We are delighted that both Beauty Prescription doctors have been selected to participate in an event that is important for all women. We’ve been asked to speak about The Beauty Prescription and the Beauty-Brain Loop at the third annual Exclusive Premier Women’s Empowerment Expo, to be held August 28-30 at the Long Beach Convention Center near the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. More than 5,000 women are expected to attend to enjoy more than 450 exhibitors in hair care, cosmetics, skin care and other products, cooking, personal care and other desirable products and services. Attendees can get professional styling tips, learn healthy cooking secrets, and listen to celebrity speakers such as Susan Powter, Dr. John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and a wide range of experts on subjects from relationships and eating disorders to complementary and alternative medicine.
We don’t know precisely when or where we’ll be speaking yet, but we will be talking about the book and signing copies, so watch our Facebook or Twitter pages for more specific information. For more details about the Expo, visit epremierwomensexpo.com. We hope we can help empower women, educate them about how to be more beautiful inside and out, and make a positive difference in the lives of women from all over the country.
Back to some skin issue for a couple of posts. Since our skin is the most visible aspect of our Outer Beauty, it’s always going to be an important subject. Our consistent advice from Day One has been: protect yourself from too much sun exposure. Solar radiation dehydrates, damages collagen, and causes skin cancer, as you know. One remedy has been to wear broad-spectrum sunscreen right?
Well…
Now news has come out from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) that the majority of the 1,100 sunscreens they tested did not work as well as claimed. In particular, they worried about broad-spectrum products, which are supposed to offer protection from UVA rays (which penetrate the skin and cause damage) and UVB rays (which cause sunburns). Basically, sunscreen makers don’t have to tell you how much protection their products offer from UVA and UVB rays, so they don’t. You have no idea if you’re blocking the burning rays while the UVA wreaks havoc on your skin.
The other concern the EWG found was that people who regularly used sunscreens had levels of the UVA blocker oxybenzone in their urine. Now, the FDA requires that sunscreens be topical, which means their ingredients can’t be absorbed into the bloodstream. So how does this happen? Clearly, some sunscreen makers aren’t formulating their products safely, and that’s a problem because oxybenzone in pregnant women has been shown to affect birth weight.
There’s more about oxybenzone. Back in the 1980s, a chemist for Warner-Lambert cosmetics company found that oxybenzone had anti-inflammatory properties. It’s taken this long for the industry to publish his findings, because if your sunscreen reduces the pain of the sunburn you get after too much exposure, then you might spend more time in the sun and do some real damage.
So what now. Do we go back to white dabs of zinc oxide or titantium cream, which don’t go really well with a toned beach body? For one thing, you can lobby your representatives to demand that the FDA adopt a more precise SPF rating system. Sunscreen makers are fighting this, as they always do, but consumer pressure helps. For another, you can contact smaller companies that make sunscreen (presumably, they will be more responsive than a major corporation) and tell them you would love to buy and recommend their products if they a) contain no oxybenzone and b) have a totally transparent SPF rating that reveals both UVA and UVB protection.
Otherwise, use common sense. Wear UV-resistant clothing. Limit your sun exposure. Check the ingredients. There are sunscreens without oxybenzone: Natural Sun SPF 25 for Active Lifestyles by Aubrey Organics, Vanicream’s SPF 30 and Oat Protein SPF 30 by Kiss My Face are three examples. However, they use minerals like zinc and titanium dioxide to block rays, so they may not be as invisible as you’re used to. And if you must use sunscreen, reapply it every two hours and use something with at least 45 SPF. If you’re not sure you can trust the companies who make your sun protection products, at least you can trust your own sound judgment.
The first Beauty Prescription Club, named after our book of the same name, has started at Florida State College at Jacksonville, with more to come around south Florida. The club will feature events, activities and speakers designed to promote the idea of the Beauty-Brain Loop and educate women on how they can become their most beautiful inside and out. We’re absolutely thrilled. Huge thanks to Gloria White for creating the charter club from sheer will and determination to succeed!
We don’t want this movement to stop there, however. We would love this to be just the first of hundreds of Beauty Prescription clubs around the country, and not just at colleges and universities, but in private homes and in businesses. Anywhere there’s a group of women who want to look better, feel better and live better, there’s fertile soil for growing a Beauty Prescription club.
What can you do with a Beauty Prescription Club?
Share experiences and beauty tips
Plan activities that foster Health and improve Environment
Discuss principles of the book
Support members through difficult times and encourage beauty-friendly life changes
Raise money for causes that promote whole-woman beauty
Facebook and Meetup.com are excellent places to begin your own Beauty Prescription club. You don’t need a lot to get started. You really only need an understanding of The Beauty Prescription and its message, a place to meet and a group of women who are enthusiastic about participating. You don’t need our permission, but if you launch your own club we would love to find out about it. If you launch your own club, please let us know by posting your news on the Beauty Prescription Facebook page here.
Valentine’s Day is about all the stages of the Beauty-Brain Loop. Sure, you want to look great for your loved one, but it’s also about being happy with who you are and grateful for the blessings you have. Health and fitness is a big part of both looking and feeling beautiful, and what is more romantic than a physical Environment that’s beautiful and welcoming and sensual? Yes, Valentine’s Day is definitely a Beauty Prescription kind of holiday, so it’s appropriate that Dr. Eva Ritvo will be joining several other physicians on WFOR CBS4 television in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area on Wednesday, Feb 11 for a special “Looking and Feeling Your Best” phone bank.
Eva and the other docs—two dermatologists and a family medicine specialist—will take live phone calls from WFOR viewers from 5 to 6:30 p.m., during the regular evening newscast. This will be an opportunity for viewers to call in to ask questions about skin care, general health, beauty products, stress management and more. Eva, who regularly contributes to the WFOR newscast on subjects related to psychiatry and behavior, will focus on her specialty: Inner Beauty. She will answer your questions about feeling good from the inside, mental adjustments that will make a visible difference in your perceived beauty, making closer connections with key people in your life and more.
If you want more information about this special live event, call WFOR at 305-591-4444 or visit www.cbs4.com. We hope you’ll call in and ask Eva a question about your own efforts to be as beautiful as you can be!
We don’t announce most events on our blog, but this one is special: the first annual Marissa Nestor Invitational Doubles Tournament is being held on Saturday, March 9 at 9 a.m. at the La Gorce Country Club, located at 5685 Alton Road in Miami Beach, Florida. What makes this tournament so special. Marissa is Eva’s lovely daughter and the event is in honor of her 18th birthday
This is the listing from the website SocialMiami.com:
Sign up for a day of tennis and fun at the first ever Marissa Nestor Invitational Doubles Tournament, a fundraiser for United Cerebral Palsy of South Florida. Player fees are $30 per individual and $50 per team, which includes lunch and a chance to win tickets for the Sony Ericsson Open. Registration begins at 9 a.m., and the matches get underway at 10. Tennis Pro Daniel Capote will organize this kick-off tournament, an introduction to the main event that will take place November 14, also a benefit for UCP. The tournament is named in honor of Marissa Nestor, a young woman living with cerebral palsy and the daughter of UCP of South Florida board member, Dr. Eva Ritvo, who is hosting the tournament. For information about participating or sponsoring the tournament, please call or e-mail Janelle Cedeno.
Marissa was born with a condition called hemiparesis, which is a weakness on one side of the body that can be caused by cerebral palsy. That’s why the fundraiser is for UCP. This is also special because Eva is a huge tennis fan who has been to Wimbledon and spends a lot of her free time on the court. So this is a chance to engage the sport she loves to both show her love for Marissa and to support a worthy cause, namely, cerebral palsy and hemiparesis research.
This is also an example of the Beauty-Brain Loop in action. You activate your Inner Beauty because helping others makes you feel good. You protect your Outer Beauty by wearing sunscreen and a hat, and burning calories to keep you trim. You improve your Health with the cardiovascular exercise, and improve your Environment because you’re surrounded by friends and giving to a good cause.
To find out more about the 2009 Marissa Nestor Invitational Doubles Tournament, you can go to the Social Miami website here, or call 305-325-9018.
We’re fortunate enough to be in Washington, DC with hundreds of thousands of our closest friends for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. It’s an incredibly exciting time, and when we think about Obama’s message of “Change,” it’s impossible for us not to put that in the context of our favorite subject. So at a time when change is on everyone’s mind, how will you change the way beauty impacts your life in the coming year?
In keeping with the political news that’s on everyone’s mind, we’ve organized our ideas according to our own imaginary presidential cabinet. If Barack Obama had these as his priorities, we don’t know how the economy would do, but we do know the entire country would look and feel fabulous.
State: In the spirit of foreign relations, you could reach out to people in your life with whom your relationships haven’t been as close as they could be and find the beauty in them.
Treasury: At a time when the economy seems to be in for a prolonged slump, get creative and find ways to get quality beauty and skin care products for less. Share your secrets with friends and invite them to share theirs with you.
Agriculture: Discover natural and organic cosmetics and beauty products. There are many sources for these; see our last posting about the Ecocert designation, which guarantees that your product is 100% natural.
Health and Human Services: Adopt at least one healthy new habit, such as working out five days a week, eating fish at least twice a week, or taking up meditation as a daily practice. Do something great for your body and watch it become more beautiful.
Commerce: Get into the community and bring your beauty business to locally owned businesses like hair salons and makers of handmade cosmetics. You’ll meet new people who will be grateful for your patronage, make new friends and feel like a part of the fabric of where you live.
Labor: Make your work environment more conducive to beauty by doing everything from getting an anti-glare filter for your computer to take the strain off your eyes, taking 15 minutes a day to walk around the building or do deep breathing, or simply filling your workspace with beautiful things.
Interior: Work on your Inner Beauty by taking a candid look at behaviors that have caused you pain in the past, such as jealousy, being passive when you should be assertive, or beating yourself up for little things. Vow to become more aware of these behaviors and work to turn them into positive energy.
Housing and Urban Development: Beautify the physical space where you live. This doesn’t to be expensive; it could be a matter of lighting, plants, music, fabrics and rearranging the things you already own. But a beautiful physical environment makes you feel more content, peaceful and in love with your own life.
Change will be on everyone’s mind as this exciting year moves ahead. How will you change yourself for the better? Please share your stories with us on Comments. And to paraphrase our new president: “Yes you can!”
Unless you’ve been living in seclusion on a deserted tropical island for the last year (lucky you), you’re quite aware of the Big R: Recession. We’re in one, it’s ugly and it looks like it might get a lot uglier. People are cutting back on everything from travel to buying new appliances, rediscovering frugal activities like gardening and do-it-yourself repairs, and clipping every coupon in sight to try and save money. You may already be doing some or all of those things yourself in an effort to survive the tough times. So what are we to make of this news?
According to a survey of more than 11,500 people in more than a dozen countries including Brazil, Greece, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, Britain and the United States, people are still spending the same amount on cosmetics and other beauty products as they did before the economic collapse. The data show that 41% of the people surveyed planned to maintain their spending levels on beauty products such as cosmetics, skin care products and hair care products, while 55% of respondents said they would spend more on healthcare products and only 17% would spend less.
What does this say about us? Does it makes sense that we’re cancelling vacations, not buying cars and washing machines and counting pennies at the supermarket, but still shelling out for Garnier and Neutrogena? We think that it does. Everyone needs to feel they have a sanctuary, especially when times are hard or frightening, as they are now. For women, that sanctuary often becomes the knowledge that no matter what else happens, we are taking care of our appearance and our health. It’s an aspect of control; we cannot control the Dow Jones average, the housing market or whether we’ll be laid off next month, but we can control how we care for our skin, watch our diet, style our hair and so on. Paying attention to and money for self-care products gives us a psychological safe harbor for our Inner Beauty, a little bit of armor for the world that lets us say, “At least I look and feel good,” no matter what else happens.
So shop smart and save where you can, but if you feel the drive to care for your looks and your health while you’re cutting back everywhere else, don’t feel guilty. Allow yourself a little indulgence. Keep taking your vitamins and omega-3s, keep using moisturizer and sunscreen, and treat yourself to some time getting your hair or nails done once in a while. It doesn’t make you wasteful. It makes you wise. Spending a few dollars on beauty is a small price to pay to keep your spirits up and help you feel like you can take on an increasingly harsh world.
It’s been obvious for many years that the U.S. has become a deeply diverse nation. The election of Barack Obama was, to us, final proof of the fact that we’re getting to the point where we can see a non-white face not only as beautiful but trustworthy, intelligent and wise. That’s a huge step, and here’s another: a company called Thevi Cosmetics is debuting lines of beauty products designed specifically for women from different ethnic groups. Companies have been marketing specialty lines of foundation, eye shadow, lipstick and other prodcuts to African-American women for years, but now this company is targeting the estimated 44 million women in the U.S. of Latino, Asian, South Asian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern descent.
This is a fantastic development. As we talk about in The Beauty Prescription and this blog, not all colors are for every woman. Color palettes are based on skin tone, eye color and hair color, and women from different ethnic backgrounds have exotic combinations of these elements that demand attention. Well, they’re getting it. Thevi and other companies are using color science to develop new palettes based on undertones like red-brown, red-gold, olive and golden. The reason this is so important goes far beyond giving women from Pakistan, Greece, Syria, Sri Lanka or Brazil the ability to accent their most beautiful features. That’s important, of course, but the real benefit goes deeper.
Essentially, by opening our eyes to wider world of cosmetics, companies like these are saying to women of different non-Caucasian ethnicities, “Yes, you are beautiful, too!” By acknowledging these women, they are contributing to the inner beauty of all ethnic women. Part of inner beauty is seeing beauty in others and knowing that others see beauty in you. In this context, ethnocentric beauty products become tools of recognition and empowerment. That may seem like quite a burden to place on lip liner, but hey, it’s not easy changing the world.
The economic news just seems to get worse and worse, doesn’t it? First the unemployment rate jumps, then the stock market drops, and the cycle starts again. And at the end of the day, we as consumers start getting more and more nervous about spending money on anything but the necessities. Luxuries become things to be deferred for another day, and apparently that includes beauty products. Usually one of the steadiest sectors of the marketplace, fragrance, makeup and skin care products are showing that they’re not recession-proof, either.
According to Women’s Wear Daily, spending on all major categories of beauty products is down 1% going into the all-important holiday season. No big deal? Well, consider that 1% of the total annual beauty spending in the U.S. equals about $70 million. That’s nothing to shake a lipstick at. Now, we’re doctors, not economists, so we’re not going to weigh in on the impact of the drop in beauty spending. But we are going to say a thing or two about the importance of investing a little bit, even during tough times, in keeping yourself looking great outside and feeling great inside.
Our basic advice is, if you’re in the habit of spending a certain amount on cosmetics, skin care products, “cosmeceuticals” or regular manicures, cut what you need to feel more secure, but don’t stop spending on your beauty completely. It’s too important. From a Beauty-Brain Loop perspective, you should always be doing what you can to keep yourself looking as good as possible, because that affects your Inner Beauty, your self-esteem and feeling of confidence. And since beauty is often a sign of good health, focusing on the essentials of beauty is also a good way to ensure that you’re taking the basic steps to maintain your health, something that’s vital for dealing with stressful times.
What are the “beauty essentials” you should not cut back on? Here’s our list:
Moisturizer with sunscreen. If you can afford only one beauty product, this is the one to get. Great brands include…
Hair care products. These include a shampoo that’s right for your type of hair and a conditioner with an SPF factor such as…
Lipstick or lip gloss with moisturizer and SPF. As we said in an earlier post, the lips are the doorway to your beauty, what attracts the eye and the interest. Take care of them. Good choices include…
Skin-healthy foods such as blueberries, raspberries and blackberries (which contain powerful antioxidants) and foods rich in anti-inflammatory fatty acids like walnuts, flax seed and salmon. You can also take omega-3 fish oil supplements to get a daily dose of important fatty acids.
Dental care. Flossing and brushing each day should always be part of your daily routine, and even if you don’t have dental insurance and can’t afford veneers or some other cosmetic procedure, get your teeth cleaned twice a year. It’s important for oral health…and for preventing halitosis that can render even the most beautiful face intolerable.
Exercise. Working out can be free, but even if you pay for a gym membership, keep going. Regular exercise helps control your weight, boosts your energy and reduces the effects of stress. It also helps fight osteoporosis as you age.
Annual physical. Deal with the co-pay and keep getting your annual checkup with your regular physician. There’s no better way to catch possible health problems early when they’re easy to treat, and to develop a positive, communicative relationship with your doctor and his or her staff. Hint: make sure a skin check is part of your physical.
This stuff is pretty basic, but when you have to tighten your belt and “extras” like Botox, fillers, peels and monthly highlighting treatments are out of the question, the basics are what keep you going. In fact, since too many women focus on the exterior trappings of beauty while going easy on the internal essentials like nutrition and fitness, look at the recession as the time to make sure the foundation of your beauty is strong. Things will get better eventually, and when you have the means to go back to expensive beauty products, who knows…maybe you won’t need them.
Inner beauty is a major focus of what we do in both our medical practices. For a psychiatrist, that’s obvious: so much of the work is directed at helping patients discover ways to cope with life’s problems and to bring out the strength and self-esteem that lies at the core of inner beauty. It’s less obvious for a dermatologist, but equally valid. Yes, that area of medicine is about the outer beauty of the skin, but often concerns about what’s outside mask issues about the inner self: a crisis of confidence, fears about aging or a troubled relationship, worries about body image or social conformity. In any case, it’s very difficult to help a person become truly beautiful if you are only addressing the problems on the exterior.
That’s why we particularly love this poem from writer Sam Levenson, which reflects the essence of what we talk about when we mention Inner Beauty—that true beauty stems from seeing beauty around you, reaching out to others, and having a restorative, healing, loving attitude toward life. The poem:
For attractive lips, speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. For beautiful hair, let a child run his/her fingers through it once a day. For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone. People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself, and the other for helping others.
