Vivesana announces its newest retail partner, the Hippocrates Health Institute of West Palm Beach.

Standing apart as one of the most prominent wellness centers in the country, the Institute embodies many of ideals Vivesana strives to meet. Live Healthy!

We encourage all to give what they can to help. For our part, Vivesana will donate at least 50% of online sales to Haiti relief via Doctors without Borders from January 14-20.

Basking in Sunny Praise: Where to Begin?

We’re blushing.  We’ve received scores – possibly hundreds – of reviews those with the most discerning eyes of all – the bloggers.

Here are just a few notable examples of the blogs and websites that have given their thoughts.

We’ll keep posting the reviews as we find ‘em.  Click on any of the links below to see what the experts have to say…

Ideal Bite, The Style Page, Livestrong, Beauty News NYC, The Greenists, Babble, Baby Gadget, Mamaista, Cool Mom Picks, Treehugger, Quiskaeya, Mogul Baby, Nonchalant Mom, Totsnob, Smorgasbite, Beauty Snob, Re-Nest, DKmommyspot, Green Blog, Sustainability Digest, This Full House, Green Goddess Dressing, FindBuzz.com

Webster’s dictionary defines “natural” as “being in accordance with or determined by nature.” Ok, pretty straightforward.

Of course, nothing’s ever simple. This is an oxymoronic world we live in, where the Environmental Protection Agency takes the side of corporations and sues states for protecting the environment, and coal calls itself clean. The trick to finding natural products is resisting natural self-descriptions, branding and marketing…even when they put trees and bushes in their logo.

The proof is in the pudding. Just look at the ingredients. Products must list ingredients in descending order by volume and must provide specific terminology. Exceptions include ingredients present in very small amounts and fragrances, which may be described as “fragrances”. Helpful. We simply don’t buy products that say “fragrances”, and opt for those that spell out what that means.

So, if you see octyl dodecanol or dimethicone silicone on there, we suggest that you put that product right back on the shelf. Instead, look for a products with labels that start and finish with ingredients like sunflower, green tea, and avocado. Ingredients you can pronounce. Ingredients you can cook with!

We see it everywhere. Our friends going green. The local dry cleaner going green. Celebrities going green. Even some unlikely converts…oil companies going green? Really? What’s next, the coal industry goes green? Actually, there is the clean coal campaign…

It’s a great thing to see a trend toward something positive. It’s empowering that we can make dirty companies do their best to look clean and green. But it’s crucial that the movement doesn’t let up. And it’s important to be sure that clean and green is more than a tagline.

Quotes like (do your best Pepe Le Pew accent for this) “If the consumer wants organic products, we will give them organic products…” leave one to wonder how deep the commitment lies.

Are these companies that are built on sustainable, green principles? Who knows. But we say keep up the pressure. Use your purchasing power. Eventually, sustainable, responsible corporate practices will be the normal course of business. Some day, it’ll be “we give them organic because it’s better for people and better for the planet.”

We love it when restaurants open their kitchens up. Not only is it fun to watch the pros in action, it’s a good sign when a place feels confident enough in their ingredients and practices to pull back the curtain. No corner cutting, no unswept corners, no dirty tricks!

Skin care is not so different. You feed your skin the same way fill your stomach. But when it comes to skin care, as consumers, we always felt like we were flying blind. Who knows what’s inside the pretty packages. Is it all made in an industrial vat somewhere? Maybe we’d read too many scary headlines.So, we pulled back our own curtain. Our products are our babies – we couldn’t be prouder of them, and we’re more than happy to share every last detail! Skin care consumers finally get an open kitchen of their own…What does all this mean? It means we’ll tell you not just what are ingredients are and what they do, we’ll tell where they came from. We’ll tell you where our packaging is made and how. We welcome comments. No more guessing…

Good question. Better answer. Sana removed water from its formulations for two giant reasons. First, topically applied water as a skin care treatment is a red herring…see how long it lasts on your skin without a proper barrier. Fact is, topically applied water does not provide any lasting benefit to your skin. But practically every other skin care product out there is mostly water. What gives? Not our business, but here’s a tip: check the latest price for water. Sana does not believe in cutting corners with fillers. Water needs to be in your skin, not on it.

Second, water is where microbes live. It’s true. Water is a wonderful, vital element that we would not last long without. But it’s filled with bacteria, germs and other critters. Especially standing water. Anytime it sits for a period of time, the little guys are going to find it. It’s not so different in skin care. Water may be an excellent way to stretch a product, but it’s also the main reason synthetic preservatives (and synthetic emulsifiers) are necessary. Take the filler out, and suddenly there’s nowhere for microbes to grow.didn’t stop there, but removing water is the single biggest leap.

It’s just like cooking – once you start cutting corners with unnecessary ingredients, you need to start balancing them, and before you know it, the “recipe” has gotten away from you. It’s first principles for Sana: stick with ingredients that directly benefit skin. What does it mean for you? 100% natural, synthetic-free products that go all the way toward beautiful, healthy skin.

It’s easy to trumpet a couple of fancy naturals or organics, while packing a product with the same old chemicals. Sana is different. It wasn’t born on Madison Avenue or cooked up in a vat in New Jersey. Why? Because it’s important to us, and we figure it’s important to you, that products are safe and healthy, top to bottom. Between bio-accumulation, slippery labeling, and the lack of adequate research regarding certain technologies or synthetics, deciding to find a way to remove all synthetics was not a tough call.

But what about that extra step from natural to organic. Necessary, or just branding?

Let’s look at the four legs of the table (we love our food imagery!):

Safety: In order to be certified organic by the USDA, an ingredient must comply with a whole range of safety and sustainability standards far above conventional standards. Common pesticides with documented toxic or carcinogenic properties frequently make their way into our food and personal care products. A recent study showed the average baby has over 200 industrial synthetics in their system at birth. Even where present in trace amounts, many of these pesticides bio-accumulate , meaning they can add up to cause more serious problems. Organic ingredients are, by definition, produced without dangerous pesticides.

Quality: Greater care is taken in organic farming and it generally shows in the quality. There is not a separate certification process for skin care, so in order to be used in Sana’s products, ingredients must meet food grade organic quality. Which, frankly, is how it should be. Skin care and food both become part of you!

Environment: Organics are grown in a far more environmentally friendly manner. Agro-business is a major contributor to soil, water and air contamination, as well as to global warming. Studies have shown people growing up near agro-farms have far greater concentrations of toxic industrial synthetics. The energy used to produce pesticides and conduct large scale conventional farming consumes as much energy each year as all the cars in America. Organics are another way.

Philosophy: Supporting organic farming means supporting small family-based farms rather than huge conglomerates. It means healthier products and a healthier Earth. It promotes a culture of sustainability and respect for the land. It’s what Sana chooses.

Skin care is tough.
The first priority has to be protecting against UV radiation. But more so than in other areas of skin care, that function comes with a cost. The overwhelming majority of sunscreens on the market have synthetics that raise concern (and that goes double for mothers and babies), and use a new, unlabeled and understudied technology.
What are the synthetics and what do they do? A bunch of them, like Benzophenone, Homosalate, and Octyl-methocycinnamate (aka Occinate) are endocrine disrupters. Broadly, that means they affect the normal flow of hormones from glands; in this case, those synthetics have been shown to have estrogenic effect and to bio-accumulate. Bio-accumulation, which means a given material sticks in the body, accumulating over time, is particularly worrisome for babies and children.

Sunscreens also frequently use nanotechnology, an approach that allows particles to permeate the skin barrier and enter the bloodstream. It’s an area we know little about.

Finally, like most skin care products, most sunscreen are full of any number of synthetic preservatives, like parabens, and other “inactive” chemicals, like phthalates. And of course, many are packaged in materials that leach BPA.

Sana, in case you haven’t noticed, has none of those chemicals, doesn’t employ nanotechnology, and provides the best protection on the market. It doesn’t have to be a give and take…

No, we’re not talking about short days, shoveling the walk, or the morning commute. We’re talking about the atmospheric humidity which, together with sauna-like indoor heating, can bring humidity levels as low as 5-10%. And what happens to skin not accustomed to such conditions? It struggles to keep up by building its barrier, but that adaptation can take a while, and often gums up the whole system.

There is a cascading impact that ripples through the skin’s infrastructure when there’s not enough moisture. The lipid layers stall, the normally plump skin cells flatten and create fissures. The shedding process, which is dependent on water, stops functioning, so that dead cells stay stuck in the skin’s surface, and then break off in scaly chunks. Cracks in the skin make it more vulnerable to germs and permeation of all kinds of things. The skin can usually adapt over time, but in the meantime, it’s not a pretty (or healthy) picture.

Sana works by helping the skin do its thing. Give skin support in adverse conditions, and it’s amazing how beautiful and healthy it’ll stay. Dry, damaged skin often develops because the natural barrier is compromised, or because the barrier simply can’t adapt quickly enough to external stressors, like dry air, sun, or stretching.

So what is Sana’s answer? We chose the organic botanicals and extracts best suited to support skin when it needs help. Why? Because those botanicals mimic natural lipids, waxes and anti-oxidants in your skin. Evolutionarily, plants have been at it for millions of years – a lot longer than people have – which starts to explain their remarkable array of defenses to moisture loss, oxidation, and external contaminants.
We don’t rely on synthetics for a host of health and environmental reasons. But even from a functional perspective, we’d rather start from scratch. Synthetics are often just cheap derivatives of the real thing. In some cases, synthetic skin care ingredients act by altering the chemistry of the skin. Every day we learn new things about the mystery of skin and its –and the body’s – reactions to synthetics. We’d rather help skin do its thing, naturally.
Skin hydration is the single most important thing for overall skin health. Naturally supporting the skin’s barrier, while nourishing and anti-oxidizing, is what Sana is all about…

Warning: tanning is not fully understood, so take the following with a grain of salt. Wearing sunglasses makes sunburns more likely. Why? Light hitting the optic nerve signals the pituitary gland to produce melanin – the body’s main defense against burning. It’s also what makes you look tan. Sunglasses, in effect, trick our bodies. The optic nerve registers less light and thus the pituitary gland produces less melanin…meaning less of a defense, less of a tan, and more vulnerability to burning.Of course, it’s also theorized that melanin production is triggered by UV rays hitting deeper layers of the skin….and it may be a combination of the causes.
In any case, it’s important to protect your eyes from UV radiation. Don’t discard the glasses, just think about taking them off for a minute or two every once in while. You might get the best of both worlds: a better tan and better protection.

Water may be the sine qua non of healthy skin, but hanging out in water causes all kinds of problems. Why? Sitting in water strips your skin of essential oils necessary for your barrier to function properly…meaning putting water on actually sucks water out. Add chlorine or saltwater to the equation, and it gets more serious still. Not only does it dry your skin, it makes it more permeable. Why? For one, with the protective lipids effectively stripped, moisture is now traveling back and forth through your skin. Add to that the fact that water is a primary breeding ground for microbes. There’s a reason you get athletes foot in the locker room: moisture makes your skin more permeable, and standing water is chock full of microbes.

OK, so hanging in water is dehydrating and makes skin more vulnerable to infection and absorption. Anything else? Uh huh. Spending time in water makes your skin more prone to injury. Skin cells swell with water, essentially begging to be burst. Not done yet. Showering after swimming usually exacerbates the lipid stripping problem, especially if you’ve been in chlorine. And if you’re using an alkaline soap, it may further impede the anti-microbial function in your acid mantle. By now, the protective coating has been significantly compromised. Rough towel drying, a form of exfoliation, is not good for compromised skin. All of which suggests might want a good, barrier supporting moisturizer, sunscreen and lip balm, products without permeating synthetics and that are water resistant. Where to find such a set of products?

Skin replenishes itself all the time. Water travels through the skin layers from the bottom up, and skin cells do the same. Over the course of a few weeks skin cells rise from the bottom layers, eventually forming the bricks at the surface, before eventually shedding invisibly off the skin. It is essential for healthy, vibrant skin to replace the old with the new. When we exfoliate, we are giving the shedding process (also called desquamation) an extra push. Just be careful not to push too hard…gentle exfoliation is a good thing, aggressive exfoliation can cause skin trauma.

The shedding process is not just about making skin look good. The dead cells can be filled with toxins. Desquamation is a form of detoxifying your skin. And it’s one more reason to drink water…it doesn’t just flush your fluids, it flushes your skin by making sure the cells shed properly!

It’s all about water. When the skin loses too much water – either because the barrier is compromised or simply can’t keep up with its environment – the skin is in trouble in more ways than one. Ever wonder about ashy, scaly skin? That happens because the skin stops shedding properly without water. Pliability? The lipid layers need moisture to function. Physical barrier? Cracks and fissures form when there’s not enough moisture at the surface, allowing even more moisture to evaporate and more contaminants to get in. Germ-Killing? Even the anti-microbial function of the skin is compromised when there isn’t enough water.

It’s not that tough to stop. Just drink water and feed your barrier.

Swimming strips skin of sunscreen and essential oils. Sweat exacerbates burning, and sunglasses may impede the skin’s natural defenses. UVB rays deplete NMF from skin cells, drying skin out. And dry skin creates risks of infection, and improper shedding. Skin doesn’t look or feel good and your body is at risk.

And frankly, that’s just the beginning. Cross training can implicate a whole range of issues. The keys are keeping the barrier strong, keeping skin hydrated, and protecting it from UV rays. And that’s where Sana comes in…

BPA is all over the American marketplace. It makes plastic clear, strong and shatter-proof. You’ll find it in the liners of most metal soda and food cans, as well as polycarbonate bottles (including baby and water bottles).

BPA is an endocrine disrupter. It mimics estrogen and may result in adverse, long term reactions and reproductive damage. Studies have shown negative impact on thyroid glands, the brain, the pancreas and prostate glands in animals, even in low doses.

Unfortunately, babies are particularly at risk, due to a variety of factors including their developmental vulnerability, BPA’s presence in baby bottles and infant formula containers, and the fact that BPA bio-accumulates. It leaches out of containers and can collect in fetal and placental tissue.

Responsible companies like Whole Foods and Patagonia have removed BPA from their packaging. New companies should avoid it in the first place. Sana does.

Your skin is a wall, but it’s not made of concrete. It’s designed to retain most of the skin’s moisture and to keep most external contaminants out. Most, but not all. The skin releases some moisture to keep the outer layers hydrated, to cool skin down when the body is overheating (AKA, sweating), and it sheds moisture-carrying skin cells all the time. It also absorbs moisture from the outside world.
This semi-permeable system is effective, but there are risks. There’s lots of bad stuff out there – some of which is in the very products people rub on their skin to make it look or feel better. Some synthetics permeate the skin’s barrier and go right into the body, where they can stay put. Take sunscreen chemicals – a recent study showed levels of estrogen-like sunscreen chemicals in the blood stream and umbilical cord of people. Other studies have shown the average American has hundreds of synthetics in their bloodstream, many of which got there through topical application.
The point? It’s very important to pay attention to what you put on your skin. That goes double for mothers and babies, who are at particular risk for permeation and systemic damage. It means people should pay particular care in certain areas of their bodies, where skin is thinner or there are mucous membranes (like lips). They should keep their eyes out for nanoparticles (found in many skin care products and in particular in sunscreen), which are designed to permeate the barrier. Fortunately, Sana makes it easier.

Ominous synthetics roaming the skin care landscape…mysterious chemicals with disputed toxicity or even carcinogenicity remaining unregulated on store shelves. How this could be? Maybe the risks are overblown. Maybe in such small amounts they’re not really harmful. Surely if it were that bad, the FDA or someone would step in.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The US system puts most of the burden on consumers to inform themselves about risks. Of course, accessing relevant information is next to impossible, let alone practical. The system of regulation is lax, under-enforced, painfully slow, and ultimately insufficient. Is the Government forcing manufacturers to adhere to strict labeling guidelines so consumers can make informed decisions? Is it monitoring the packaging coming from China or analyzing products before they hit the shelves? Is it banning ingredients that have some evidence of toxicity or carcinogenicity, even where banned the world over? No, no, and in many cases, no.

There are independent sources out there that are helping. Visit the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database of cosmetics or go to the NRDC’s site for environmental and health issues. Sana has condensed relevant information about the most commonly found risk items: Phthalates, Parabens, Bisphenol A (BPA), Endocrine Disrupting Sunscreen agents, as well as related issues like bio-accumulation, infant susceptibility, and nanotechnology. Hope it helps.

What’s it mean? In the skin care arena, it generally relates to the accumulation of certain substances in the body over time. In order for something to accumulate, of course, it has to stay in the body and not get flushed out. Many synthetics in skin care, unfortunately, do stick around. While companies get away with trace amounts of toxic synthetics in their products, those trace amounts can add up.

A 2004 EWG study looked at industrial chemicals in babies and umbilical cord blood. It found 287 industrial synthetics. The average baby in the study carried over 200 industrial chemicals. Many of those chemicals likely came from pesticides on the inorganic food we eat. Others came from skin care.

Of the 287 industrial synthetics, over 200 are potentially toxic, carcinogenic or may cause defects. Others have impacts we don’t yet know. We do know that things like low birth weight, type 2 diabetes, low sperm counts, breast cancer, and early onset of female puberty, among other related health issues, are on the rise.

Advice? Eat organic and local if you can. Filter your water, and stay away from fish high on the food chain. Use synthetic-free, organic personal products.