Food’s only skin deep

Yolanda Owens stirs a stockpot of a thickening creamy concoction, bubbling over an open flame. She adds freshly squeezed, organic carrot juice. Owens has several recipes in motion: Silver bowls swish with lime juice or churn with oatmeal and brown sugar.

But while her southwest Atlanta kitchen begins to smell like a bakery, her customers don’t bite into these desserts. These sweet mixtures are meant to glide on top of the body. Customers exfoliate with grits, scrub their feet with coffee beans and splash their face with “It’s Like a Salad” face toner.

Owens, a self-proclaimed “skin chef,” joins an emerging group of businesses making fresh and even perishable skin care products. She even sells mini-refrigerators for proper storage of her line of preservative-free skin care made with fruits, vegetables and grains purchased in bulk from the DeKalb Farmer’s Market. Her Iwi Fresh (stands for “it is what it is”) products are sold online and at six metro Atlanta day spas.

The 2-year-old company dips into a $60 billion-per-year cosmetics and skin care industry as it’s undergoing an Earth-friendly makeover.

Last year, Spa Sydell introduced fruit masks that change with the season —- crushed cranberry pomegranate masks in winter, blueberry toppings in springtime and a grapefruit cleanser during the hottest months.

From Body Shop’s seaweed exfoliater to Bath & Body Works’ organic honey and pear body scrub (which has a shelf life of only six to eight months), the skin care industry is increasingly turning to Mother Nature.

The green shift in skin care products is being fueled by growing consumer concerns about chemicals in everything from water bottles to children’s plastic toys to what’s inside that night cream (it’s common for face products to include paraben preservatives and petroleum-based ingredients).

So with Americans opting for BPA-free water bottles, and wooden toys, why not puree an avocado to moisturize your face?

Skin care experts say they understand the appeal of lathering up with fruits and vegetables rich in antioxidants, but they are not convinced food-based beauty products are necessarily safer, more nourishing or even more gentle on the skin.

“Just because it’s squeezed from a fruit doesn’t mean it’s going to be more benign,” said John Bailey, chief scientist at the Personal Care Products Council. “The acids of citrus fruits can be more irritating. Traditional products have been around for a long time, and they have been shown to work and be safe.”

Dermatologists also raise concerns about the all-natural mixtures not containing SPF, which protects the skin from sun damage.

Additionally, experts warn about using perishable cleansing brews past their expiration dates. Skin products made without preservatives are prone to bacteria growth, the way a piece of bread gets moldy.

So rubbing a freshly made pumpkin scrub on your face after it’s past its prime could cause acne, warns Dr. Amy Kim, a dermatologist at Metropolitan Dermatologic Surgery.

Warnings aside, Jody Artale of Fayetteville finds it refreshing using an edible skin care line without any chemicals, dyes or preservatives. She believes she gets everything she needs from her Iwi Fresh collection, which includes the “14 Carrot Glow,” a tonic made from lettuce, and the “Brown Sugar” body scrub.

“I look and feel great,” Artale said. “And I like knowing what I am putting on my body.”

Melissa Grill Petersen, director of operations at Blue Med Spa in Atlanta, said she loves the idea of green products but believes they don’t always get the job done.

The spa continues to whip up fresh-to-order hair smoothies made with bananas, avocados, cantaloupes and olive oil in its Green People Salon.

But it no longer sends batches home with customers because the smoothies last only one month —- even if refrigerated.

And perhaps the biggest challenge is fighting Mother Nature with her own output.

“There are great things that are naturally based that can help you feel better and make your skin smoother, but is it going to take away lines and wrinkles?” Petersen said. “I can’t say there’s any olive oil or a pear that’s going to do that.”

Back in Owens’ southwest Atlanta kitchen, she’s experimenting with tropical recipes for a spa at Atlantic Station.

She’s draining coconuts and slicing starfish. She jots down ideas on her poster-sized paper on an easel. After spending two years mastering the carrot product, she’s prepared for many trips to the farmer’s market —- and many hours in the kitchen —- to get this Caribbean-inspired line just right.

She hopes to one day open up an organic fruit and vegetable juice bar —- for skin.

Kiwi Skin Firmer

Kiwi contains vitamin C. It improves the overall look of the skin and makes it more elastic. Honey is a natural hydrater and moisturizer.

1 ripe kiwi (peeled) 1 teaspoon of honey

Mix the kiwi in a blender or mash with a fork if it is soft. Strain the excess liquid and add the honey.

Apply the mass on the face and leave on for 20 minutes. Rinse off with warm water.

Source: Iwi Fresh

Banana Face Smoothie (Face Cleanser)

Yogurt and sour cream refresh, moisturize and cleanse the skin, while banana and honey rehydrate it.

1 banana

1 tablespoon sour cream

1 tablespoon plain yogurt

1 teaspoon honey

Mash banana in a bowl. Add sour cream and yogurt and mix to a smooth paste. Drizzle in honey. Blend to smooth texture.

Apply a small amount to a clean face and neck in a upward circular motion. Rinse with warm water

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Treatment: the organic yam and pumpkin peel

What it does: This 98 percent-organic peel reduces fine lines and wrinkles and infuses the skin with active vitamins and bioflavonoids. (Bioflavonoids give color to vegetables, fruits and flowers; they have been shown to have anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, antiviral and anti-cancer properties.)

This peel is especially effective for hydrating and plumping the skin and refining skin tone, but it can also reduce uneven pigmentation and roughness. It is designed to leave the skin with a radiant glow and to”rev up” skin tone before a special event. “This is a real glow-getter,” says Oksana Kalchanka, an aesthetician at Tranquility Spa & Salon, “and is especially popular before weddings and reunions. A series of weekly treatments one month beforehand ensures clients a luminous, radiant, younger-looking complexion.”

What you really need to know: This 30-minute professional treatment is Read more…

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ME Day Spa Adds New Products, Free Blow Dry

Product lovers, unite. Me Day Spa announces the addition of its new luxury spa product lines to the salon’s already extensive product repertoire. What better place to get your product fix than the hottest South Beach day spa? Plastic Surgeon and spa entrepreneur, Dr. Paul Wigoda is pleased to offer these new product lines and specials to complement Me Day Spa’s services.

Me Day Spa Boutique

Adding this array of professional and natural beauty products allows us to further our commitment to be the best salon on Miami Beach

South Beach Day Spa New Products Include:

Kerastase hair care retail products and in salon treatments: including strengthening, leave in, color treated, and curly hair products

Eminence skin care: featuring the new body care and tropical lines
Alison Raffaelle cosmetics: naturally inspired beauty products

Obagi medical products: prescription strength, salon quality skincare

Prevage MD: anti-aging skincare that corrects environmental damage

Trapp Candles: premium exotic fragrances for the mind and body

Marcia Teixeira Brazilian Chocolate Hair Relaxer: A natural de-frizzing treatment – desert for your hair

As part of this new product introduction, Me Day Spa in Miami Beach is offering salon specials.

Specials change monthly, including:
Free manicure with purchase of a spa pedicure
Free blow-dry with purchase of $50.00 in Kerastase products

“Adding this array of professional and natural beauty products allows us to further our commitment to be the best salon on Miami Beach,” said Salon Manager, Sonia Fardales. “We strive to provide our customers with the best possible experience — and that includes offering a full range of luxury, custom products.”
For more information on Me Day Spa’s product lines and services.

About Me Day Spa:
Me Day Spa offers complete day spa services including hair styling, extensions, color, cuts, manicures, pedicures, and skin care including professional makeup, facials, glycolic treatments, pineapple peels, microdermabrasion as well as massage and medical spa services including laser hair removal, spider vein treatments, botox, fillers, and plastic surgery consultations with Dr. Paul Wigoda. The spa features several lines of organic skin care products and a boutique filled with scented scented candles and other self-indulging products.

About Dr. Paul Wigoda:
Dr. Paul Wigoda practices plastic surgery in the Fort Lauderdale and Miami area. He is a board certified plastic surgeon and is a member of the American Medical Association, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the Florida Medical Association, and the Broward County Medical Association. Recently voted the Best Cosmetics Surgeon in Fort Lauderdale, Dr. Wigoda specializes in breast augmentation, breast reduction, breast lift, liposuction, rhinoplasty, tummy tuck, facelift, brow lift, eyelid surgery, juvederm, radiesse, restylane, botox treatments, laser hair removal, spider vein treatments, and the “laser facial” wrinkle treatment.

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A snack for the skin

Cosmetics trend claims food that’s good inside is good for your outside as well

For Jean Halter of Odessa, a facial is the ultimate way to pamper yourself. Make it a chocolate facial, and we’re talking stairway-to-heaven stuff for the self-confessed chocoholic.

“I don’t even now how to describe it,” Halter says of the facial she received at the La Dolce Vita Spa for Wellness in Middletown. “It was very relaxing, number one, and smelled scrumptious. It was a really neat experience, and I’m going to ask for another one.”

Her food-infused beauty treat is just one of many culinary-influenced products and services flooding the market.

Generations ago, beauty care often consisted of mashing food at home and slathering it on, in the hope of creating tighter skin or shinier hair. Now beauty products and venues are commercializing that idea, incorporating fruits, vegetables and even chocolate and wine.

In Minneapolis, Minn., as Horst Rechelbacher, founder of Intelligent Nutrients, works on his new cosmetics line, he occasionally pours some of his ingredients into a glass, tops it with mineral water and drinks it.

This isn’t a case of Dr. Jekyll trying his strange brews on himself. Rechelbacher uses organic, high-grade food in his line that includes cosmetics, hair care and soaps.

Rechelbacher’s line is the pinnacle of beauty’s return to the basics, because all of the ingredients contain no chemicals or artificial preservatives. What is more commonly found around Delaware are spas offering treatments with food mixed in.

“It’s as healthy for the skin outside as it is inside,” said Chris Sateriale, owner of La Dolce Vita, which offers chocolate facials and scrubs as well as fruit masks and peels. “I think it’s because people are realizing that the enzymes and the benefits you can get from fruits and vegetables are very good and very healthy for the rejuvenation of the skin.”

It’s a trend, Rechelbacher said, but a trend driven by knowledge.

“We are constantly educating ourselves,” he said. “We are getting smarter.”

“I think that the pendulum just swings … and right now it’s swinging in the direction of going back to the basics of skin care,” said Devon Tucker, owner of Covet Spa in Greenville.

Margie Hartnett, owner of Visions Hair Design, an Aveda concept salon located on Concord Pike which carries Intelligent Nutrients products, believes people are becoming more health-oriented.

“We’re more vain, so if it’s proven, we want to be younger and act younger,” Hartnett said.

Antioxidants are the buzzword in food and beauty for their anti-aging benefits. Thus, food products high in antioxidants, such as dark chocolate, wine, fruits, vegetables and teas, also are popular in beauty products.

Vitamins such as C and E and enzymes found in foods like pumpkins, avocados and papayas give a kick to your skin, Hartnett said.

“Your body will absorb anything you put on your skin unless it is too big, in which case it will block your pores,” said Hartnett.

“If you want your hair, body and skin to look better, you have to start from within,” said Hartnett. “You can use good hair conditioners or whatever, but if you’re not eating properly, it won’t help.”

Rechelbacher said he decided to research organic cosmetics after learning about how quickly the body absorbs toxins through the skin and how long those unnatural products take to get out of the human system.

“I started looking at nurturing the body from the inside and the outside,” said Rechelbacher.

A handful of Intelligent Nutrients’ supplements is available, but a full line of products — including hair care, makeup, pet-care products, personal lubricants and maternity products — will be launched this fall, said Rechelbacher, who plans to open stores in Manhattan and Minnesota’s Mall of America.

Rather than use mineral water as a base for his cleansers, Rechelbacher uses fruit juices. Hairspray retains its stickiness through water-soluble, food-grade gum resins used to harden candies. Kale extracts provide the foaming action in shampoos and soaps. Even the preservatives for the perishable ingredients are all natural.

“We’re not encouraging people to start eating our products,” said Rechelbacher. “If you have nothing else to eat, you can survive. It’s not going to taste good, but it will smell good.”

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After Laura Noss signed up to receive a weekly organic produce box from a farm near her home in Menlo Park, Calif., she decided that fruits and vegetables grown close to home taste better.

“It has opened my eyes to what is local and seasonal,” Ms. Noss said. “I now understand that what I put in my body and on my body matters.”

So she began looking for ways to go local beyond the palate. Last year, while she planned a getaway to Maui, she hunted for treatments that used indigenous ingredients at the Grand Wailea Resort Hotel and Spa. That is how she found herself being scrubbed with locally-sourced coconut and sugar, then dunked in just-harvested coconut milk — for $160 a treatment.

“It felt like it would be fresher than some of the other treatments,” said Ms. Noss, 38, the founder of Social Planets, a communications and marketing company. “I envisioned the woman going out to the tree and plucking my coconut.”

More than 28 percent of spas nationwide use local ingredients, according to a 2007 survey by the International Spa Association, a trade group for the industry. Last year, after seeing the trend take off, the association started tracking how many of the 3,000 spas in its membership use ingredients from local nature in treatments.

In an age of global warming and high gas prices, is it any wonder that more spa-goers are gravitating to blueberries, honey and even maple syrup, cultivated close by because they believe it leaves a lighter carbon footprint?

The local-food movement, popularized by writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, has created an aura of authenticity around all things local. Forward-thinking spas have long included indigenous ingredients on their menus, but more spa owners have entered the game of late, now that customers will pay more for services they deem environmentally responsible.

Some spas use the local produce in unexpected ways. The Cliff House Resort and Spa in Ogunquit, Me., offers its guests a Maine blueberry body wrap for $110. You can also get a Maine Blueberry Pedicure.

That more businesses (spas included) are rushing to make greenbacks off the green-minded hasn’t escaped the notice of Jessica Jensen, a founder of Low Impact Living, an online resource that helps consumers live eco-friendly.

“There are two kinds of companies,” Ms. Jensen said, “ones that are genuinely dedicated to these issues and incorporate them into every aspect of their business, and then other companies trying to put a varnish on their business in the form of putting a few green techniques here and there.”

Some critics say that marketing — not any environmental impulse per se — is the reason local ingredients are touted at spas from the Napa Valley to the Maine Coast.

“Putting the label ‘organic’ or ‘local’ on a product allows a vendor to charge more, irregardless of supply and demand,” said James E. McWilliams, the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.” “There is a psychological factor at work here as well. When a company can claim they are going local, it conveys a sense of virtue, that what they are doing is natural and pure, and that their behavior is alternative and even elite. These are values that a lot of consumers today crave.”

Heather Stephenson, 34, favors buying local wherever she travels, as well as in San Francisco, her base. “One of the best things you can do in terms of the planet is to seek out things that are sourced close to home,” said Ms. Stephenson, a founder of Ideal Bite, a Web site about ways to go green. Her body has been polished from regional grape seeds at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa in California, exfoliated with Javanese coffee in Bali, and massaged with volcanic rocks from Costa Rica.

Some green advocates question whether such destination-spa treatments, however carefully sourced, are eco-friendly at all. “Using local materials in a spa setting is a great idea,” said Ms. Jensen of Low Impact Living. “But it’s kind of silly when you think about the carbon emissions associated with people flying 3,000 miles to get to the spa, versus the supposed savings using local materials, wraps and lotion.”

Ms. Stephenson, who visits roughly five spas a year, doesn’t see a contradiction. “The fact is that people go on a vacation,” she said. “We can do that in a way that gives us a healthy experience for ourselves, but also wakes us up to experiencing the things that that culture provides, and gives us an appreciation for the natural world.”

Home-grown experiences are part of what destination spas sell. The spa at Stoweflake Mountain Resort in Stowe, Vt., offers a Vermont Maple Sugar Body Polish using local maple syrup. Tell a tale of a land or its people, and patrons will come — many spas hope.

Sometimes a marketable idea is discovered where it’s least expected. During construction at the Sundara Inn and Spa in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., the former owner, Kelli Trumble, lamented how she had sand in everything, said Tara Duarte, the director of operations at Sundara, including “every pair of shoes and boots and all over her car.”

“Yet, the sand was a pretty mix of reds and golds,” Ms. Duarte added, “and it had such an even consistency that she thought it was the sort of thing you’d find in body polishes.”

So Ms. Trumble put some sandstone into a baggie and had it analyzed at a lab. When it turned out to be sandstone of an ancient Cambrian variety, Sandstone Body Polishes soon appeared at the spa.

Designing signature services based around local ingredients sets spas apart from the competition, said Melinda Taschetta-Millane, the editor in chief of Skin Inc. magazine, a trade publication for spa professionals. “They find that if they use one of these indigenous ingredients, it helps their identity and gives their spa a distinctive mark.”

Competition is fierce with roughly 14,615 spas nationwide, up from 10,128 in 2004, according to the spa association.

As a result, spas are concocting increasingly offbeat (some might say outlandish) offerings, looking to nearby vineyards, deserts and rock formations for ingredients to slather, spritz and rub onto willing bodies.

ESSpa Kozmetika, a spa near downtown Pittsburgh, doles out hot chocolate, brownies and dark-chocolate samples in the waiting room to draw attention to its $140 Stimulating Hot Cocoa Facial and $140 Hot Chocolate Body Wrap. (What the spa doesn’t advertise is that although it gets its chocolate from a local ice cream shop, the cocoa beans are from Africa.)

Customers who choose the Rosemary and Grape Seed Foot Scrub at the spa at Auberge du Soleil in Napa Valley are greeted with a glass of 2002 Barlow merlot and tasting notes: “The balanced fruit with subtle earth and herbal notes in the merlot are wonderfully brought to life by the complementary aromatics of grape seeds and rosemary in the foot treatment.”

Spa-goers shouldn’t assume that locals have traditionally given themselves facials or wrapped their limbs in, say, a blueberry mash just because a treatment’s star ingredient is indigenous. “The Hawaiians didn’t really do a papaya scrub, although you do have papaya in Hawaii,” said Sylvia Sepielli, the owner of Sylvia Planning and Design, a spa design and consulting firm in Sedona, Ariz. In her opinion, spas that try to connect their treatments to “local healing culture” are misleading.

It is possible that discovering local ingredients at a spa will have an impact on a person’s behavior once they return home, Mr. McWilliams said.

“Maybe ‘green lite’ will turn into ‘green heavy,’ ” he said. “But the most environmentally-friendly thing we can do is reduce our consumer spending dramatically, and a spa is a dramatic luxury expense.”

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