Tuning In - A Practical Guide to Your Skin

This episode picks up where we left off and gets practical. We go through different skin types and conditions, ultra-sensitive, acne-prone, dry and how to build a routine around what your skin is telling you.

We also talk about the nervous system connection, seasonal shifts, and why doing less is often the most powerful thing you can do for your skin.

For our inner meets outer beauty practice, check out Rewiring Your Frequency: [link]

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

What happens when we stop trying to fix the skin and start listening to it? This is Skin Freaks, a podcast about looking closer and discovering what the beauty industry doesn't want you to know. I'm Summer, an esthetician, holistic facialist, and formulator with over 20 years experience. Here we'll pull back the curtain and explore what truly supports the skin. For practitioners and conscious consumers alike, this is a space for honest conversation and new ways of seeing. Let's get into it. Last episode, we went deeper into the foundations of skin, the acid mantle, microbiome, and the barrier, and why those three systems matter and how they work together to keep your skin balanced, protected, and resilient. This episode continues on the practical side of that. It's about your products and how to use them intuitively and how to support different skin concerns that you may be experiencing. It's also here to give you the confidence and knowledge to make adjustments as your skin changes with different climates, seasons, and hormonal shifts, so you're never just guessing. But before we get into that, I want to take a minute to say that these products are a little unconventional, and that is intentional. After 20 years working in skin, from medical aesthetics to holistic healing, I was searching for something that truly worked for myself and for my clients. That's the intention that shaped these formulas. And what I kept coming back to was that the issue wasn't just about finding the right ingredients. It was about rethinking the entire approach. So this isn't about combining clean ingredients that sound nice on a label. It's about asking, what does this specific oil actually do for this skin type? How does it sit on the skin? How does the skin respond to it? Every ingredient has been chosen based on real experience with real skin conditions. And the formulas combine two things. And that's it. The actives we use are gentle and intelligent, what I'd call new generation, effective without being aggressive, and the botanicals are doing what botanicals do best, nourishing the skin, supporting it, and helping it heal. A lot of brands, even ones calling themselves natural, clean, or conscious, are still working from the same conventional formula template. Think of it like a recipe that's been passed around the industry for decades. What they do is take that recipe and swap out the worst offenders for slightly cleaner versions. But the structure stays the same. What we did is completely different. We didn't make substitutions, we dismantled the whole thing. We removed entire categories of ingredients that don't serve the skin. So what you're left with are only ingredients that are actively feeding and nourishing the skin. Understanding that really changes the way you use these products. They're designed to work as a complete system. Each one is multifunctional, and when you use them together, they build on each other, and they exist to address real skin concerns. Breakouts, sensitivity, dehydration, congestion, dullness, deep nourishment, and balance. And if those are concerns that you deal with, this is exactly why this line was created. Every ingredient is doing something specific. And I know that might sound like what every other natural skincare brand is saying. The marketing in this industry is incredibly noisy. So I'm not going to ask you to just take my word for it. What I will say is look at the full ingredient list because that's where the truth lives. When you compare what's actually in these formulas to most products on the market, you'll notice something. So when you first start using these products, they might feel different than what you're used to because they are different. An oil cleanser shouldn't foam. A hydrosol doesn't tingle like a toner. And because these formulas are water-free, you can use a lot less than what you're used to. A lot of conventional products can be up to 80% water, so you might be used to using more. Those textures you expect, the lather, the silicone slip, the tingle, the squeaky clean finish, those come from the very ingredients that we have left out on purpose. So when there's an adjustment, your hands might wonder where the foam went, your skin might feel like it's waiting for something more to happen. So give it a few weeks and pay attention to the quiet shifts, how your skin feels when you wake up, how it holds on to moisture, how the texture starts to change. The feedback is subtler, but it builds into something long-term, skin health and true vitality. Something else that can happen, and this doesn't happen for everyone, but when you shift from a completely different style of skincare into something like this, it can go through a bit of a recalibration phase. I had a client who had been using drugstore products her whole life. She switched over and she really loved everything. She loved the feel and the scent and the ritual of the oil cleansing. But her skin started breaking out a little. And it's something that hadn't happened to her in years. And what was happening wasn't that something was wrong. It was just that her skin was adjusting. The way the oil was moving through her pores was changing. The barrier was functioning different. And so there was a short period where things were shifting. And she just stayed with it. She let her skin go through this process. And now her skin has been better than ever. She's in her 60s and she gets irregular compliments about how glowing her skin is. It may or may not happen, just something to observe as your skin finds a new baseline. So if your skin is currently in a very sensitized state, reactive, feeling uncomfortable and flaring up, you're not really sure what triggered it, or maybe you've been overusing actives or exfoliants, or maybe it's stress, or you just don't know. So the first thing that I would do in this situation is I would really minimize everything that you're doing. Just simplify, pull it all back. It's kind of the same philosophy as an elimination diet. You're trying to figure out what foods you might be reacting to. You could strip everything back and then slowly reintroduce one thing at a time and notice what your body responds well to and what it doesn't. So this is the same philosophy with the skin. So you pair everything back. And what I would use out of our line is our Liberate oil cleanser and moisturizer. So for a while, just using one product. So Liberate is designed to heal the skin barrier, has an olive squalene, which is bioidentical to what your skin naturally produces. Castor oil, which is really soothing if you have any painful inflammatory breakouts. Castor can really calm and soothe the skin. Jajoba, which mirrors the skin's sebum, so it just regulates your oil production. Red raspberry seed is an antioxidant. It also has a really high natural protection from the sun. And then hemp oil, which is really high in linoleic acid, which we'll get into a little bit more later in the episode. So what you can do is a gentle oil cleanse, massage into your skin really gently, and then just remove with a soft, clean, damp washcloth. And then you can put on another couple pumps and just use this as your moisturizer as well. So one product is doing both jobs. Just give your skin a break and let the barrier come back, let the acid mantle regulate, let the microbiome build up again, and so your natural defense systems start working on the outside. So stay with this for as long as your skin needs until it feels calm and settled, until it has that waterproof quality that the skin naturally has when the barrier is intact. Something else that we can talk about here with sensitive skin is how connected our skin is with our nervous system. They are so deeply entwined. So when you're massaging oil into your skin, you're not just cleansing it, but you're also communicating with your nervous system. Your face holds a tremendous amount of tension in the jaw, forehead, around the eyes, the muscles, around the mouth. Most of us carry stress there without even realizing this. So when you slow down daily and you just take those extra 30 seconds to move the oil across your skin with intention, something happens beneath the surface that has nothing to do with the products. Your nervous system starts to relax, your breathing slows down a little, your shoulders drop, and you might notice that you were clenching your jaw and you can feel yourself unclenched. You're starting to send signals to your body that says you can soften, you are safe. And when the nervous system settles, the skin responds, blood flow improves, inflammation calms. So we're starting to shift from that sympathetic state, always being on alert to that parasympathetic state where you can rest, where you can renew, where you can heal. So when you're cleansing in this sensitized state, really want to use these slow massage movements. Use the entire palm of your hand and your fingers, not just the fingertips. Pairing that with simple barrier-supportive ingredients, when those two come together, it can really create a genuinely impactful combination. Also, what I see a lot with my clients, especially if your skin is reacting in some kind of way, is pressure, that feeling of needing to fix the skin immediately, needing to layer on tons of products because something's wrong. But the skin loves simplicity. It responds so well to simplicity, especially if it's in a sensitized state. So doing less is a really the best thing that you can do right now. Another tool that you can bring in that can be really supportive is a tuning fork. Striking a tuning fork and then placing it on your temples, your cheeks, your jaw, anywhere that feels like it's holding tension and holding it there and feeling the vibration, that can work directly into your nervous system. And since those two are so interconnected, the system settles and then your skin can settle too. The products are supporting the inflammation, the gentle cleanse, the minimal routine, and the tuning forks are working alongside that, helping your body signal safety and releasing what's being held underneath. So once you've been doing this minimal routine for a while, there's less inflammation, the barrier feels softer, more intact, then you can start to begin to build out your routine. So this is also a good starting point. If your skin isn't in that ultra-sensitive state, maybe it's just a little sensitive. So you can continue doing your oil cleanse with liberate. And if you haven't already, I'd recommend going back and listening to the previous episode as it does go deeper into oil cleansing and why it's so transformational for the skin, how it supports the barrier, and that one step can do so much. Then after you oil cleanse, you can mist. Equilibrium is our rose hydrosol. It's a wonderful for hydration and the skin barrier, and it's feeding the microbiome. So after you cleanse, put on a nice, generous mist. And then you can bring in warmth, which is a zinc balm. Warmth is one of those products that really surprises people. It's so deeply soothing, calming. It's so anti-inflammatory. The zinc in it is a 17% non-nano, uncoated zinc. It's incredible for a lot of different skin conditions. It brings down inflammation and it's also astringent. So if you're dealing with breakouts, it helps to reduce them and heal them fast. You want to apply it over that generous amount of mist, then massage it into the damp skin. You're gonna get a better glide, better absorption, and just feels beautiful. So this goes back to what I was saying earlier about these products feeling different. And warmth, especially, is a unique product. It might take a couple of applications to find that sweet spot with how much to use. And that's okay. It's just part of the process. So in the morning, there's some debate about whether you should cleanse in the morning or you should avoid cleansing in the morning. And I think that there is something to that because there is a lot of healing that's happening in the skin overnight. And so I think this is really just personal preference. I would say that everybody should cleanse at night because you want to remove the day from your skin. Makeup, sunscreen, pollution, even if you don't wear makeup, you still want to cleanse the day off your skin before you get into bed. But in the morning, I think it's optional. And this is where you can really start tuning into your skin. If you're waking up and your skin is feeling dry, a little sensitive, it might be more beneficial to skip cleansing and let the microbiome continue to build. Your skin is healing and hydrating while you sleep. And sometimes the best thing you can do in the morning is just leave it alone, splash it with some water, apply your mist, and then follow with the warmth. On the other hand, if you're waking up and you're feeling oily or a bit congested, or you just want some extra brightening that day, you can shake some of the purify powder into the palm of your hand in the shower, and then just massage it into your skin and rinse it off exactly the same way you would with a conventional foaming cleanser. Or you can massage an oil cleanser into dry skin and remove it with a warm, damp cloth. Both work beautifully. It just depends on what your skin is asking for that morning. And while we're talking about what happens to the skin overnight, this is something that can make a big difference is to change your pillowcases weekly. You're cleansing at night, you're putting on your products, you're doing this beautiful work for your skin, and then you're resting your face on fabric for eight hours. You want it to be clean and fresh. And this is one of those things that can trip people up is use an unscented laundry detergent and skip the dryer sheets. I've had clients dealing with persistent breakouts, and once they eliminate the dryer sheet, things can genuinely really clear up. It's one of those little environmental factors that can quietly undo a lot of what your routine is doing for you. Another little tip that I love to do at night for sensitive skin is to blend the liberate oil and the warmth together and make a nice anti-inflammatory, soothing overnight mix of the balm and the oil. It's really beautiful to get the oil and the zinc together and it just becomes this calming overnight treatment. So that's your sensitive skin routine: oil cleanse, mist, warmth. And at night, that liberate and warmth blend is really lovely. Now, if your skin tends to break out, this actually overlaps a lot with what we just talked about. Sensitivity and acne share a lot of the same foundations. Acne can seem really complicated and it can be triggered by so many different things. But the root of most of it is inflammation and a disrupted skin barrier. And here's the pattern I see all the time is you break out and you kind of panic and start throwing everything at it: acids, exfoliation, masks, spot treatments. You're just trying to make it go away as fast as possible. But all of that is stripping the skin barrier, your acid mantle, and your microbiome. The very systems that protect you from breakouts in the first place. When those are intact, breakouts significantly reduce. And when you wipe them out by trying to fix one breakout, you create the conditions for more. A lot of the time, breakouts are hormonal fluctuations that are passing through. If you can resist the urge to go into attack mode, if you just let the skin move through the cycle without breaking down its protective systems, the breakouts will pass and your skin is left intact. So for more acne-prone skin, I love liberate. And there's a reason I named it that is the hemp is really high in linoleic acid. People who tend towards oily acne-prone skin often have sebum that's thicker and more stagnant, almost like molasses getting stuck in the pores. It doesn't flow the way it should. Linoleic acid changes that. It creates more movement in the oil. It helps the sebum flow more freely. It liberates your pores instead of everything staying stuck and congested in there. Liberate, like we spoke about before, is amazing for the skin barrier. The castor oil is really soothing for any inflamed breakouts. So after cleansing, mist with equilibrium hydrates, feeds the microbiome, and then warmth. The zinc is astringent and anti-inflammatory, which makes it really effective for acne. It brings down swelling, and the subtle tint of it reduces visible redness of the breakout while the zinc is working to calm the inflammation. So it's very similar to the sensitive skin routine. But then we can add in enlighten. So enlighten uses willow bark, which is a natural form of salicylic acid, something you see a lot in acne treating products. So it works inside the pores, helping to loosen and break up oil that's sitting there, like blackheads and congestion and clogged pores. It helps to clear all of that out, but in a really gentle way. Enlighten also has niacinamide, which brings down inflammation and balances oil production. And again, this is one of those products that might feel different from what you're used to. Enlighten is a liquid, but it comes in a pump, and we intentionally didn't add a thickener just to give it that familiar consistency because that thickener wouldn't serve the skin. So it's a liquid of pure ingredients that work to heal and clear and balance. You pump it into the palm of your hand, rub your hands together for a second, and then press it into the skin. It exfoliates, but it doesn't feel aggressive. That's really important, especially with active acne. So it's really gentle and you won't get that burn or that tingle sensation that you can associate with something working, but that can often just be irritation. And irritation on already inflamed skin just creates more problems. This works, but it's without adding more stress to the skin. And that really comes back to the whole philosophy of what these products are doing. They're not pushing and pulling your skin in different directions. Stripping it one day, overcoating it the next. They're keeping everything centered and balanced. So you can use Enlighten about three times a week or every other day, is usually a good rhythm if you're feeling congested and having breakouts. I also did another full episode all about exfoliation. So if you want to go deeper into that, you can check out that episode as well. So overview your acne-prone routine would be oil cleanse with liberate, enlighten every other night, pressed into the skin, then you missed, and then you can apply warmth. The nervous system piece is present here as well, as acne can be stressful and raise cortisol, and that cortisol can increase inflammation, and then the inflammation just feeds more breakouts. It's a cycle that can keep reinforcing itself. This is something I experienced myself when I first started dealing with breakouts. I did exactly what I described before. I panicked, I threw every product, every treatment, every aggressive active at my skin trying to fix it. And it made it so much worse. So if I could go back and do it all over again, I would do exactly what I'm telling you to do. I would simplify, I would support the skin instead of attacking it, and I would just trust the process and let my skin move through it. So if you're in this phase right now, or if your kids are going through it, just know that the instinct to go into fix it mode is totally normal. But the best thing that you can do is just take a breath, keep things really simple, support the skin. And a part of supporting acne-prone skin is resisting the urge to overcorrect, just letting it move through what it's moving through and trust that it will pass. Let's move on to dry and dehydrated skin. Incorporating a balm can be really helpful because balms slow down transepidermal water loss, aka dehydration, which is the biggest problem for dry skin. It sits on top, sealing in hydration and keeps the skin feeling soft, nourished, and comfortable. For some people, a balm at night is enough. For others, especially as things get colder and drier, layering one during the day can make all the difference. So after cleansing, mist a generous amount of equilibrium to hydrate. Next, massage your balm into freshly misted skin to lock in the hydration. You can also mist between layers of your products for more hydration and dewiness. If you're using a treatment oil or a serum, those would layer under a balm. So you can oil cleanse, mist, serum, mist again, and apply a balm or warmth. Some days your skin craves all the layers, other days it just wants mist and a balm. And over time you stop asking what are the right steps, and you start feeling into what your skin wants on any given day. Your skincare will shift with the seasons as well. In winter, when the air is cold and indoor heating strips the moisture and absorbs water faster. You might want to apply your products more thickly morning and night during that time. But then spring arrives, the air starts to soften and humidity returns. That's when you notice you don't need that extra layer of balm during the day anymore, or just use a lighter application of everything. Knowing how much to apply is constantly shifting as well. So instead of thinking of one pump or two pumps, notice what's happening while you're applying. Does the skin feel like it's drinking everything up quickly and still wants more? Or does it feel heavy, like something sitting on the surface? Then you might need to use a little less. Over time, you'll get to know what it needs a little more today, a little less tomorrow, thicker layers at night and during the winter because it's cold and dry, and lighter layers as spring arrives and moisture returns. You can also give your skin a little more support when you know you'll be exposed to dry winter elements. Like before a long winter walk or a ski day or even a long car ride with the heating up high. Apply a slightly thicker layer of warmth or a balm beforehand so your skin doesn't lose water the whole time you're out there. And then when you get back, give yourself a generous mist of equilibrium to replenish and rehydrate. These little habits can help winter feel less like a battle and keep your skin comfortable and protected throughout it. But thankfully, now we're getting into spring, and throughout any season, I love using equilibrium throughout the day whenever I need a little boost, whether you're working at your computer for hours or in an office. This is also a great product to travel with as it can really help transitioning from one climate to another. On planes, the air cabins are really dry and dehydrating. So misting throughout keeps your skin hydrated and it also feels so refreshing in that environment. And it will also help adjust when you land somewhere with completely different air and climate. These are just a few tips on how to intuitively tweak how you use the products. We have much more on the website and videos explaining how to use and combine everything, but you know your skin better than anyone. You can feel when it needs something different. And when you tune into that, you also build a deeper relationship with your skin, one that you'll carry throughout your whole life. Today we also touched on the nervous system skin connection. And if any of that resonated with you, I created a course called The Inner Meets Outer Beauty Practice that goes deeper into that area. It was built to support your body and mind and to shift into more of a healing, parasympathetic state and to gently unwind some of the pressure that we carry regarding our appearance. There's subconscious reprogramming audio for feeling good in your skin, for competence, love, connection, and more, as well as guidance on using our tuning fork to release tension we hold in the fascia. It's simple and practical, but it really gets into the heart of things. And it's currently 50% off at$49. And I'll include the link below if you want to explore that more. And if you want to go deeper into some other things I touched on today, we have previous episodes on dehydration, vitamin C, exfoliation, and more. And we'll just keep building. Next time we'll get into retinol and retinol alternatives. Thanks for tuning in. Skinfreaks is brought to you by Skin Frequency. Formulas built around what the skin actually needs and nothing it doesn't. If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend and subscribed so you'll get notified when future episodes are released.