Comfortable in Your Skin: About & Beyond Skin Food
Connecting with the Spirit of Sandalwood
Balbec’s second vibrational fragrance explores frequencies of benevolent connection. In such a fragrance sandalwood (Santal album) would ideally find its place. It is warm, grounding, and expansive in the base chord, and the wood note is also a tenacious fixative in the realm of natural perfumery where ephemeral sillage can be a challenge. However here sandalwood is absent, but its story helps us consider how we choose to connect. Ultimately all ingredients are also educators-- signals to the body and mind of the powers of attunement.
Sovereign Iris
Krishnamurti observed that “We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear”
Holding Space for Sleep
Sleep, soft and deep—rich with dreams, shredded by nightmares or dreamless. How much do you get? How much do you need? How much do you value it?
Whether your concern is saving your skin through the adequate release of toxins, relieving stress and inflammation, pulling away from the edge of irritability that is the hallmark of poor sleep, slowing down the aging process, treating acne, wrinkles, or peace of mind, sleep is a good place to start, because even small changes in habits can make a significant difference.
Energetic Wrappings: We're Making the Experience Better
Queeny Kingly Rose
"Fame is ultimately but the summary of all misunderstandings that crystallize about a new name" ~Rilke Rodin
Rose is not a new name for the flower that is always a rose despite its name, but the name "rose" repeatedly renews itself to every breakthrough that holds the idea of the flower in its imagination.
There is natural and there is studied, but when it comes to rose both apply. It is one of the most diverse plant families, and most roses, including the old roses-- damasks among them--are feats of engineering, made by crossing different species of rose to create new roses or by whizzing out a molecular plan on a computer and then putting some compounds together for another rose fragrance...a disembodied ghost.
Risk Your Microbiome to Smooth a Wrinkle? Run.
"The press briefing for October’s Clinical Cosmetic Reconstructive Expo in London was delayed – there had been another death. A cluster of journalists gathered on the mezzanine while below them visitors filtered past signs for She Lase and Zero Gravity Skin and a stand for a company called Eurosilicone that claims to have been “Empowering women for over 30 years”. At the far end of the conference hall, a woman was having her jawline enhanced with fillers in front of a rapt crowd; the Safety in Beauty stand was empty."
"Rear View: The Big Business of Bottoms", The Guardian 11.18.18