“Spring adds new life and new beauty to all that is.” –Jessica Harrelson
As the days get longer and the sunlight becomes brighter, my senses delight at signs of spring all around me – the greening of trees, colorful flowering bulbs blooming, and the sound of early morning songbirds.
For many people worldwide, spring is the time of renewal, fresh starts, and new growth welcomed by practicing spring purification rituals to detoxify and heal the body, mind, and spirit.
Although the vernal equinox is just a few short weeks away, I feel an energetic quickening that makes me want to jump with joy!
As I shake off the symbolic layers of winter, I feel compelled to incorporate purification rituals to cleanse and renew myself inside and out. I’m aware that even though my spirit is uplifted by the transition from winter to spring, seasonal and climatic changes also bring about imbalances that affect my skin.
I have already begun to shed my winter layers to wear short sleeves, skirts, and sandals. It’s only when the temperatures start to rise that I realize how much my skin needs more attention and care.
In this blog, I will share with you the six steps you can take to transform your winter skin from dry and scaly to soft, smooth, and hydrated in time to bare your beautiful glowing skin you’ll be proud to show off this spring.
Transitioning from Winter to Spring Skin
It is not unusual for your skin to build up dead skin cells because the turnover of our cells slows down in the winter when we are covered head to toes with layers of clothing. Our skin can get seriously thirsty!
Unfortunately, after a long winter spent indoors with dry air and little sun and fresh air, skin is often dull, dry, and rough. It doesn’t take long for ignored skin to become scaly, flaky, and itchy, creating an unappealing appearance.
While many of us apply moisturizer all over our faces to battle dryness, something about being wrapped up in cozy layers makes us forget to give the skin on our bodies the same attention. The good news is that there’s more moisture in the air in the spring. Helping your skin breathe again by exposing your skin to the elements means changes to your skincare regimen.
Outer Beauty Reflects Inner Health
Nowhere does this hold truer than with our skin. Your skin absorbs everything you ingest into the bloodstream and what you put on it. Skin texture and tone are all affected by what we eat, how hydrated we are, and how stressed or healthy and balanced our bodies are. We want to nourish it with pure, natural, and balancing ingredients.
It is important to emphasize that most commercial, over-the-counter body skincare products contain synthetic substances, mineral oil, chemical additives, dyes, preservatives, and chemical fragrances. These ingredients are toxic and known potential carcinogens. Choosing ingredients that are truly wholesome and beneficial for your body and skin makes an enormous difference in how you look and feel.
Your skin is alive, and synthetic chemicals cannot give life back to your skin. Any skincare products made with toxic ingredients lack the “intelligence” of nature. Whatever we put on the skin should be made from botanical sources that contain all the purifying, nourishing, and balancing properties that provide external relief and slow aging.
Your skin is a constantly changing environment made up of many different layers. Seasonal factors, environmental toxins, nutrition, hydration, age, illness, sleep, and emotional stress all affect the quality of your skin. Weak circulation, poor oxygen respiration, hormonal changes, and inherited factors affect how you look as you age.
Fleur Alchemical Flower Essence Aromatherapy formulations are filled with natural skin-loving ingredients to nourish the body and skin. The pure extracts of plants, flower essences, and essential oils contain the vibratory signatures that impart their healing gifts. They have powerful healing properties and are the active ingredients of medicinal plants that penetrate the skin to the cellular level, helping to nourish the tissue and stimulate new cell growth.
Balanced by nature, Fleur Body Oils and Sea of Life salts are the perfect skin food to help our bodies and our skin look and feel the best. Incorporating glow-inducing skincare with our skin essentials takes a little effort with significant results.
Spring Skin Beauty Routine
To prepare your skin for the warmer days coming, use our six-step protocol to experience an immediate improvement in your skin.
Step 1: Increase Circulation
When aiming for gorgeous skin, we start with increasing circulation in the body. Springtime is the ideal time to get outside and enjoy moderate weather before it gets too hot. Healthy circulation gives your skin a luminous glow. Increasing circulation throughout the body with simple pumping and stretching movements, clean water, and antioxidant-rich foods brings nutrients, moisture, and bacteria-fighting agents to our tissues and skin from the inside out.
Increasing circulation to the skin’s surface starts the detoxification process to help the skin turnover the buildup of old cells and stimulate new skin cells. Your skin will take on a vibrantly healthy look.
Step 2: Garshana Dry Brush Exfoliation
Spring is the best time to exfoliate dull, dry, and flaky skin accumulated during winter. It is the best way to revive your skin, taking it from dull and lackluster back to bright and radiant. By unclogging pores, it’s easier for the body to sweat and eliminate toxins in your system. Exfoliation is the key to achieving a more satiny smooth body.
Exfoliating in the morning before you shower is ideal because the skin repairs itself at night. Start your morning skincare ritual with Fleur Essential: Garshana Raw-Silk Gloves.
The gentleness of the raw silk means that your Garshana massage is best performed daily to awaken natural healing. Using raw silk removes surface skin buildup, unclogs pores, and helps detoxify your skin to bring blood circulation to the surface of your skin. This ritual has the added benefit of improving lymph flow and drainage. (See our Garshana page to download our Massage Infographic).
Garshana massage enhances the potential of nutrients to reach starved cells and eliminates stagnant waste. The gentle friction of raw silk increases circulation, alkalizes the blood, detoxifies the liver, helps create negative ions, and cleans the skin.
Step 3. Exfoliate with Water
The secret to proper cleansing is to eliminate any dead cells and toxins not thrown off naturally by the skin. Removing dirt and grime, clearing clogged pores, and purging infection-causing bacteria without removing the skin’s natural oils and cellular moisture are vital for healthy, beautiful skin.
Physical exfoliation with water and a gentle cleanser will improve the health of your skin. The warmth of a shower softens the skin and releases the body’s natural oils, all while opening your pores to reveal a healthy skin that can breathe again.
Fleur essential natural Linen Bath mitt is a must for bathing. Its soft texture cleans the skin and efficiently removes the dead skin, leaving no room for potential skin damage or micro-tears.
Using our Linen Bath mitt also gently stimulates the tissues beneath the skin by helping the layers of skin release trapped toxins stored deep in the tissues on the thighs, buttocks, hips, tummy, and arms to come to the surface of the body.
Step 4: Body Polishing
Body polishing with natural salt boosts blood flow and circulation, giving your skin a healthy flush and a smooth, refreshed skin. It also helps ease and soothe tension in the muscles, helping you relax more.
Using bioavailable Fleur Sea of Life Salts as a polishing scrub when you exfoliate can give your skin a rejuvenated feeling from head to toe. Unlike other salts you’ll find in commercial products, the minerals in salts from the Dead Sea enhance your skin cells’ metabolism and increase blood flow to the areas you apply it.
Our Sea of Life salt is bursting with numerous skin-healing minerals—magnesium, calcium, and potassium help absorb toxins trapped in the body. Magnesium is an anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial agent and helps the body heal. Trace minerals, like sulfur, are natural antiseptics.
Salt is a natural exfoliant and detoxifier because it absorbs dirt, grime, and toxins. It penetrates the layers of the skin to deeply cleanse your skin’s pores to remove impurities that clog pores.
Sea of Life salts are finely ground so that they won’t hurt or tear the skin. Massage over wet body with your hands or our natural Linen Bath Mitt and gently work it into the skin, massaging it in circular motions for about 15 seconds. Start with your limbs and the top of your body and from your feet upward. Rinse your skin with lukewarm to cool water when you are finished.
And don’t neglect your feet. At the end of my shower, I like to exfoliate the bottoms of my feet, the heel, around the toes, and the nailbeds to help keep my toenails looking clean and polished and my feet their prettiest and softest.
Fleur 50/50 Sea of Life Salt blend has antibacterial and antifungal properties. Using Sea of Life salt will help soften cuticles and your toes’ skin and strengthen nails preventing toenail fungus and other bacterial infections.
As much as exfoliating is good for your skin, over-exfoliating has the potential to irritate your skin and can strip the dermis of its natural oils and dry out the skin, increasing redness, peeling, and flaking. I recommend polishing your body only once or twice a week depending upon the type of skin you have.
Step 5: Cellulite Treatment
Cellulite is a feature all women can live without. An excess of lumpy texture around the thighs, hips, tummy, and arms are the most prominent and unavoidable symptoms that it’s time to focus on detoxification and extra body love and care.
The deep detoxifying and rejuvenating action of oil massage with herbalized and essential oils can eliminate stored-up cellular waste beneath the skin. The skin-softening oils revitalize the skin through its many layers to reduce the appearance of cellulite.
The alchemical properties of the anti-cellulite essential oils and active plant extracts in our CelluCleanse Body Oil are formulated to accelerate the breakdown of trapped fats in the connective tissues. Used alone after your shower or as a salt glow, you will see a drastic improvement over time. 
A salt glow is a body treatment made with a combination of salt and oils that exfoliates your skin, leaving it bright, smooth, and clean. Like a salt scrub, the primary purpose of a salt glow is to improve circulation, strengthen the connective tissue, and detoxify the body of stored impurities in the tissues beneath the skin.
To make a salt glow to target stubborn areas around your thighs, hips, buttocks, tummy, and arms, add a pump of CelluCleanse Body Oil to a tsp of Sea of Life salts and massage into your problem areas with your Linen Mitt.
I recommend performing this cellulite treatment at least three times a week. Consistency is vital as much as eliminating those foods that contribute to a buildup of toxins in the body, and the cellulite you see.
Step 6: Feed and Moisturize Your Skin
Daily moisturizing feeds the skin to keep it supple and soft. Fleur Body Oil’s skin-loving ingredients are made from organic botanicals that support skin health and, most importantly, nourish the skin barrier and seal in the moisture. Our body oils help balance and heal your skin free of toxic elements.
While your skin is moist, apply your choice of Fleur Body Oils to help your skin glow and look radiant. Their nourishing properties enter the bloodstream through the numerous surface capillaries in the skin, reducing the appearance of wrinkles and crepey skin.
Fleur Body Oils are (see our collection here) made from selected therapeutic grade organic essential oils formulated in a base of Jojoba oil. They are fine enough to penetrate the skin through all its layers to rejuvenate the cells completely. Their pleasing aromas work to balance the emotions, relax the mind, invigorate the spirit, and otherwise add to their nutritional effects on the skin.
Fleur Body Oil’s synergistic alchemy benefits are enhanced with specific wildflower essences to nourish all aspects of body, mind, and spirit.
Spring Body Beautiful
The focus and care to transform your winter skin to a beautiful spring body isn’t a lot, and it has many benefits. Gathering your supplies, establishing your routine, and taking care of nourishing your skin
The climatic transition from winter to spring reminds us that the seasons have a universal influence on our whole being. Flowing with cyclic change through each season harmonizes us to the yin and yang energies each season brings.
Now that you know that you can transform your winter skin imbalances, follow the steps outlined above. The basic skincare routine cleansing, nourishing, and moisturizing takes only a few minutes each day, which is not a lot to give in exchange for maintaining healthy skin and a radiant appearance.
Although no external skincare routine can completely rid the body of the toxins that cause disease, spring is the classic time of the year to cleanse, detoxify, and nourish within. Purification rituals performed each day with mindfulness are a lifestyle practice.
Pairing the following lifestyle strategies when you begin your spring skincare routine will help the body function in natural wholeness further restoring your skin to its healthiest.
- Remove processed foods and add fresh green foods that grow in springtime to your diet. Fresh nettles, dandelion, arugula, cilantro, spinach, bok choy, and kale greens are low in calories yet high in fiber. They are the perfect spring foods to assist the natural detoxification and restoration process.
- Get active! Movement therapies to exercise your body is a must to help your lymph system move the toxins out. Doing yoga is an excellent practice for your entire system. Using weights to strengthen your muscles will change the shape of your body underneath your skin.
- Deep breathing flushes the excess carbon dioxide from the body and replaces it with a rich supply of cell-energizing oxygen. This inner pick-me-up improves circulation, invigorates the cells, and minimizes the impact of stress on the skin.
- Address any emotional stress, anxiety, fear, worry, grief, and depression as these emotions are significant factors for most skin problems.
- Go easy with alcohol libations before bedtime. Alcohol consumption has a dehydrating effect on the body and skin.
- Beauty sleep is real! Your skin goes through much of its restoration while you sleep. Your body releases growth hormones to stimulate collagen production, which helps with cell and tissue repair and restore your skin.
Skincare is not just for women, men benefit too. The same skincare principles apply to all ethnicities and body types to improve appearance and attractiveness.
Spring is the most lovely time of year. No matter your age, you can find opportunities every day to enjoy the scents of life. Savoring the natural aromas of spring is awakening for the body, mind, and spirit. Sniff the flowers in your garden; fill your lungs with ocean air; breath in the scents of a pine or eucalyptus forest.
Most of all, enjoy the sensations of the sun and breeze on bared beautiful skin this spring.
All my aromatic love,
Vidya
