Author:
December 14, 2022
mbg Beauty Director
mbg Beauty Director
Alexandra Engler is the beauty director at mindbodygreen and host of the beauty podcast Clean Beauty School. Previously, she’s held beauty roles at Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, SELF, and Cosmopolitan; her byline has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Allure.com.
Image by mbg creative x Aaron Bernstein / mbg
December 14, 2022
Taking care of your skin shouldn’t be hard. You shouldn’t dread the lead-up to your nighttime skin care routine. You shouldn’t have to feel that your post-shower routine is work. Or that your body care routine is labor-some, with little benefit.
Beauty—when it’s right, when you have the right products, and when you have homed in on your unique routine—should be something you want to do. Even if you don’t count yourself a skin care fanatic or beauty lover, taking care of your skin should be a pleasurable experience.
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And as we’ve been gearing up to introduce you to mindbodygreen’s newest personal care product, our dry body oil, I’ve been thinking a lot about how it’s changed my body care routine.
I’ve been using this oil for the past year (through the formulation and testing process), and it’s made my post-shower rituals so much more ahh-inspiring. No matter whether I’m applying it in the morning to prep for my day or at night as part of my wind-down rituals, it’s made my body care routine feel luxurious but never inconvenient.
You’re going to look forward to using mindbodygreen’s dry body oil — I know I do.
We worked hard to get this texture right: We wanted something soft and supple. We wanted it to be so light, so effervescent, that it would practically disappear into your skin upon application. We wanted a sensorial experience that felt rich but never left a residue. Honestly, I just wanted something easy.
And that’s what this is: It’s a body oil that’s enjoyable to wear, but you don’t have to think too much about it during or after application. It just slips on the skin effortlessly and then feels almost like it was always meant to be there.
Throughout the day, you’ll probably notice how soft your skin feels—or you’ll notice that it has more of a glow—but you never notice the oil itself. There’s no greasy residue on your clothing or an oil-slick patch that just won’t disappear. It becomes a second skin.
How I use the dry body oil.
To make my post-rinse routine easier, I really should just keep it in the shower. But in reality, my little bottle practically follows me around my apartment. I even have a spare bottle at my desk in the mindbodygreen offices—because what a travesty it’d be to be too far away from it during working hours.
I use it throughout the day to replenish dry skin, as a cuticle oil, and on my elbows. Because I’ve been testing it for a very long time now, it was my secret to conditioned, glowing legs and limbs in the summer. I even use it as a hair oil to smooth down flyaways, on my ends, and to give myself an end-of-day scalp massage. I’ve even used a very small amount as a lip oil or to add a dewy highlight on the tops of my cheekbones.
I’m very comfortable using this body oil quite literally all over my body, because I know the ingredients are good: We blended together a mix of sunflower, organic safflower, squalane, prickly pear, and vitamin E oils. These are full of skin-supporting nutrients to nurture the skin barrier, provide antioxidant properties, and feed the skin lipids.
We have sunflower and organic safflower oils to thank for the silky texture, but they also provide vitamin E, linoleic acid, and fatty acids. We use an olive-derived squalane to enhance skin barrier function, comfort sensitive skin, and replenish lipids to dry skin.
For an added dose of antioxidant properties, the blend also contains prickly pear seed oil and vitamin E (in the active form of tocopherol). Prickly pear seed is full of nutrients like vitamin E and phytosterols. In addition to the fact that many of our botanical oils naturally contain vitamin E, we also added an active form of the antioxidant to stabilize the blend as well as to enhance the oil’s skin-supporting qualities.
These ingredients make it great for skin at any age or for any need. It’s light enough that it won’t overwhelm areas of the body that naturally produce more sebum but rich enough that it can cradle and comfort dry areas too. It’s fragrance-free, so sensitive skin folks can wear it too (of course, check the ingredient list to see if you’re not personally sensitive to any of the individual ingredients). It’s chock-full of nutrients that support skin at any stage of life. Our body oil is for every body.
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We are committed to keeping your skin & the planet healthy.
We don’t mess around with our product’s efficacy or responsibility. While there is no regulated definition of “clean,” we believe it has become a useful term for consumers to identify formulas that align with their wants. Every brand, retailer, and organization has its own set of standards for their version of clean—and we have always encouraged people to look for brands that match up with their own standards.
We excluded many of the common ingredients buzzed about currently, including parabens, phthalates, mineral oils, petrochemicals, formaldehyde and formaldehyde releasers, silicones, BHA, BHT, and over 1,000 other ingredients regulated by the European Union.
But in the formulation process, we actually didn’t start by outlining what we didn’t want. To us, creating a clean product with integrity was the baseline. So instead, we started by outlining the ingredients we did want. In the case of this oil, we wanted ingredients that were shown to be well tolerated by most people and were nutrient-dense. Once we outlined this, we were able to craft formulas with intention. See, we have always found that when you approach an endeavor from a place of abundance—not restriction—you’re better able to thrive.
In addition to that, we want to make sure that we are selecting an eco-friendly packaging that was available to us. We’re going to be honest with you: Making a personal care collection as sustainable as possible is not easy. Many times throughout the process we are faced with hard choices in terms of packaging, supply chain, shipping (i.e., contributing to the carbon footprint) and so much more. But each time, we never took the easy way out—we always went with the most sustainable option available even if it cost us time and resources.
This oil is housed in glass bottles, and it is shipped to you in boxes that are made from 100% recycled paper and are fully curbside recyclable as well. We also manufacture our formula in a plant powered by 100% wind energy. As we move forward, we will make changes when new green technology becomes available to us.
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The takeaway.
Glowing skin starts with skin care you actually want to apply. Everyone’s personal tastes with beauty products vary quite a bit—but I think this oil will suit a lot of people, especially those who never thought a body oil was for them because all the products they tried before were too, for a lack of a better word, oily.
If you do end up trying it, I’d just like to say thank you. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’ve trusted us enough to let us in to your skin care routine. And secondly, I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I have.
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