It’s amazing how many people use certain products on their face but don’t really know why. That was me for a long time until I started getting interested in natural products and started asking a lot of “why’s”. I’ve started a small daily routine. It took me a long time to find a routine that was simple enough for me to stick to and effective enough for me to keep doing it but I found one that I religiously stick to. This is all it is: Cleanse, Tone and Moisturize.

We cleanse the face for pretty obvious reasons. During the day it gets dirty, even if you don’t wear make-up. Good cleansers will lift the dirt gently from the pores without disturbing the natural pH or natural oil balance of the skin too radically. This is why I’m super against soap on the face. It can clean the face but it disrupts the pH and strips all the oils on your face. This means that your face needs to try to figure out how much oil to put back on and can easily over or under-shoot. But, when you aren’t using soap, you want to ensure that the cleanser you are using is strong enough to lift the impurities and light enough that it doesn’t clog the pores. I love our cleanser and am convinced that we have the right balance of these two things for all skin types. We have a mix of castor oil to lift the dirt from the face combined with other oils and essential oils that continue to cleanse the face without clogging the pores. In fact, it’s such a nice blend that sometimes I just let hot water from the shower rinse part of the cleanser off instead of how I usually use a warm cloth to remove all the cleansing oil.

A toner was something I never really had in my skincare routine until about a year and a half ago when we started to create ours. The first questions when we decided to create this product was “why use a toner?” To be honest, neither of us really knew. The toner part of the face care routine actually has a few jobs. Toners help to clean a bit deeper into the pores, they help to restore the pH of the face, they provide some hydration to the face, they help to tighten pores AND they help to prep the skin to absorb your moisturizer. When I started using the toner in my routine, I quickly realized that it was something that I would not ever travel without. Any hormonal acne that I get is easily controlled with my toner. When I use it (especially after exfoliating,) I notice an immediate tightening of my pores. Lately, I’ve also been applying it mixed with my moisturizer as a way to suspend my serum and I find that I can use much less of my moisturizer and get the same amount of hydration with a less oily feel that natural products tend to have. We have created ours with a little bit of apple cider vinegar, floral waters, witch hazel and essential oils to pack a huge punch in a small bottle and seriously, I don’t travel without it.

Convincing people to moisturize is not hard, what is hard is finding the right moisturizer for you. We carry 4 different kinds of serums and 2 different kinds of face creams for this reason. My skin likes them all, as it’s pretty easy going, so I honestly rotate between all of our products and like each one of them for different reasons. Right now, I have gone back to our rejuvenate serum which was our original serum created specifically to combat signs of aging. It doesn’t have the infusion of herbs and botanicals or concentration of essential oils that our other serums do BUT the oils we did choose are all deeply nourishing for the skin. My favorite oil in this blend is raspberry seed oil. Because we only use a few drops of Amyris essential oil (coming from the same family as sandalwood), a mild smell of raspberry bushes pulls through when applied to the face. As mentioned before, applying moisturizers to a face that is not bone dry actually helps the moisturizer go deeper into the pores. This can be after warm water has been splashed on your face or you can try to do it with your toner. The way I do it is by spraying about 3 pumps of toner into my hand and then adding in about 10 drops of the serum before gently massaging my face and neck. I’m sure you’ll love this method as much as I do and you’ll feel like you get a lot more out our your moisturizer too!

Even though this is what I stick to daily, I also throw in some extra’s during the month to really revitalize my complexion. I find that exfoliating in the shower 1-2x a week and doing a wet mask once every 10 days is not that hard to incorporate and is definitely a little extra touch that makes a great difference. It’s crazy! I’m not the type to have ever cared about seeing signs of aging on my face but taking care of my face on a daily and weekly basis does more that just feeling as though I can keep the aging process under control. What I find happens with this routine is that I feel like I have built in a bit of time to take care of myself. It reminds me that I still have some time for me, no matter how busy I am. Plus, it just feels so good to have a fresh, clean face just like it feels so good to have clean teeth after a visit to the dentist.

It you haven’t found a great routing for your skin, I’d highly recommend trying this one. I know I said I don’t travel without my toner, but I also don’t travel without the cleanser and a moisturizer too. This 3-pack is amazing and I’m sure that you’ll be so happy to notice changes in your skin that it will quickly become your standard routine just like it did for me!