Feed Your Face

Words by Peppermint

11 April 2011

Food • Mind & Body

Don’t know about you, but we just love a good chef. But a chef who cooks up organic skincare? Well that’s just doubly special. The Beauty Chef, a.k.a. bestselling author and natural beauty expert Carla Oates, has just launched her line of commercial products – Carla Oates Beauty. Following 10 years of research and made from organic, fair-trade and sustainable food, the products let you feed your face in a whole new way.

The range features products for both external and internal use, designed to maintain the skin’s own “ecosystem”. First on the menu is a delectable probiotic powder: Inner Beauty, with a blend of ‘superfoods’ to nourish your skin starting from the inside. Next up, a luscious Coco Balm made with young coconut sourced from the South Pacific and Asia, so fresh you can almost feel the island breeze. Carla says her formulations work from the inside out by “increasing the biological value of already nutrient rich organic ingredients, offering supernatural skincare to help keep your skin healthy, radiant and resilient inside and out. I have embraced the time-honoured art of fermentation for the clever way that it naturally bio-activates nutrients in ingredients to make them more available for the body and skin to use,” she says.

With five products so far, Carla says the response has been amazing. “I’ve had a really great response from the public and beauty editors. It is a very unique concept so I’ve had a lot of interest and questions!” So what beauty tips can the chef recommend? “Eat lots of lacto-fermented foods! Eat lots of fresh organic produce and avoid refined foods, including hydrogenated oils – anything that is processed. I am a big believer that good skin begins in the gut, as this is where we manufacture nutrients, detoxifying enzymes, where 70% of the immune system lies, and also where our hormones are metabolised.” Carla also recommends incorporating fresh, organic food masks into your daily beauty routine, and you can find a bunch of delicious recipes in her book, Feeding Your Skin (Lantern, Penguin).