an hour, depending on your longitude and latitude and what base you’ve built up. You want to start slowly but surely and start in the spring and just get that base layer going so that you’re ready to rock by June, July.
One thing that I’m doing differently is I just would once the vitamin D left in October because there’s no D November, December, and January here. It starts coming back mid-February. It’s so weak though. [chuckles] It’s hilarious. I’ve started to just lay out in the winter. Even though I’m not going to get the tan, I just realized I’m getting everything else. We have set up sunspots all over our land. We’ve lived here for 18 years. We’ve really got it nailed now, and then I have a little beanbag that I’ll move around the house to just find the sun where I can open up the doors. Then in the winter, I’m half in, half out, because it can be minus 40.
If the sun is out, and that’s helped me get through the winter because I do like the sun and I definitely like– the winters are long here and we’re not away the whole time.
The practical aspects of sun exposure and protection
Ari: Let’s talk a bit more about practical aspects of sun exposure. I’ll mention a couple of contexts that I think are important. One is number one, ancestry and skin type. There’s something called Fitzpatrick skin type scale. We have an internal sunscreen that has been built over millions of years into our skin. It’s called melanin. Some people have a lot of it. Some people have much less of it. Some people even have a different type of melanin depending on their ancestry. The cool thing is it’s malleable. You can build it up or it can get weaker depending on your sun exposure.
Speaking about me personally, as we were just talking about before we started recording, I spend quite a bit of time in Costa Rica. I surf. I spend a lot of time on the ocean there. Even in the morning, the sun gets real intense real fast.
Nadine: Reflecting off the ocean.
Ari: Yes, and the reflecting aspect of it. By 9:00 AM, 9:30, you’re cooking out there. If you’re not in the water, you’re overheating from how hot and how intense that sun is.
Nadine: It’s true.
Ari: That’s a different aspect than sun up in Canada, than sun even in California. It’s a different beast that you’re interacting with. You have the interaction of different places, different geographical locations. How far away you are from the equator, in particular, is a big factor. That’s now interacting with the qualities of your skin built, determined by your ancestry and your genetics. Can you paint that picture? Oh, I’ll mention one thing for me personally. I have a lot of ancestry from the Mediterranean region.
I’m very tolerant of the sun. I can handle a lot of sun. Also, my diet is very good. I have a good omega 6 to 3 ratio, probably 1 to 1 or 2 to 1, somewhere in there, maybe 3 to 1. I have a ton of rich pigments in my diet. I’m building up my melanin through regular sun exposure. I have a good tan that gives me a lot of protection. When I’m in Costa Rica and I’m surfing, and I might be on the water for two or three hours, I will pretty much always wear a zinc-based sunscreen on my face. I’ll pretty much paint it white. I don’t really care how I look out there. When you’re dealing with that intense of tropical sun for that length of time, you need to put a face mask on.
Almost everybody does it, even the Ticos, the local Costa Ricans who have much darker skin genetically, you’ll see them out there with their faces painted as well. I don’t put sunscreen pretty much anywhere else on my body. Within a week or two of being down there, I can handle two, three hours in the sun without getting sunburned just by building up my internal melanin.
Nadine: You’ve described perfect sun relationship, which is good. For sure, from what you said, you’ve got to zinc, especially water sports. I’ll send you that version. We have a liquid version and a beach balm version, just FYI.
Ari: I like the balms, the stuff that have beeswax and [crosstalk]
Nadine: Yes, because it stays.
Ari: All the liquidy stuff comes off within 30 minutes or an hour.
Nadine: The balm would make a lot more sense in your application. With the Fitzpatrick scale too, I have some Mediterranean, but also some English-Irish situations. I definitely feel like I have gone up in the Fitzpatrick scale. The darker your skin you’re born with, the more vitamin D you need. A person from Africa ancestry is going to need more– I got to let my dog out here. Is going to need more than Irish ancestry person.
Ari: It’s both an indication of how tolerant your skin is likely to be to the sun and an indication of how big [inaudible 00:42:41] your body needs from the sun on a regular basis.
Nadine: Very perfect way to put that, for sure. We do need ways to protect. Another fun way is vitamin C is protective. You can make a spray. It’s 10% vitamin– a powder with water, and it is waterproof, so it’s a good thing for kids. If you’re into peptides, a really fun peptide that we pull out in the tropical times is Melanotan. Have you used Melanotan?
Ari: I know what it is, but I’ve never used it.
Nadine: It’s one of the peptides called Melanotan. It’s super fun. Some people call it the Ken and Barbie peptide because it literally makes a tan. It works with your melanocytes, and it’s cool, but it can bring out hyperpigmentation more. That’s the one drawback. If you are freckles and some things, it could make it deeper and darker. I have found that instead of injecting it– it’s like obviously a whole peptide combo, but if you’re up with the peptides, if you inject it, and you’re just doing like 1 unit, like 1 milliliter. However, what I found better than that is to reconstitute it and make a nasal spray, which is even lighter.
If a freckle was going to get darker, I feel like with the nasal spray, it doesn’t get as dark, if that makes any sense. I will just do literally a couple of snorts a year. I don’t do it regularly because you could make a redhead super dark, super tanned. It’s crazy. I give it to my son before– he’s in Costa Rica or whatever, I’ll usually just give him the injection so it’s stronger, and he doesn’t have any hyperpigmentation. Anyway, my point is, holy cow, is it ever sun-protective? He’s never going to wear sunscreen, he’s just not. It literally protects him. It is so cool. He doesn’t need to do anything.
Ideally, he would probably maybe put a stripe of zinc on his nose when he’s out in the ocean fishing all day, but he does wear a hat and stuff, but there’s that reflection again coming up. It is so amazing for that. Then it can prepare your body to– if you’re going on a trip or just before the summer starts, it’s super cool. Super handy. That one bottle lasts me so long because it’s literally just a few snorts a year.
Ari: Not to digress too much on this topic, but last I looked into that several years ago, I think there’s Melanotan and Melanotan II, and I think one has a genitalia-related side effect.
Nadine: Generally, it’s Melanotan II. Oh, I let you out. Sorry, my dog here. There is Melanotan II and I. Generally, people go with the II. It can make you feel sensual, excited. What they do from that is they derive another peptide from Melanotan called PT-141, and that is a full libido driver. Melanotan can boost your libido a bit. Boost libido, have a little tan, it’s not too bad. Plus, on another level, I don’t think I could ever take it enough because I would just get too dark to really go for the other therapeutics, but it’s very good for mold recovery and that kind of stuff.
Ari: There’s one thing I want to come back to, which is, I think for context, I want to just give people a little thought experiment to think about to reframe your way of relating to the sun, if you’ve been told for a long time, or maybe if you’ve been told recently by your dermatologist. I was having a conversation with my neighbor just the other day who was all covered up on a beautiful day. He’s been told by his dermatologist that he needs to protect his skin at all times from the sun, so he’s been avoiding the sun. If people listening have been under that impression for a long time, I want to give you a way of conceptualizing this in a different way than probably what your dermatologist has presented to you.
Now this is not medical advice for any specific type of pre-cancer [crosstalk]
Nadine: It’s enjoy the sunscreen advice.
Ari: This is just a way of thinking about things hopefully in a new way. Let’s imagine that there was a drug that reduced your risk of a particular disease by let’s say 40%, and if you took this drug every day, you’d cut your risk of let’s say getting Alzheimer’s disease by 40%, or let’s say heart disease by 40%. In the process, it also increased your risk of dementia, and it increased your risk of diabetes, and it increased your risk of several other diseases by 30 or 40%. If you were only looking at the sliver of that overall picture where you said this drug reduces this disease by 40%, it would seem really impressive and like a really smart thing to do, really obvious thing to do.
Why wouldn’t you take a drug that reduces your risk of that disease by 40%? Until you started to zoom out and not just see that sliver of the pie, but you started to see some other stuff that was going on outside of what you were looking at that showed that that drug also had side effects that increased your risk of other diseases. When we look at the sun, we can zoom in very narrowly on this picture of sun exposure and skin cancer. That’s this sliver of the pie. It’s important not to get confused and think that this sliver of the pie is the entirety-
Nadine: Is the pie.
Ari: -of the whole of the human relationship with the sun and the relationship of sun exposure to human health. Here’s why I say that. I’ll say one notable study out of Sweden where they looked at about 30,000 women over a long period of time, over decades, and they found that women who avoided sun exposure had a mortality rate of what’s called all-cause mortality. This is risk of dying from any cause. In other words, now we’re starting to look at the whole pie rather than just one potential because of death. We’re looking at all causes of death. Women who avoided sun exposure had a mortality rate, all-cause mortality, that was about twice as high as those who had the highest sun exposure. When we look at that picture, now all of a sudden, things switch a little bit and sun avoidance doesn’t seem like such a smart strategy anymore. How we look at things, and the forest for the trees expression comes to mind here, we want to make sure that we’re not so zoomed in on one aspect, one detail of what’s going on that we lose sight of the big picture. This has been shown in many, many other studies as well. To quantify this risk, they actually showed that sun avoidance was as big of a risk factor for increasing risk of all-cause mortality as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. This is not a–
Nadine: Wow. I believe it, but wow.
Ari: This is not a small factor. If we zoom out, even just within the cancer story, we see that regular sun exposure is actually protective against many other types of cancers, internal cancers, and many cases that are much more deadly than skin cancer. The story is not nearly as simple as just saying, let’s look at this sliver of the pie, sun exposure’s relationship to skin cancer. Even if we granted– I think this is also highly questionable for many reasons that you brought up earlier.
Even if we granted the idea that regular sun exposure is causing skin cancer in some very direct and serious way, and there’s lots of research to put that in question, by the way, but even if we granted that, it would still be the case that sun exposure is broadly protective against many, many other diseases, and the big picture needs to be all-cause mortality. Anyway, I want people to understand the big picture of what’s going on and not be so focused on sun, skin cancer.
Nadine: Yes. I think it also infantilizes us as people on the planet. What, do we not know how to get burned? You know what I mean? The doctor can’t just say, “Hey, dude, here’s where you can use the sun, here’s where you can’t. Don’t get burnt.” I feel like there’s that. I feel like also so much of our modern medicine is just the trees and no forest. That’s why the skin is separate from– just like the teeth are treated separately and all that kind of stuff.
Ari: Yes.
Nadine: Yes. That’s how I felt even when I didn’t have all the studies to back me up, but I’m in my 20s and I’m like, “I don’t know, but it just makes me feel good, and I’m going to discover why this is true.”
Ari: What are some other practical aspects of sun exposure skincare that people might want to be aware of?
Nadine: Well, I just back to, again, it’s like, what body are you bringing to that heavenly body to create the tan? We want to have a good, non– like no Mazola and eating with the good oils, good fats, good pigments, good nutrition, water, but also vitamin D is helpful. Coming out of the winter or whatever, just be sufficient in vitamin D. As you get your vitamin D from the sun, that helps prevent burns. One, I forgot to mention this when we were talking about melatonin, but melatonin is a phenomenal sun screen, I don’t know, sun harmonizer.
That’s actually– I called our Everybody Loves Sunshine, because it’s not a block, it’s whatever, but it’s going to harmonize your skin with the sun’s rays. Melatonin, if you have it– so I actually also, if I do take melatonin, I do daytime melatonin, like how Dr. John Lieurance, how he has the higher dosing, like Russell Reiter, Doris Loh, those people all looking at experimenting with high dose melatonin. I’ve been experimenting with that for the past three years.
I feel like it’s one of the things that has brought down my biological age by taking care of that, by protecting my circadian rhythms, and by keeping a melanin base has all shown to actually reverse aging from some testing that I’ve been doing over the past four years. That’s fun. Melatonin at these doses is apparently supposed to be anti-aging, so it does seem to be adding up, but it is so sun protective. Again, I can’t say, because everybody’s going to be different, are you a redhead going out in the sun? It just– [crosstalk]
Ari: You’re talking about internal use, right?
Nadine: Yes. Internal use, so just take some before. I did try melatonin 10 years ago, that one capsule at night, it was very low dose, and I didn’t sleep well and I didn’t get it. Then, I started to understand the daytime use and that you could take it during the daytime or at least much before bed, because about 30% of the population don’t sleep on it. I think I fall in that category. You want to take it any time– [crosstalk]
Ari: [inaudible 00:55:10]
Nadine: Are you in that category?
Ari: Melatonin disrupts my sleep profoundly.
Nadine: I was like, I don’t get it, I don’t want it, but if I take it up until sunset, so hours before bed, I’m fine, but actually I’ve been taking it in the morning most times, and at first, I was a little bit sleepy, I would just try it on the weekend. I can take 400 micrograms and well, here I am, I literally already did that today. It’s been an amazing thing, but oh my God, it just so prepares your skin for– I’m going to write an article deeper on that synergy, how it’s working with the melanocyte layer, but it is very, very protective and will bring on a golden tan. It’s super cool.
Ari: Have you seen research on topical use of melatonin?
Nadine: I have, but not in the way for the sunskin thing. It helps so much with hair growth. I do advise people, men, women, whoever, is you can do a hair tonic at night with using essential oils of rosemary. That will make the melatonin solvent, the powder, shake it up, and there’s those root applicators with some water, and you can just put it right on your scalp. It doesn’t even make your hair oily because there’s no fat oil in there.
I had some men do it, and because men’s hair is usually so short, you can see the thickness multiply by 20, 30% in just a week or so.
Ari: Wow.
Nadine: It’s so good for hair growth.
Ari: Nadine, is there anything else that we should talk about skincare-wise? Anything else you want to share with people to wrap up?
Nadine: Yes, when I think we’re bringing our skin to the sun, definitely have clean sun– don’t put chemical things on. You can be just your skin without oil. If you do need that help, even one of our Best Skin Evers like the Seabuckthorn Best Skin Ever, or really any of them, will give you that little bit of sun harmonizing factor and really help meld those sunbeams with your skin. The skin just loves feeling the sun’s rays. We literally dilate, every pore dilates to bring on and to receive all that messaging and that information.
I just think that’s so cool that we want to be a part of that cosmic creation. I feel like in modern times, I think previously, obviously the elements would really– obviously that was one of our main challenges as humans, is to fight the elements, like we need shelter and all that stuff. We have that now we’re all in our cozy homes, but we’re forgetting to connect up to the cosmos, to those circadian rhythms. I feel like it’s just however it means for you and how you’re going to architect your life or your literal home, but just bring in the sun, start to think about it, start to hopefully time parts of your day with it.
Can you see the sunrise, the sunset? Can you get out at lunchtime and get those 20 minutes? Although I also want to say about 20 minutes, yes, get in the sun for 20 minutes, but 20 minutes of sunshine a couple of times a week is not going to give you the actual vitamin D you need at all.
Sun exposure based on skin type
Ari: Let’s go into the practical aspects of that a bit more as far as skin type and how much sun people should be getting.
Nadine: Yes. I think something like the dminder app is good to get your training wheels on, A, so you can understand what is the sun doing in relation to my longitude and latitude. Then, you can put in your skin type and it will tell you when you’ve had too much, how much you’re creating. I feel like you can really start to see, okay, 20 minutes at noon in April in California versus 20 minutes in April in Costa Rica or 20 minutes in California in July. You can start to see it because literally the sun is giving different, not information, but different strengths, different seasons, different days, different longitudes and latitudes.
Then, you’ve got your own being with your own skin type. Working with something like the D-App will literally tell you like, “Okay, this is what you’ve hit today,” and then you can really see that you do need far more than just 20 minutes. Luckily, I can pop in and get the sun whenever I want. I’m my own boss, so I can look at the sun and drop everything, go outside, and we live in our lake. I’m really always working on like, “Oh my God, it’s sunny, getting out there.”
I’m just saying, I do it. I go for it, and I still have to work at my levels, you know what I mean?
Ari: Yes.
Nadine: Again, I’m not living in California, but we do get plenty of sun. If I don’t supplement, it’s like December 1st, I would be out from all my summer stuff. It’s just like, as soon as October comes, it just starts [unintelligible 01:00:15]. It’s very individual.
Ari: I just got done playing two hours of tennis in the sun here in California with my shirt off to get extra sun all over my body. Yes, after this podcast is over, I’ll probably take my laptop outside and do a little more work in the sun.
Nadine: Yes, that’s the way.
Ari: Yes, men– [crosstalk]
Nadine: There’s also T-shirts, I think it’s called Tanless T-shirts, and you can literally get T-shirts, they look very normal, and the sun will go through them.
Ari: Oh, interesting, I didn’t know that.
Nadine: Yes, the T-shirts are good, especially for the men. You can just get white V-neck, crew neck, blue, normal. The bathing suits, on the other hand, for the men and women, I feel like all the fabrics are from 1990, and they’re very crazy, but the shirts are great.
Ari: Interesting. As far as people with Fitzpatrick, I think it’s type one, if I remember correctly.
Nadine: The light people?
Ari: Yes.
Nadine: Yes, the lightest.
Ari: I don’t remember if it’s type one or type five. I think it’s type one.
Nadine: I think it is too, and then five being darker.
Ari: Yes, type one and up to type six is of African descent. Type one is more like Irish. Descent is that’s the redhead, and that’s actually the different type of melanin.
Nadine: Oh, so that’s the one that has the different melanin?
Ari: Yes.
Nadine: Fitzpatrick one?
Ari: Yes. Because people with those very pale skin types actually have way lower requirements for the sun. If they were to have some type of sun exposure that I’m talking about that I just engaged in today, they would probably burn, and the thing about that skin type is you’re much more limited in how much you can actually build up your internal melanin-
Nadine: This is true.
Ari: – to offer that protection, so it’s just genetically, ancestrally, your skin’s tolerance for sunlight is going to be dramatically lower.
Nadine: Very much so. Look, people have found if they do– because again, some people have been like, “I’m never going to skin,” so they’ve taken that Fitzpatrick one and then driven it home. Again, slowly but surely, which may be a really cool thing to look up in Google because you can see the photos, but Dr. Auguste Rollier in the 1920s in Lausanne, Switzerland. Look up his name in Lausanne, Switzerland, and you can see the photos from his hospital where they had verandas and everybody’s outside and the kids are out in these little shorts in the snow even, and they’re all getting sun.
You see before and afters of kids, they’re black and white, but they went in malformed with rickets. Then, a year later, it’s in black and white, but you can see they’re all tanned and they’re upright and it’s so beautiful. Start slowly– [crosstalk]
Ari: [inaudible 01:03:20] the original heliotherapy clinics.
Nadine: Yes, and it’s such a great archive of photos on the internet. Some people he had to start at five minutes, five minutes a day, and maybe it’s just the legs or the calves. You’re starting and you’re going to build. It isn’t sunny every day, generally speaking. You got to build that up. Then, for those folks too, I would look at some melatonin, vitamin D levels, red algae, and some melanotan.
Ari: As far as your skincare products, do you have any thoughts on stuff that should either be used at night or before or after sun exposure?
Nadine: You can really use anything that we make, day and night, you can layer it. Really, that Everybody Loves the Sunshine or the Best Skin Ever would prep your skin before and it would prep it after. If you jump in the lake or the ocean, don’t even fully dry off, and then you can take some oil and then rub it in with that little bit of water, spread it around even more. Yes, before, during, after, it’s there for you.
Ari: I know some skincare products are photosensitive, like you don’t want to go out into the sun with them on your skin because they can actually be reactive.
Nadine: Yes.
Retinol and Tretinoin
Ari: Then, given that you’re in the skincare business, one of the hot ingredients for many years now is Retinol and Tretinoin and these kinds of compounds. What do you think of those?
Nadine: I actually wrote an article just a few months ago on it. Of course, it’s synthetic, and there is many side effects, including it affects fertility. There could be visual results and it could seem exciting for first few months. I would look at, again, where’s vitamin A coming in your diet? Eat some liver, eat some organ meats, and then look at the natural sources of Retinol, which is like rosehips and mastic. I give a recipe in that article and I really go through the difference between the natural and the Retinol and the side effects and that kind of thing, but we don’t need it.
Ari: You use rosehip oil in a lot of your skincare products, right?
Nadine: Yes, a lot of them. Yes. The mastic’s a certain special one. We actually use that in oral care, but it has this special property. We have a lot of rose serums. Then, you had a question before. Oh yes, the phototoxicity, I thought I would just mention. Generally, yes, there are things that are phototoxic. That generally though is the citrus essential oils, not in a formula because it has to be more than 15%. No formula, generally speaking, is going to have 15% of just lemon in there.
Everything we make is perfect for the sun, no photosensitivity. Although we do sell individual oils, which could be. There’s generally, it’s the citrus family, like lemon and lime. That’s putting it straight on your skin and then going in the sun, or bergamot, because that’s 100% on your skin and then you’re in the sun. Then, that could create irritation or even a photo pigmentation. It’s okay when it’s totally blended up. Most people aren’t just putting lime straight on their body, so– [crosstalk]
Ari: You don’t recommend applying essential oils directly to the skin, right? You should– [crosstalk]
Nadine: No, well, there are times for that. Yes, we call it neat. Generally, everything says don’t, but again, it’s a nuanced situation and we don’t just want to say no, because there are many essential oils that never would irritate the skin, which again, generally speaking, but every individual can be different. There are times when you do want to use it undiluted because it’s antiseptic, antiviral, antibacterial. Let’s say your son came home with a scraped knee. Yes, I’m going to pour peppermint right in there. It’s going to clean it. It’s going to anesthetize it. It’s going to be an antiseptic.
It’s going to make the skin seal and it’s going to clean it better than any bacteriostatic BS, better than any of that. If you’ve got a zit, you might just want to put a drop of frankincense on there, or a scar, a fresh one or a surgical one, let’s just say it’s fresh, and then you want to use frankincense to seal it and heal it. Then, you can start diluting that frankincense with oil to work down the keloids. There are times for neat application. We even have a family of products called the DewDabs. Those are pure combinations that are undiluted.
You can further dilute them, but they’re really for that spot treatment and spot application of skin eruptions and things that can go on with the skin. There’s a balance there. They’re very strong. They are concentrated. You do think of them as a drop. Something like oregano, cinnamon, clove, never use those undiluted, because they will burn.
Nadine’s top ingredients for skin care
Ari: Are there any ingredients that have come on to the market in the last, I don’t know, 5, 10 years that you’re really excited about as far as skincare? I’m curious if you’ve heard of bakuchiol and what you think–
Nadine: Yes. Well, it’s just another trendy thing. It doesn’t do anything really that the essential oils and stuff won’t do. With any of those hot herbal extract ingredients, there’s usually two or three secondary ingredients that are made in the extraction process from the manufacturer, and it’s big chemical companies that have that extract. When you’re looking behind the scenes, it isn’t so pretty, and they have ways of making things trend. Also, it’s just not even exciting, even if it was clean, it’s not that exciting.
Ari: Really? I saw what looked to me like impressive research. You just– [crosstalk]
Nadine: Yes. It doesn’t really stand up. When you see where it comes from behind the scenes, it’s like just making another thing trendy.
Ari: Yes. The whole skincare product is just this– it’s almost like a mess, the way I perceive it, just– [crosstalk]
Nadine: It’s like the food system, the big food, big cosmetics so tied into the chemicals that are produced for other industries. In my book, I do talk about there’s just four elements that we need. We need a water, we need a fat, and then we need substances that can help with the microbiome or making masks like a probiotic powder, a clay, algae, honey, and then occlusive layers, like an aloe vera gel, and through all those things, you could make whatever you wanted, and some botanical products like the essential oils to really amp the active ingredients.
Through all of that, that’s all you need, just rearranging those ingredients, putting them together, and it would just take care of all the angles. You don’t need soy oil and silicone and 50 types of petroleum derivatives. No pore in your body is parched for some petroleum cosmetic to make it anti-age and thrive. So many of the ingredients are literally just aging us. In that moment and you look in the mirror, you may feel like plumped and glowy, but it’s not helping the cells at the long term.
Ari: Yes, it’s hard to imagine that applying a cream with 20 different synthetic chemicals is likely to do something good over time. Well, I was going to say something, but it’s too much of a digression. The other thing is I almost think that the natural skin care marketplace is a bit of a mess right now as well-
Nadine: It is.
Ari: – because I just see so many companies just throwing together random mish-mashes of different ingredients that they build these fancy looking web pages for it and they’ll list off this long list of exotic-sounding ingredients, but none of them have any actual research showing benefits. It’s all marketing and no science, and it’s just– [crosstalk]
Nadine: Or let’s just highlight these key ingredients. The key ingredients thing drives me crazy because it’s just the ones that you’d want to read about. Then, you go the ingredients and it’s just-
Ari: You see all the synthetics that they’re hiding.
Nadine: -stuff you do not even ever want near you. Actually, we had a house fire once and obviously there was no libations. I had people bringing me their half bottles and I had to go to a store in Toronto, get their stuff. Anyway. That being said, if I were to just need to go to [unintelligible 01:12:49] and get skincare, I would just buy the bottle of organic olive oil and the apple cider vinegar and some baking soda and be done with it and wait till I could make libations because even [unintelligible 01:13:00] food store is so much BS, as you would know even from food shopping on one level.
Yes, there’s just so many ingredients. First of all, there’s even natural ingredients that you don’t want to use because maybe the quality or they go rancid, like almond oil, peach kernel oil, grape seed oil, they’re all rancid, and as if almond oil is even almond oil anymore, just like olive oil is barely olive oil. They go rancid, they go off, and then are they even using a real essential oil? They’re probably using a derivative of that. Then, with organic skincare certification, only 80% has to be organic.
What’s allowed in that other 20% is mind-blowing, but then even what’s allowed in that 80%, quite frankly, is mind-blowing to me because the amount of processing, folding, refractionating, and processing that is allowed to be done to those ingredients, and then it’s still allowed to be organic. You could have an organic jojoba, but you might winterize it and deodorize it, like what they do with a canola, and that’s still organic. Then, you’re allowed methylparabens in an organic product. That’s only under 1% anyway.
Then, what most people are doing is they’re gaming it, because let’s just say, generally, a lotion is 50 to 60% water. It’s like making mayonnaise. You have a water, you have the fat, and then the egg is the emulsifier bringing it all together. Every lotion is water and oil brought together by an emulsifier. For the water part of the lotion, they’ll use something like– you may have seen– What do they call it? Lavender extract or lavender, not a lavender water, but, I don’t know, lavender tea–
I forget what they call it for the Latin name, but basically what it is making a lavender tea water and calling that water organic, and then that’s 60% of your product. Now you’ve already taken care of a huge part of your organic requirements, because that’s 60%, and it’s just this tea water. It’s one of the first ingredients. The lavender flowers to make that tea water were organic,.
Ari: Wow. That’s crazy.
Nadine: Lots of games. Yes, and most essential oils aren’t real. Most are using fragrance oils, but then even when you get into the world of essential oils, there’s a lot that are just not authentic. You can often detect it with your nose, but most people would be like, “Oh yes, that smells like peppermint or eucalyptus,” but it could have synthetic menthol in there or whatever. There’s a lot of games played to get to that. I know everybody’s wants that. The bottom line is just generally for a lot of those businesses it’s just different than how you and I would think of how we would want a bottom line.
Ari: What would you say are your top, let’s say, five or six compounds for skin health, for natural skin care?
Nadine: I love frankincense. It’s just gorgeous. It’s ancient. It is so skin healing, helping renew the cells. It works just magic on the skin care. It’s top. Of course, we have 10 different types, but we’ll just frankincense in general. Seabuckthorn, so healing. I’ve been using that. I found my distiller for that in 1992 and we have been rocking it ever since, and I’ve now seen it become popular. It wasn’t even known before. That’s a beautiful classic. Of course, rose in all of its forms is timeless and beautiful, and it’s actually way more medicinal than we might think. It is just as antibacterial as clove is, because clove is so obviously antibacterial.
It’s really good. It’s really good for scars. That’s three. Jojoba. it is the oil, but it’s beautiful. It’s one of the most expensive plant oils. That’s an oil, like a fatty oil. It’s not an essential oil. It’s fatty, like olive oil. It’s made from the desert plants, so beautiful skincare. It matches our sebum. It’s like the most synergistically sebum compatible oil on the planet, and it’s actually a liquid wax and it protects the plant in the desert, but it’s so cool that it’s a liquid wax.
It goes solid if it’s frozen, and it has a stability if it’s stored properly for 100 years.
Ari: Wow.
Nadine: [unintelligible 01:17:44] oil has that, and so that’s why I’ve been formulating with it since, again, 1990, and the reason is because it doesn’t go rancid, and so it’s just so awesome, because we don’t want to ever put rancid things on our body. It’s just so awesome, but a lot of people don’t use it because it is the most expensive, but again, those are the choices I like making because I’m like, it just makes so much sense to me to go for that beautiful quality.
Ari: I have one last question for you that I think you’re going to have some interesting answers for. Take your time thinking about it before you answer. Even if you need a minute, we’ll edit out that minute of time if necessary.
Nadine: With some music like, doo-doo-doo.
Common myths about skin care
Ari: Yes, exactly. I would love for you to debunk maybe two or three myths that exist in the skincare realm that maybe even exist in the realm of natural skin care. Things that people are under the impression are good for their skin but are really not. Does anything come to mind to you in that category?
Nadine: Well, if course, one of the things is we’ve been talking about literally sun. You will get everybody tell you not to be in the sun. I am here to say, be in the sun. Again, I get older every year like everybody else, but I don’t think it has contributed to any type of skin aging. There’s that. The other thing I think is pretty key is don’t wash with soap on– Obviously, you can use soap, scrub your nails, wash your pits, wash your bits, but your skin doesn’t need it and your face really doesn’t need it at all, ever.
We wash with oil, we cleanse with oil, and when I was trying to figure this out 30 years ago, I was looking at– It’s what I do for each body area because I just know we’re not doing it right. I’m like, step back. I want to look at the biological systems. What is the sun or what is going on in our bodies to clean our teeth, because we weren’t born with a toothbrush in our hands. I’m trying to see all that. I was looking at what are ancient cultures. How were they cleaning their skin?
You really have quite a cross-cultural, trans-historical use of oil for cleaning the skin, whether it was Turkish baths where they’re oiling up and then using a strigil, which is like a gua sha, but it’s a scraper, but not scraping hard, like a butter knife kind of thing. You’re oiling up and then you’re scraping the oil, which is clearing and cleansing and lifting the dirt out with it. We had that. The Berber women always wash their face with the oil. Roman baths, ancient Chinese culture, you’ve got Egypt, they’re all using oil.
Cleopatra would use alligator fat or crocodile fat to cleanse her face. We’re looking at oil, and so it’s great because what it does is it cleanses the pores, it lifts off the dirt, but you’re not disrupting the microbiome. With these foaming cleansers and our modern synthetic surfactants, what we’re now understanding through understanding the microbiome is that you can get these microscopic splinters in the top layer, in the stratum corneum, and they don’t go away with rinsing. You’re getting this microscopic buildup of surfactants in the stratum corneum through the course of time.
Ari: That’s if you’re using soap?
Nadine: Yes, if you’re using soap like that, all the variations we have of the foaming cleansers, because it feels good and it seems– I don’t know. We like soap, but it seems like that’s how we’re supposed to clean our face– [crosstalk]
Ari: It’s foamy, it’s got bubbles.
Nadine: Yes, exactly.
Ari: What more do you need?
Nadine: Exactly. Then you’re all tight and then you’ve thrown off your whole lipid barrier and blah, blah, blah. Then, your skin might get more oily because it’s trying to compensate for the parching that you’ve just given it. As gross as it sounds, we don’t want to overexfoliate, and we need a little bit of sebum action because the bacteria on our skin need to feed off that. We, even though it’s gross, have to pull back, stop fussing with our face so much, and let the bacteria be the beautician.
With oil, it’s very compatible with our microbiome, and it’s literally cleansing and it doesn’t mess up the stratum corneum or the lipid barrier. There’s a few ways to do it, but you’re basically just wetting your face and you can use a cotton pad or a face cloth, put a spot of water on there, a score of your Best Skin Ever, a score of Everybody Loves Sunshine, massaging that over the face, lifting it off. If you’re wearing makeup, obviously, you then use a cotton pad, then you rinse, and you just put on one more squirt.
That’s all men need, women need. It literally changes people’s skin. People with cystic acne or acne in general might be, “Oh my God, that sounds so scary.” Of course, you’ve got to use real oil. We’re not talking baby oil. We’re not talking synthetic, weird stuff. Use a true jojoba, olive oil, or something like the Best Skin Ever. It will literally just transform your skin, and it will clear up the acne. It might take a couple of days to a month or six weeks, but you will see the transition. Most people see a transition within 48 hours.
Ari: Two quick questions. One is, I’m sure since you’re into peptides, you’ve heard of GHKCU, copper peptides. What do you think of those? There seems to be some really impressive looking research on it.
Nadine: I think there’s a lot that’s impressive about it. It’s supposed to balance copper, but it can throw off copper for some people. For some, it can grow the hair, and it may be good if you have a deficiency, but then it can throw off some people’s copper. What I’ve seen is it can create acne or hair shedding, even though it also has a lot of good things. Now, to take it internally, like to inject it, it does seem like you want to cycle more than an injection a day to really get it in.
Ari: I’ve heard that from talking to a peptide expert that injecting it is almost like you need so much of it so frequently that it’s almost meaningless, but topical use of it for the skin, for skin anti-aging– [crosstalk]
Nadine: Topical can be, yes. It’s easy to get online, and then you can just put it into a spray and spray it, or you can literally just mix it into a cream. I wouldn’t mix it in with an oil because it needs a bit of a water-soluble, and then you can just take our Maverick cream or anything and just put it in and use it that way, and that is a good way to do it. Just watch yourself because a lot of people are deficient in copper and it helps a lot of people, but then some people it just throws it right off. If you do get acne– [crosstalk]
Ari: That’s taking it internally, right?
Nadine: It depends. Even topically for some people, it can create acne.
Ari: Interesting.
Nadine: It’s lovely, but just know, as with anything, try it out, monitor it, and see what’s happening. Sorry about Angel.
Ari: No problem. Essential oils, also one more thing on that. Do you have any concern with some of these essential oils disrupting the skin microbiome?
Nadine: Well, they don’t because it’s like how they work in oral care. Yes, they are antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, that kimd of thing, so they sound disruptive. We still don’t know all the whys, but in oral care, they’ve studied it. They are antifungal, and so that’s what you need to clean up your mouth. Then, some dentists think, “Oh no, it would be too strong and would kill things off.” What the studies show is that the essential oils act like quorum sensing inhibitors, QSI for short.
That inhibits the pathogens from grouping up and creating gene expression and grouping up to then create a biofilm, that kind of thing. What the QSI of the essential oils does, like clove in your mouth, it will bust up the pathogens. It will prevent the biofilm, yet it will be compatible to the beneficial bacteria, which is exactly the stealth skincare that we need right now because it can tidy up the pathogens but work beneficially with the microbiome.
For example, for animal agriculture feed in Europe, they’re using things like oregano and rosemary and chicken feed instead of antibiotics because it’s helping the whole situation. It’s preventing the use of antibiotics because these essential oils are again, able to work with pathogens but not disrupt the beneficial bacteria. That’s cool.
Ari: Last question, what are your personal favorite products of your own line? What do you use personally?
Nadine: Yes, let’s see. Right now I always use the Neroli Poetic Pits for my underarm charm. That’s my favorite. We have so many good men ones though. I don’t know, have you ever tried the Poetic Pits? I’ll send you.
Ari: I’m in a unique situation. Number one, I’m not particularly smelly.
Nadine: Although people find though that you just need one touch and you’re good for two or three days. All it does is make you smell better. It takes you and then it almost makes you a cologne.
Ari: Here’s the other thing. Okay. You interrupted too soon because I was about to tell you-
Nadine: Sorry.
Ari: – the real important part, which is that my wife actually likes the smell of my natural scent.
Nadine: Of course. Yes.
Ari: I’m already producing my natural cologne. I don’t want to disrupt that.
Nadine: I think you’ll find your wife would just– it just is like you plus. It never takes away your smell. It just makes it awesome.
Ari: No, I know. Actually, she uses Poetic Pits and she’s like it, yes.
Nadine: There you go. I’m in the Neroli. For my teeth, I’m loving, I think we launched it like last year, but our Triple Mint because it has the nano hydroxy apatite in it. I’m loving that for teeth. I wash with the Immortelle Best Skin Ever. I’ve got a new shampoo coming out called Calendula Comfort. I use that, and it has this really awesome conditioner that we’ve infused with black walnut. We’re rocking that. I do keep it pretty simple. I know I use other things, but that’s my classics. The DewDab, I use the Queen Dew, which is one of our DewDab family. I use that for everything.
Ari: Awesome. Let people know where they can get your products. Do you want to offer, you don’t have to, we can edit this out if the answer is no, but do you want to offer my listeners a bit of a discount or is there anything we can do in that regard?
Nadine: Yes, let’s do that for sure, because you also have an affiliate program. I don’t know the amount now, but let’s do a discount and then add it to maybe the show notes.
Ari: Okay. Perfect.
Nadine: Can we do that?
Ari: Yes.
Nadine: Just so I don’t– Yes.
Ari: I’ll put it in the description in the link on YouTube. It’ll also be on the webpage, on the website. If they go to theenergyblueprint.com, go to podcast and find this episode, we’ll have the link there where people can get some undetermined amount of discount that shall be named later.
Nadine: If it is a code, let’s make it Ari-
Ari: Okay. Perfect.
Nadine: – so that people will know that. We have that. Then– [crosstalk]
Ari: Use the code Ari to get X percentage off your order. [laughs] How can people resist a discount like that?
Nadine: You’re so silly.
[laughter]
Ari: Yes, like I said, to everybody listening, we really are a fan. These are the skincare products that I use, that my wife uses in particular, and that my kids literally use. My kids, it’s really funny. My five-year-old daughter is putting this Seabuck– Not this one.
Nadine: Jai Baby Joy?
Ari: Seabuckthorn-
Nadine: Oh, the Seabuckthorn.
Ari: – Best Skin Ever. She asks for it every night. She needs to put it on her leg and she just loves it. She loves the feeling of it. We are a fan, big, big fans of your products. Nadine, it was an absolute pleasure connecting with you again. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, for the amazing products that you’re putting out into the world. The brand, by the way, I don’t know if we mentioned that, but it’s called Living Libations. If people want to go to the website and check things out, Living Libations is Nadine’s brand. Anything else you want to say to wrap up, Nadine?
Nadine: Well, just thank you so much for having me as a guest again. I [unintelligible 01:30:41] just so happy that we could connect, talk about the sun. My books are also on the website, and also they’re audible. They’re available on audible as well, both the Holistic Dental Care and Renegade Beauty.
Ari: Awesome. Thank you so much, Nadine. I look forward to talking to you again. Hopefully, not after so many years. Hopefully, we can do this again sometime soon.
Nadine: Love that. Thank you.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:46 – Guest Intro – Nadine Artemis
07:05 – Should we avoid sunlight?
13:39 – How indoor lighting can increase the risk of cancer
25:25 – Harms of intermittent sun exposure
28:18 – How diet can affect the skin’s reaction to sunexposure
31:10 – Everybody Loves the Sunshine
38:40 – The practical aspects of sun exposure and protection
59:15 – Sun exposure based on skin type
1:05:16 – Retinol and Tretinoin
1:09:19 Nadine’s top ingredients for skin care
1:19.11 – Common myths about skin care
Links
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