Transform Your Beauty Routine with Nadine Artemis

Transcript for Transform Your Beauty Routine

Dr. Cates: Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. On today’s podcast, we’re talking about renegade beauty and how to transform the way you think about beauty and your self care routine. My guest is Nadine Artemis and she is the author of two books including Renegade Beauty, Reveal and Revive Your National Radiance and Holistic Dental Care, The Complete Guide to Healthy Teeth and Gums. She is the creator of living libations as an innovative aromacologist developing immune enhancing formulas and medicinal blends for health and wellness, her healing creations, along with her concept of renegade beauty, encourage effortlessness and inspire people to rethink conventional notions of beauty and wellness. She she’s received glowing reviews from her for her work, including the Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, People, Elle, Natural Health, and the New York Times. In this interview, Nadine shares how to get back to nature and support the microbiomes of our body to help have optimal wellness and natural beauty. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Cates: Nadine its great to have you on The Spa Dr. Podcast, welcome.

Nadine Artemis: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Dr. Cates: So today we’re talking about natural radiance. I just love, I just love that. And you know, that idea, that natural beauty is so much more than what we see physically. Right. And what we do as, especially as women for our beauty routine, it can actually not really enhance beauty in the way that we want. Right. So really wanna dive into this topic with you.

Nadine Artemis: Yes. Oh, for sure. I mean, we’ve been taught to like primp and preen and poke and pluck and plus put on, you know, things with plastic in them. And so yeah, we definitely need a new relationship with our bodies and a new relationship to understanding what’s beauty, you know, for ourselves.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. So what, first of all, let’s back up for a minute. What got you interested in this?

Nadine Artemis: Well, I, you know, as a young child, I definitely had so much experience in nature. So there was that, there was this, you know, the mixing and mashing of things and mud and all of that. And I would even raid my mother’s bathroom cabinet and pour her like joy perfume in with probably, you know, things with skull and crossbones on them. I just really loved that. But it was really, uh, a sort of milestone. When I was in grade nine, I was doing a science fair project and I didn’t know what to do it on, but I was at the library and a book, you know, kind of fell out of the shelf and it was about making cosmetics but it was geared towards a younger audience. It was really easy to understand. And you know, my being the youngest in the family, my bathroom at all the bottle hand me downs from my mother and sister and I just, there was something I really loved about that.

Nadine Artemis: And even at that age I was like mixing the perfumes together. I’d gotten away from a skull and crossbones. And the chapter on perfumery was fascinating and it really, you know, this is before the internet, it really contextualized the history of perfume where they came from, that it was actually distilled from plants because back then it was just that bottle. It had no connection to, well and really what’s in that bottle doesn’t really have a connection to plants. So I love that and it talks about this thing called essential oils and that that was the modern day word for what they were and you could probably find them at health food stores. So we drove into the big city to the health food store and there I was smelling for the first time like you know, the first whiffs of like orange and a for that project I recreated L’Air Du Temps using natural essential oils.

Nadine Artemis: And that was really fun. And then we had, you know, and then I really was into, for some reason I had just the bottles. I just, and I gave my girlfriends makeovers or I would crush the white Christian Dior eyeshadow into the Crabtree and Evelyn lip balm you know, so I was just mixing all the time. And then, you know, the body shop was around and I thought, oh, that was natural. But then when I’m off at university, I’m 18 and I’m understanding really for the first time too like more about food and actually skipped school one day and Lisa Benet was on on a show talking about how food is hooked up to the environment and health. And it was just really mind opening because this, again, this was early on, it’s not like it was today.

Nadine Artemis: And then just through that I understood. And there was a health food store I walked by every day there was a farmer’s market. So I just really started to understand about food and that the supermarket was filled with fake food and you know, kind of like five companies really supplied all the food and all that kind of stuff. So that was really exciting and I really understood what to eat and how to read labels. And I was making all my own food. And then I was just like, it really felt like in the course of a couple months I was just like, wait, what am I putting on my body? How am I reading those labels? And then really coming to understand that this sort of petroleum promise land of products was just just dressed in like sort of, you know, the greener label, but what was in it was still a lot of BS. And so I purge that all and I just really, I began making my own, you know, lip balms and put them in recycled like film cases.

Nadine Artemis: And I was making things like waitress legs for all my friends that were waitressing to help with the varicose veins and all of that. And I just found that whole realm so fascinating. So as I was going through university, and that was nice too because at university I was really, you know, we had textbooks like Our Bodies Ourselves and understanding like really the crazy history of women’s bodies in Western society, you know, or around the globe and really cosmetics coming into that and like reading books, like the Beauty Myth and really just seeing like, you know, the history, especially our modern history of just this century of, you know, how all of our insecurities have been sort of exacerbated or you know, made up or whatever to just feed in these cosmetics that were really damaging to us. And so from that moment forward, making my own formulas.

Nadine Artemis: And then I was obsessed with ingredients because I was smelling and I was reading books. I love the 18th century period of cosmetic books because they were reaching back into the ancients to understand those recipes. And in the 18th century, were on the cusp before synthetics were made. So I love that period in history for cosmetics. And yes, so I would smell things like Immortelle or Angelica and I had to find them. So then I wrote letters like crazy cause again there was no internet and you know, getting distillers and farmers and then getting in samples. And even things that seem commonplace like a tea tree or a bergamot, were completely different and really blowing my mind or my nose. And then I was understanding about the falseness with essential oils in the food and flavor industry and that so many of these ingredients were just sort of from warehouses in New Jersey. And so just understanding all the layers. And then I graduated in like six months later I’d opened up North America’s first full concept aroma therapy store and had all my formulas out and that was the beginning of the present time.

Dr. Cates: That’s fantastic. Yeah. And so I mean there are a lot of parts that you touched on there. There’s food, there’s essential oils, there’s even just how we perceive beauty. And there’s different layers to this. I mean, I think let’s talk about how we perceive beauty. And I know there are these books that you’re talking about. And I remember reading those too. And when the beauty myth came out, I remember being fascinated by that book and, was so relieved to see that. AndI think it was like in, I want to say middle school, high school or something and I probably high school but I remember that and being so relieved that that book came out because, you know, here I am at this, you know, as a teenager looking at magazines and comparing myself and, you know, what is this concept of beauty? What is beautiful?

Nadine Artemis: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Looking at all the magazines, I actually would, people like we got to stop, we have to stop, you know, bringing those images into our brains.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. Because of the, kind of the damage it does and the world of social media where everybody posts their perfect pictures and the digital world, we had a bad picture. We just delete it.

Nadine Artemis:   If only we saw the other 50 shots to get the one.

Dr. Cates: Right. I mean it’s, you know, it is definitely something that I think we all know to a certain extent at this point, but it’s nice to have a reminder and that it nice to know that there are other people out there that realize that there’s something more to beauty than what you might see in a magazine.

Nadine Artemis: Right? Yes. And also I think when we’re just in the world of surface, cause of course it sounds so hallmark or whatever cliched, like the beauty comes from within. It does. But you know, we’re so bombarded with the surface, with the veneer like to insane amounts that we really have to like step back and deconstruct that and also, you know, and become free of it a bit because, you know, we’re not going to get well what we think we want by just focusing on the veneer of it all. And you know, that’s like, that’s a game that you’re not gonna win because you’ll be 30 and a wrinkle will come. You know, and then your life’s going to be over. So we have to get a little more resilient and a little more understanding that it’s coming from the inside out, which again sounds like a cliche and that diet would affect it, but it does.

Nadine Artemis: And then also I think because beauty has so become this thing that’s in a bottle, you know, like that’s, I feel like it’s just is like beauty is something that you can shop for and that you’ll find the solutions in the bottle yet it’s this sort of dangling carrot on a stick because it’s like never fully realized and it’s like completely in the realm of like being idealized. And so when we know it’s not coming from a bottle of lifeless liquid of petroleum, you know, I mean back in the ancient days or not, well ancient ish, you know, everything that was applied to the body was like, you know, like tinctured from trees or pressed from pedals and it was real and perfume was medicine. There’s literally like words for that. Like thymectomy in ancient Greece is literally like letting perfume be your medicine.

Nadine Artemis: There was no division because it was seen as one in the same and in many cultures the perfumists were also the priests, so to speak, they were the medicine people and the religious people. And there was a real understanding that we are a part of the cosmos. So I like to think in terms of “cosmo”etics, which is rejoining ourselves and we are already a part of creation, but just not having that false separation and that and just knowing that, you know, it’s from the cosmos that we would reveal and revive our inner radiance, for example. That’s how we’re going to get an inner glow, you know, and whether it’s from the earth where we’re eating and then getting the botanicals to put on our skin or engaging with the sun, the element of the sun or the element of pure water or fresh air. Like you know, we’re wrapped up in polyester clothing, applying petroleum products, showering in chlorine and eating GMOs. And that’s not how you’re going to be radiant when you’re 80

Dr. Cates: Right. Or even 30. Exactly. Yeah. It’s, it’s catching up with us cause we’re exposed to these toxins, these endocrine disrupting chemicals and other toxic ingredients more now than we ever have been. And our air, water, food and personal care products. So it is essential for us and we’re starting to see it in our worlds health, right? The amount of diseases, and the shift and, these chronic diseases becoming more prevalent like thyroid disease or certain types of cancers and obesity, diabetes, you know, these that are, a lot of them are associated with these toxic exposures that we have. So, you know, we talk about like you’re talking about, I love what you’re talking about. It’s really getting back to nature, right. To get it back to you know, natural beauty. What better way to say natural beauty comes from nature, right? So we, we get back in touch with our, what’s natural with our bodies by looking at nature. And I know you talk a lot like in your books about, about the microbiome and then it’s really helping us get back to nature. And I think a lot of disease too has happened because of our, the dysbiosis that we’ve put our bodies into throughout our bodies. So I’d love to hear what you think about that as well.

Nadine Artemis: Yes, completely. And the microbiome, you know, like many people have said, it’s kind of like the soil of our bodies and like this, you know, especially with our guts and as you know, we have the gut microbiome. The skin microbiome is a huge microbiome system, the oral microbiome, and for women, the vaginal microbiome is really important to have healthy too. But within all that realm of just what we do for beauty with cosmetics, it can disrupt all of those microbiomes. And as we engage with nature, I like to think of that as like, we can step back a bit and we can allow our bodies and our body’s natural systems to activate and to take care of us. And we really even, you know, as a mother, as a woman as so many women are just, you know, doing it all. We have to really find what nurtures us.

Nadine Artemis: And, and for me that answer seems to be nature because that’s the thing, taking care of all of us. And so knowing our place in that and our relationship with that and understanding the microbiome so that we can let the bacteria be our beauticians, you know, allowing the body systems to come rather than us just like scrubbing and over exfoliating and thinking the beauty is going to come out that way. In the meantime, not only is that not engaging our true nature in selves, it’s literally disrupting the micro microbiome. We’re mutating species, we’re creating things like melasma. I mean there’s this thing of beauty type, which is really just hype and was, you know, formulated by cosmetics manufacturers in the fifties and as a marketing tool. And the thing is, all of those things like melasma, acne, blemishes, dandruff, hormonal acne, you know, all those things that we have going on with patchy skin, all of that, those aren’t skin type issues.

Nadine Artemis: Those are all microbiome issues. And that’s what we have to understand. So we can’t just keep applying things that are disturbing that like one thing is so they now understand it creates like synthetic surfactants, cause microscopic splinters in the skin. They just stay in the stratum corneum and they don’t leave after rinsing. So we have this daily, yearly build up of, for example, that, not to mention a methylparaben or something that we’re, you know, applying every day. And then you could be showering in chlorine and then we’re just getting this buildup that we can’t escape from. And then things may show up on your face, but we don’t think it’s related. Right. Cause we’ll be been washing our face like that for decades. And so we want to just, you know, understand some of that stuff. Simplify and not the applying 200 chemicals a day to our body in the name of beauty.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, absolutely. So then the next step that a lot of people would go to then is conventional dermatology where they’re applying a topical steroids they are using antibiotics, birth control pills and here you’re just adding fuel to the fire of, not only not addressing the root cause, but worsening it.

Nadine Artemis: Oh my. Yeah. So anything like you’re mentioning the topical cortisones or antibiotics, I mean, any skin therapy should really keep the skin’s microbiome in mind, not be further disrupting it. And so yeah, a lot of people get in a really vicious cycle of, like from their regular beauty routines going, hey, why you’re going to the dermatologist maybe something’s changing for a month. And then they’re hitting that same wall again. And it’s usually like worse. And some of the side effects, which I’m sure you’re well, like, you know, for the cortisones and stuff, it’s like, you know, pregnancy issues, and infertility issues. It’s pretty intense.

Dr. Cates: Right? You know a lot of the skin issues that you talked about and you think about like, I was in Uganda last year and but when do you see that these skin issues. I mean, all these women that we were visiting that none of them had skin problems. That wasn’t the problem they were experiencing. They had other issues. But yeah, their skin was just beautiful and they weren’t having issues. And I’m sure they weren’t applying sunscreen everyday either. Well, and, you know, so we really have created this ourselves. And I was at an integrative dermatology symposium last year and they were talking about how we’ve created a lot of this stuff ourselves. And that, you know, giving antibiotics the way that we’ve been giving antibiotics and treating our patients, we need to step back and think, how can we do things differently? And so it’s, I think the conversations are really starting to happen. They’re not, you know, global and huge, but they’re happening on a small level. And so we’re starting to see, I like to see that there’s hope and a shift in the way that we’re thinking. So let’s talk about some of the things that people can do to help support their microbiome that you learned that really helped.

Nadine Artemis: Ihave this, the thing I wrote about in my book called stop sealing seed and you can kind of apply that to different areas, whether it’s the oral microbiome or the skin and, or even the vaginal. So stop is like stopping the microbiome disruptors. So stop applying petroleum jelly. I mean, whatever petroleum based products it cause there’s petroleum in products and there’s about 40 derivatives. You know, stop showering in chlorine get a shower filter. Like, you know, even if it’s just like that $20 one, it will improve. So we want to do the things that are, stop doing the things that are disrupting. And then sealing is when we look at sealing and healing the skin, you know, and if it was a gut situation, you’d stop eating GMOs and gluten for example. And then to seal, you’d start working with probiotics, prebiotics, fermented foods to seal the gut.

Nadine Artemis: And so for the skin it’s about, you know, rethinking all those dermatological peels, rethinking, you know, using things with chemicals like oxybenzene in the sunscreen or harsh alcohols for acne. Just stop grooming your body with chemicals and then sealing, so using things like, you know, natural oils to heal and seal the skin to regenerate the hydro lipid barrier to like calm the stratum corneum. And then seed is about reseeding area. So I like to think of our bodies as this sort of microbial bank account and we want to have like diverse investments of different species. And so we can reseed, you know, our guts, we can reseed our oral environment. We can swish with prebiotics and probiotics. We can use things like honey on our skin, which are prebiotics. You can even add a probiotic to a honey. Put that in your mask, let that sit for a while and then rinse it off. So there’s those three things of like stopping the habits that are doing it. Sealing and seeding.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, I love that. And you know, we’ve been talking a lot in the health world about leaky gut and now some attention about leaky skin. And so you’re, what you’re talking about is so important is how do we, now that the damage is done, which really with, you know, just typical lifestyle practices that you’re going to have damage done. So how do we reverse that? How do we restore that and heal that to help the body behave the way it’s supposed to when it’s in a healthy state? And so healing the gut lining and healing the gut, getting it back in balance, healing leaky gut, healing leaky skin too of that barrier function of our skin. How do we get that protection back to our skin? And like you said, it’s stopped using all the toxic ingredients, the ones that, that are toxic for your body overall, but also for your microbiome and that protection.

Dr. Cates: And then what can we do to, what are those restorative things that we can do to put on topically as well as internally with the gut. I mean I think it’s so important. And then you know, you mentioned, so I want to talk, cause we talk a lot on The Spa Dr. Podcast, we talk a lot about the gut and the skin and that connection. But you also know a lot about the oral health and vaginal health and the microbiome of that, which we don’t really, we haven’t really talked about much.

Nadine Artemis: Yeah. So the all connected and you know, the oral and the yoni, the vaginal microbiome, they have this very thin skin. It’s the epithelium. And so it’s one cell thick. So, you know, leaky gums I think of as bleeding gums. And that’s coming from, you know, our toothpastes with triclosan, which has been banned in hand soap, not toothpaste. And studies show that in the antibacterial hand soap cleanser stuff. It actually, of course, makes your resistance to superbugs lower because it’s devastating the microbiome when your microbiome is your immune system, not the triclosan. But anyway yeah, so we’re brushing with all this stuff. We’re using like a synthetic alcohol mouthwashes, which show to have over 36,000 cases of oral cancer a year. You know, not to mention, you know, the foods we eat that are, or the dental protocols of like, you know, a root canal or mercury in the mouth.

Nadine Artemis: All of that stuff’s gonna mess with the mouths microbiome. Not to mention like an antibiotic mouthwash. And what we’re understanding now, which is good about, we’re really understanding antibacterial, I mean antibiotic resistance. So it’s helping us, it’s, you know, it’s helping the dermatologist go, oh, wait a minute and it’s helping us find other answers. But we also know they’re not always that effective. And so not all antibiotics converse through the biofilms, for example. But for re-healing the mouth, when we look at botanicals and using essential oils and different extracts that we’ve been using for thousands of years, like tea tree, you know, in different cultures, frankincense, tea tree, neem, myrrh, all of those things, we now have the modern science to understand why those plants have been used and what their understanding is that these plants have quorum sensing inhibitors so that they’re actually able to suppress the quorum sensing of pathogens.

Nadine Artemis: Pathogens are normally like free floating around the body like plankton. And then when they quorum sense, that’s their way of communicating and then getting in little gangs and then becoming stronger and stronger. And then what these plants do, are able to do is break up that quorum sensing, not have the gene expression in the communication and they’re able to bust through the biofilms. They’re able to clean up the pathogens, but work with the friendly bacteria. So they’re really some ideal substances for taking care of the mouth. And so then we can understand how they work for the skin as well. And so we just have to rethink about how we are taking care of our mouths. But simply just switching to something like baking soda, like that alone, you can add some to water and swish, get a quick alkalinizing of the mouth and then you can put a little pinch on your toothbrush and you do it that way.

Nadine Artemis: I mean I do make a whole range of oral care products, but it’s literally you don’t have to do that if you just went to baking soda and ditched everything from the drug store and did that for the rest of your life. Maybe use a bit of sea salt sometimes your mouth would be in just so much better condition. So that’s also we have to know it doesn’t have to be that complicated. And it certainly, again, not caring for a part of our body with chemicals. And with the vaginal microbiome, you know it’s a similar story. And what we’re now understanding is that things like not just a yeast infection, cause that could kind of maybe be an obvious example of a microbiome off balance, but it can, a microbiome off balance in that area can lead to things like infertility. That could literally be the reason why somebody is experiencing infertility.

Nadine Artemis: You know, it may not be hormonal and that complicated. Or it can create preterm birth. Or a gum recession and a microbiome off balance in the mouth can even lead to a premature birth. There’s that understanding as well. And so we want to care for our yonis in a new way too. And not the ads for the yoni care throughout the ages are insane. You know, it started out with using Lysol as a douche. Yeah. Google those early ads. They’re horrifying on so many levels. And then, well, that caused some deaths and irritation. So then Lysol was like, hey, we’re a little less toxic. So Lysol had its time as a douche as well. But then there’s you know, from the, from the 60s where it was like women’s lib to have a clean vagina by douching you know, anyway, so to present time.

Nadine Artemis: So all of those things are complete microbiome disruptors in that area. And even things like a KY jelly where you would think it kind of seems simple and a little less like a little natural in a way. It’s just clear gel and it’s glycerine. But what studies show is that it creates osmolarity within the cell. So that just simply means the cell will then it feels the water on the outside of the gel and then it releases its water. So the cells under a microscope in the vagina that’s had a lot of KY jelly usage they shrivel. They’re like, they called them like cellular raisins and then that creates a whole die off and then make somebody even more susceptible to STDs, for example. So the whole program down there and then adding in a GMO chlorine bleached tampon, you know, that’s a toxic mix. And so again, we want to stop, find an organic tampon or whatever. And you know, I, I actually even advise like if you can just go organic, use the underwear or a pad and not put anything up there, you know, that’s been made by manufactured. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Cates: Well and there are also some natural personal lubricants and different types of things that people can use too, so they don’t have to use the KY. Yeah, yeah. Like coconut oil and even just coconut oil. Right. Yeah. Well it’s, you know, so fascinating. We could go on and on, on these topics that you, you have a couple of books on these topics. So tell everybody about your books and where they can find them.

Nadine Artemis: Yeah, thanks. Well I wrote Holistic Dental Care, which is all on dental care and it’s a good friendly read and it will really give you the kind of the 101 on how to take care of your mouth. And then I recently wrote Renegade Beauty, which is, got everything in there. So you can even start with that. Cause my dental chapter in there is pretty decent and you could just buy the one book. But yeah, we walkthrough that and how to engaged with the, you know, with the cosmos, with the elements. And then it goes on a journey from, you know, breast health, vaginal care, the skin’s microbiome, a chapter on pregnancy, a chapter on perfumery, modern alchemy recipes, and then sort of like an eight like Renegade beauty solutions, which take you through a really quick thing from, you know, from acne to, skin brushing like lymph, like all the little things at the end to tie it off. I just, and that book, I really was like wanting to download my whole brain, everything I knew so far so that I could share that.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. Well, thank you for doing that work. And I do think this is the time for women to reclaim our bodies, our health, and we have a lot of tools and information and we have a lot more available to us than we used to have. And, so I think it’s an exciting time with a lot of opportunity. And I think we just need to keep demanding more and more of it and, and we’ll see it all unfold. I think it’s going to be a beautiful thing to see.

Nadine Artemis: For sure. And, it’s 2019 so it’s like, you know, you don’t have to give up all the glamour. Like there’s, so there’s a botanical banquet that’s just like waiting for everyone to nurture their bodies.

Dr. Cates: Right. So like we’re not saying give up self care, right, don’t give up your beauty routine, just change your beauty routine. Because when I think of beauty, routine is a beautiful part of self care. And it can be a very self honoring and healthy practice too incorporate.

Nadine Artemis: And when we do it with the things that can nourish ourselves and our microbiome, you know, then it’s so worth it.

Dr. Cates: And essential oils are such a great part of that. Right?

Nadine Artemis: Yeah. They really can be. You want to definitely have real, genuine, authentic ones. But yeah, I mean there’s so many. There’s just such a pallet of them like there are all these medicinal aspects, but then they’re also just the, through their smell, they just really talk to all of the senses and work on an emotional, spiritual level as well.

Dr. Cates: All right, well that’s fantastic. Nadine, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Really appreciate your information and sharing your story with us.

Nadine Artemis: Thank you so much.

Dr. Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Nadine Artemis and if you want to learn more about her, you can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with her interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there I invite you to join The Spa Dr. Community so you don’t miss any upcoming shows and information. Also, if you haven’t gotten your customized skin report, you can go to theskinquiz.com find out your skin personality type and what information your skin is trying to tell you about your health, what you can do about it at theskinquiz.com. Also, I invite you to join me on social media, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest at The Spa Dr. and join the conversation there and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.