Wendy Ouriel
It bothers me when a customer walks into Boutique OUMERE with a confident attitude about their skincare failures. This defeatist mentality is usually along the lines of “I’ve tried everything and nothing works, I have bad/sensitive skin and I don’t think anything can help.”
When I ask them what they’ve used, the answer is a list of skin care products and beauty treatments that would strip a house of paint.
If every time I bought a silk scarf I brought it home by tying it to the axle of my car and then went to a tailor to have it repaired with the complaint that “no matter what I do I can’t stop my scarves from getting ruined ”, the advice would be obvious: stop doing stupid unnecessary things that ruin your scarf. If I answered “well a mom’s blog told me to do this” or “I saw a picture online that told me to do this” or “an Instagram influencer swears by it” then I think the scarf expert’s advice would “stop doing stupid unnecessary things that ruin your scarf.” A real expert’s advice is the same no matter what you’ve heard from pretenders.
Fraud arrest
I’ve heard the gamut of skin care nonsense ranging from vampire facials, to beef tallow, and then the ensuing confusion when the skin looks like a discarded slice of pizza instead of an edited social media image.
Skin care has become popularized and after that, the dissatisfied person, bewildered and exploited by a cacophony of charlatans, he misled and blamed himself instead of recognizing the damage caused by unscientific advice.
My advice is always the same: your skin isn’t bad, your source of information is.
Or I could say, you are not allergic to this ingredient, you are just using it wrong. Often a client will come in and say they are allergic to some oil or extract that is actually only found in skin care and not otherwise consumed. I will ask, how do you know? And the answer is always “when I put this oil on my skin, I have a reaction”. Well, that doesn’t mean an ingredient allergy, it means you’re using the ingredient improperly.
If I take a teaspoon of cayenne pepper and swallow it, my throat will close up, I’ll cough and be sick for the next hour. But, if I sprinkle cayenne pepper into coconut milk with other spices and put it on top of vegetables, I have a very nice, pleasant and completely different experience. A healthy one. Using cayenne pepper the wrong way would make me think I have an allergy, but using it correctly suggests otherwise.
The Fork in the Road
A straight oil on the skin is the wrong way to treat the skin. Oils alone can be inflammatory, clogging and lack skin care benefits. However, when mixed with other oils and extracts it provides an anti-aging effect. The complexity of oils and their fatty acid composition is what took several years to develop Serum Bioluminelle. Furthermore, an oil alone cannot hydrate the skin because oils do not contain water. Therefore, a water layer of extracts was created with the Bioluminelle oil layer sitting underneath to hydrate the skin.
Misusing an ingredient will cause a skin care reaction that will falsely indicate an allergic reaction, but is actually just a sign that the ingredient was too strong to use alone and needs proper formulation to be used properly. You can’t have an airplane with just the wings, it needs the other components like engines, stabilizers, etc. to work with the wings to fly the plane. Only one ingredient alone does not create flight, it causes crash, and one ingredient alone does not create beautiful skin, it causes disease.
Without thinking about skin care, you will receive a thoughtless gift. Acne, inflammation and aging can result from using the wrong skin care. Mindless skin care with no scientific merit is why I created OUMERE and the Mask of Vanity blog. I wanted to have skin care for myself that I created with my own scientific research and understanding because I couldn’t trust what was being presented to me because everything I encountered didn’t live up to scientific rigor when actually tested and not just parroted. Before I put anything in my products, I tested the ingredients myself to see if they lived up to the claims of “scientific” bloggers and influencers, and they never did.
The best advice I can give from these findings is that it’s not your skin that’s bad, you don’t have an allergy or skin sensitivity. Your skin is simply reacting to poor skin care.
