In today's episode, we cover the harmful effects of EDCs and how avoiding them in your beauty products can impact your uterine health for the better with Jeannie Jarnot of Beauty Heroes.
Struggle with PCOS, irregular periods, and have your hormones out of wack? Then today’s episode could be an eye-opening listen into the harmful world of EDCs, endocrine-disrupting chemicals. EDCs are found in almost all the products you have in your home, including most beauty products. Get informed about EDCs and the importance of clean beauty with our amazing guest Jeannie Jarnot.
Jeannie is the proud owner of Beauty-Heroes, a home to clean beauty that's ready to revolutionize the future of how we look at and enjoy beauty. After her own journey with PCOS and hormone imbalances, she used her clean beauty knowledge to take control of her health for the better. She lets us in on the real secrets of the beauty industry and what you can do to look after your own health in the beauty world. Stay tuned to figure out how you can win a beauty heroes subscription box of your own!
Lastly, we end on a high note that could be the beginning of a massive change for women’s tennis! Being forced to wear white during your period should be a crime.
Thanks for listening, learning and being you. And join us back here every Tuesday for all things uterus, in service to you, uterinekind.
Carol:
An exquisite system, your body. But what happens when we douse it in chemicals? Well, nothing good. In this week's episode, Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, and an expert guest, the superhero of beauty, Jeannie Jarnell O, CEO and founder of Beauty Heroes. She built a safe space for your body and she's here to talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals. Fibroids love them, but your uterus does not. No better way to kick off Fibroid Awareness Month short of a cure than to call out their best friends. EDCs, I'm Carol Johnson and this is Hello Uterus.
Two weeks ago, we talked about hormones in the endocrine system. Go back and listen if you haven't checked that episode out. We learned that the endocrine system likes to be in balance, and the body performs exquisitely when it's in balance. Glands and hormones, which are part of the endocrine system, help create that balance by regulating processes in the body, keeping us healthy and alive. And if that regulation gets out of whack, it affects the body and its processes. Today, we're going to dig into endocrine disrupting chemicals by starting out skin deep. The skin. The skin is the largest organ of the human body. How many of us ran around when we were in grade school saying, I can see your epidermis, your epidermis is showing? I still remember doing that. But it is. It's the largest organ of the human body. And it's really important. Really important. Without skin, we're done. It accounts. Forget this. About 15% of your body weight and the average person has about 300 million skin cells. Skin, along with hair, nails, glands and nerves, make up the integr mental system in your body. New word into commentary. So that's the skin. Now, everything we put on the skin has the potential, depending on the size of the molecules and what chemicals are in it, it has the potential to be absorbed into the skin and into the bloodstream. Some things sit on top of the skin and are not absorbed into the bloodstream, but endocrine disrupting chemicals are absorbed into the bloodstream. And that's not a good thing. So one of the reasons why I wanted to have Jeannie on the show today is because I keep reading about a lot of commentary around True Clean Beauty and what is it? Which line can we trust? Which companies can we trust? And then when we started diving into hormones and endocrine disrupting chemicals, it all came together for me, which is the beauty of connecting the dots. And that's why we're doing this show. Because when you connect the dots, the epiphany, the AHA moments are mind blowing. So True Clean Beauty, like really clean beauty, it's not a fad or a trend or a marketing ploy. In fact, the opposite happens. The not clean beauty is all marketing and very little good for you. So what is Truly Clean Beauty? It's a response to understanding what goes on inside of an unregulated industry that has a ton of power. And I'm talking about manufacturing. Manufacturing of skin care, fragrances, chemicals that are put into cleaning products, our shampoos conditioners, our laundry detergents, all of that stuff. That industry, those industries are very, very powerful and they are also unregulated. So for those struggling with chronic conditions that are impacted by hormones, you got to settle in because you need to understand this. If your periods are really bad and you're having a hard time getting to a diagnosis, then this information is going to be really beneficial for you. Don't think about the money that you spent on the products that you might want to throw out after this episode. And also, PS, please don't pour them down the drain or put them in the trash. Those chemicals end up in our ground, in our groundwater, in our drinking water, in our food. They're catching fish that have levels of birth control, pill hormones in them off our coasts. It's really out of control. So please dispose of them through your local recycling, hazardous waste style organization and don't pour them down the drain. So let's learn about EDCs. An endocrine disrupting chemical is any chemical that can interfere with normal hormone functions in humans or animals. While there are some naturally occurring endocrine disrupting chemicals found in plants such as soy, these are called phytoestrogens. Most endocrine disrupting compounds come from synthetic chemicals, chemicals that are made in the lab. And these are things that we can avoid and we should. These chemicals are found in everything from plastic to perfume to cleaning products to skincare products, your TVs, rugs, furniture, paint, the stuff that they build your home with. I stopped using that rinse aid in my dishwasher because I was like, EW, this is like basically putting a film I don't know what it is, on all my dishes, and then we eat that just the more you learn, the more you get. Rid of EDCs have been linked to endometriosis and fibroids in uterine kind and undecided testicles and urethra defects in men, ovarian cysts have been associated with higher amounts of chemicals such as BPA in the body. What is BPA? A royal offender. A royal offender. I single BPA out, one, because I wanted to learn how to pronounce it, but two, because truly, it is one of the worst offenders out there. Also because I wanted to read to you this quote from the National Library of Medicine. So first, what is BPA? This Sonola animal studies indicate that BPA affects reproduction. However, the gene environment interaction mechanism involved in this association remains wait for it unclear. Unclear. It is a chemical that affects reproduction. However, they just don't know how. But let's put it in anyway and basically everything it's just amazing. The mechanism of action remains unclear. Remember when I told you the mechanism of action of oral contraceptives remains unclear, which is just shocking to me. The mechanism of action, of fibroids? Unclear. Endometriosis unclear. The mechanism of action of hormones? Unclear. As a matter of fact, we only know about 50 hormones, but there are more. Be sure of it. So what does all that mean? The studies aren't happening. If they were happening, those shelves inside our grocery stores and the chain pharmacies and the discount beauty stores would be empty. I'm not kidding. They'd be empty. If the FDA regulated this stuff, they'd be empty. So studies are expensive, and the data surfaced will anger the industry. They'll change the name of a chemical and call it a different kind of chemical so they can hide it. They obviously don't care because people still buy the products because the information is gated from them. They don't realize that these endocrine disrupting chemicals are negatively impacting their own bodies. And so the money pours in and industry is like, well, whatever, we're just going to keep doing what we do. So we need to fund research, and then we need to make sure that it doesn't get buried by industries who must turn profits to keep Wall Street happy. Okay, one last quote from that study that's in the National Library of Medicine, and it's a big one. I want you to hear this loud and clear. While this is specific to BPA, it's not a leap to think that this could also apply to other endocrine disrupting chemicals. So listen to this. The detrimental effects on reproduction may be lifelong and transgenerational. Listen to that. Lifelong and transgenerational what you're putting on your body in the morning before you walk out of the house, which could be up to 15 different chemicals in a lotion. And then some petroleum and a lipstick and whatever you're spraying in your hair. And then perfume. Oh, boy, we got to just walk away from it all other complications from EDC's early onset of puberty. Think about all that cheap glitter, nail polish and stuff that young kids use. Another complication accelerated arrival of menopause. They also affect the production of eggs and the implantation of eggs. So they can contribute to infertility. They contribute to PCOS. They contribute to fibroids endometriosis. These endocrine disrupting chemicals are causing or contributing or exacerbating conditions that are chronic, that are debilitating, and yet they're still being manufactured and put on shelves and marketed as good for you products. But the good news is clean products are available, and they're amazing. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, you get to meet Jeannie Jarno.
Angel: Help bring an end to endometriosis by participating in the Rose Study. The study of menstrual blood may hold the key to the y of indo. From there, treatments are born. Participate in the Rose Study today. Visit Heliotrous.com and click on the Rose Study blog for more information or simply Google Rose Study for endometriosis. It's the first link. Please participate if you can, you could hold the key to the future for all uterine kind. Thank you. Now let's get back to the show.
Carol:
I'm not a chemist, and our guest today is not a chemist either. Just two people with brains that know our skin glands and organs have not evolved to effectively deal with the onslaught of chemicals we bombard them with. On the Daily, you need to meet Jeannie Jarnow. We call her the Beauty Superhero. She founded Beauty Heroes in 2014, while most of us were slathering on EDCs and painting our nails with who knows what all in a quest to glow. And we were probably literally toxically glowing. But Beauty Heroes is now your go to destination for truly clean beauty products that won't harm you or the environment. And you don't need to be in Northern California where their flagship store is located, to be a beauty hero. You can shop online and take advantage of the clean beauty deal of the century, which is their Beauty Heroes beauty box subscription, where you get a full size product, other samples and treats, and then education and information about how to keep the environment around you free and clear of disruptive chemicals. Beauty Heroes also recognizes clean beauty brands through their Blue Beauty Award. In its fourth year, this award recognizes innovation and sustainability, and Beauty Heroes honors those who lead the pack. The products that Jeannie sources and her team are amazing, from performance to packaging. I stopped wearing lipstick over five years ago and I learned what was in it, which is horrifying petroleum. I mean, what just crazy, but that's just the tip of the iceberg at Beauty Heroes. I also learned that it's not just what's in, for instance, the lipstick, but it's the packaging, too. And so now I got lipstick first time in five years, and they're so amazing. It's literally just the lipstick with a little paper wrapper around it and it's in a little recyclable cardboard box and there's no compromising here. These lipsticks are fantastic. So I don't have all that junk that is going directly into my mouth. It's just bad all the way around. That's one example of how you can clean up your routine, and it's actually fun and they're not expensive. Jeannie has the answers, and you're going to learn a ton about the beauty industry and about endocrine disrupting chemicals. So, Jeannie, welcome to Hello Uterus, and thank you for spending this time with us.
Jeannie Jarnot: Hi, Carol. Thank you. That was a great introduction. I really appreciate you sort of getting Beauty Heroes in the sense that it's so rewarding when people get what we do and how we do it and why we do it. So thank you so much for reaching out to me and wanting to just talk to a non chemist today.
Carol: Yes, definitely. We do have our researchers on here. We fan girl over those we fan girl over people who go against the tide. It's very hard to start a company and to have it be successful when you're trying to take down an industry. Well, not that you're trying to take down an industry, but you're playing in the same space as an industry that is very powerful. And so being able to decide that you're going to go ahead and put your flag in the ground and say, this is what I stand for, that takes a lot of time, energy and resources. So we're super appreciative because without people like you, we would continue to be putting the things on our skin and in our environments that are dangerous. And the industry itself isn't going to tell us. It's people like you at Beauty Heroes that tell us about these issues with the products that we use on our bodies. So you spotted this issue with hormone disrupting chemicals in beauty products years ago. Can you share with us a little bit about your early days around the discovery of that?
Jeannie: Yeah, absolutely, Carol. It's interesting. I just want to go back to something you just said that really recognizing that we did sort of put a stake in the ground and draw a line in the sand in terms of our ingredient standard. When I was starting Beauty Heroes a little over eight years ago, that was actually a really scary thing to do because I knew that we were limiting ourselves a lot by taking the position that we did. There's many things that come with that one in the industry. First of all, we can't work with a lot of brands that are even like really close to if you're drawing a line in the sand, you're drawing a line in the sand, right? So you can't just change that. We do move the line usually, though, it's in a more stringent direction as we learn more. We love science, we love learning about ingredients. Our standard has evolved over the last eight years. My whole perspective on everything changes. That's kind of the way the world works. You evolve. But we need by taking this stand, it definitely felt like a moment like, am I really going to be this stringent with the ingredient standard? Are people going to think that we're harsh or judgmental or not inclusive of? There's so many brand founders that I've had to say, I'm so sorry, there's an ingredient we just don't use and them feeling bad. I don't like to reject people. On the other hand, it's not necessarily good for business because there are some really popular brands out there that are really close to our ingredients standard. That would be a great business decision for us to loosen it up, but we just don't. We don't. And it's been a hard line to hold. So I just wanted to recognize you for, again, just kind of getting it without me even really having told you that much about it. But to answer your question about the early days, I was a spa director and I was a spa director who was kind of coming up in the spa industry, working with different brands that were global, brands that people really knew very well, and getting trained by their trainers and they're learning about them. And this is sort of pre internet. Honestly, in the internet in the early days, didn't have all the information that it does now. I'm talking like 1990, 719, 80, 1999, and into the early two thousand s, you couldn't just search these ingredients on the internet. And so I had textbooks that were on my desk and what happened was I would ask questions of founders and brands and two things happened. One, they either didn't know the answer, or second, well, I guess maybe three things happen. The second answer was maybe that information is proprietary. And then the third thing they would say is they would give me an answer, that sometimes it was a true answer, sometimes you get the right answer, but other times you would get an answer and find out later that it wasn't true. And of course, those sort of examples stick out in my mind at the time. It was shocking for me to feel like somebody was lying to me or wasn't telling me the truth, or it's even shocking to think that somebody who's selling a brand doesn't know what's in their products. And so my shock has really gone away because it's actually very common.
Carol: Now nothing shocks you.
Jeannie: Now nothing shocks me. Yeah, it's really interesting. Lifelong education. I was making these decisions for the brands that we would be carrying in our spas, and I was thinking about our clients and I was thinking about the therapist. And when we do spa treatments, I always really loved to do really elaborate decadent treatments. I always worked in luxury spas and you were like literally wrapping people and kind of cocooning them in products or soaking them in products, or doing a scrub and massage with lots of heat and they're going into a steam room before and they're soaking. And the whole idea is that they're absorbing as much as they can into their skin and all this goodness and all of what you're putting on them. You come out like feeling like a wonderful baby coming out of the spa. I thought, well, we would never put like a cancer causing hormone disrupting ingredient on them. That would be just cruel. Right? Who would do that? Yeah, totally against the whole point. So it was just really kind of a no brainer for me to say, hey, let's make sure we're not doing that. And also the therapists really thinking about the therapists and they're having their hands in these products for six or 8 hours a day. So that was really my inspiration for being curious about ingredients.
Carol: When you started investigating, I guess, how did you discover that these products were going to be something that could disrupt a hormone system? Like, where was the shift from, hey, I want to make sure that these are healthy products to oh my gosh, not only are they not healthy, but this is like a rabbit hole, a problematic rabbit hole.
Jeannie: Yeah, I didn't really understand it. I think that in the beginning it was just like, oh, there's ingredients that are bad for you. I didn't really understand the nuances of ingredients, but as you start to get these textbooks and read about them, I think people don't really understand what hormone and endocrine disruptors can do to you because it's almost like this invisible problem you can really wrap your head around. You can say, oh, this ingredient has been tested and shown to cause cancer, that people understand. Cancer is bad, but with hormone disruption you're like, well what does that actually do to you? People don't totally understand the consequences of hormone disruption and I didn't either. Like I said, it was an awakening for me to really understand. Things are tested for different levels of organ system toxicity. It's all very sensitive and there are so many ingredients, you can't possibly keep it all straight. So yeah, but I ended up learning quite a bit about hormone disruption, but it's pretty serious. More people need to know that small amounts of these chemicals and I don't know how small, I don't know if anybody knows how small. No one does. And I think the way that I've understood it from different people is that different people are sensitive to different amount. Not everybody is going to have the same it's based on your genetics and yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
Carol:Yeah, it is a big deal. We talked in some earlier episodes with people researching endometriosis and fibroids and doctors that are working in that space to treat people and they all admit that there is no definitive understanding of conditions like endometriosis and fibroids or PCOS as to what their mechanism of action is, how they are launched and then how they grow and proliferate in the body. But it's like we talk about this all the time here, connecting the dots. You don't have to be a scientist to connect the dots. The scientists are the ones that have to do the studies because that's their job. They can't just come out and say, well, common sense would tell you because that's not their job. But we can connect the dots and say, okay, so the endocrine system is a system that requires balance and the hormones roll around your body and manage processes to create equilibrium. Right. And then we can look at things like what are some health problems that are happening in our world? And recently I've been seeing a lot of mention of low sperm counts and these various things that people are talking about in silos. They're not connecting the dots that oh well, perhaps these chemicals that are known as hormone disruptors are causing these problems. It's fascinating and frustrating because we need more research, but there's a lot of roadblocks there to research, including in the skincare space, including, I'm sure, industry roadblocks to research that calls them out.
Jeannie: Absolutely. And there's so many ingredients and there's more ingredients coming on the market every day. So that is the tricky thing. It's not like there's 30 ingredients that make up all of the products in the world. It's like tens of thousands of ingredients that make up all the products in the world. And more research is being done to create and manufacture and synthesize more ingredients. Some of that's really good work and some of it is just more of the same. How would you possibly test all of that in a way that's standardized, in a way that's digestible? It's truly an impossible feat because you don't need to go through an approval process per se, unless something is a drop considered a drug like an SPF to launch it into market. So ingredients are being launched all the time. They're not approved by the FDA before they are put into our products. And then the other thing I will just say is that there's no way of testing a finished product really, unless you're kind of randomly testing it. But it's a whole other thing. There's a lot of loopholes in this space. And that's why ultimately it's important to, I think, buy products from brands that you know and that are really making products with integrity. From the beginning, I feel really happy and grateful that I know the people making the products that we carry at Beauty Heroes and that I'm using every day. And so I feel like this level of trust and that's important to me. And that's what Beauty Heroes has become. In the beginning, I really wanted to tell brand stories about founders that were making products from a more intentional, conscious and healthy space because they're made completely differently. It's truly the conventional personal care and beauty industry and then sort of the healthy indie, truly clean. I will say clean is like really the mainstream beauty. There's no line anymore. There are so many brands that are launching and considering themselves clean. So I think there's sort of this place where you were talking about brands that are sort of from the ground up, formulated with a mission or a purpose, really founder led, and really have a perspective on what it means to be truly healthy. Because most brands are made by marketers who are looking to develop a story that's going to resonate with a specific audience and then build a product that's going to manifest that story and make money on it at the right price point. And what's in the bottle doesn't really matter. Yeah, they're in a business. The business is not actually your wellness. No. It's a business that's more directed to Wall Street or more directed to getting bonus or increasing profits.
Carol: Absolutely. Yeah. It's very important to understand. And actually, I'd like to ask, can you give us an example or sort of show us the difference between a product that is formulated for profit and a product that is formulated for wellness and performance.
Jeannie: Yeah. Well, what I will say is to kind of give you an example. I'll give you a really good quintessential example. Well, I guess it's not formulated for wellness, but it's formulated to be truly, like, good. But if you're taking a product that's made for the beauty industry, just any given product, like, the idea is to get it somewhere around 20 times the cost of making it. So they're trying to keep the cost down so that when they sell it to you, it's like 2025, maybe even more x what they paid for it. So if you're buying a tube of lipstick, for example, and it's $35, maybe it's $150 to manufacture, that's kind of the goal. Right? Let's just give everybody a second to pick their jaws up off the floor, because that's got to hurt. Okay, what she's saying is that the cost of raw goods to manufacture a lipstick could be a dollar, $50, and then they're going to sell it for $35. Yeah. And then if you think about it, to tell you the truth, the most expensive part of that lipstick is the case, not what's going on your lips. And the box, the box that it goes in, the pre box that sits on the shelf, the actual little bit of red paste that's in the lipstick tube. It costs sense to make that sense. Truly pennies dimes to make that. So that isn't true for the brands that we're working with. So we work with a brand that I love called Yepote. And this is a great story. It's kind of a quintessential, good beauty story. She grew up in the basically, I've never met anybody who came out of the womb wanting to be in the beauty industry. Like, Taylor Swift comes out and knows she's going to be a musician. Like, she's destined for it. This founder was like that. She was, like, putting on lipsticks when she was three or four or five years old and knew from a very early age she wanted to work in the beauty industry. I wish I had that kind of clarity about my direction, but this woman did, and she ended up working for the biggest beauty companies in the world and being very high up and was working with Nars in Asia, totally her dream job, working on the biggest makeup campaigns. And anyway, she had this really great career, and she got really sick, and she started to do yoga. And she realized that the industry and all the products that she was using were toxic to her. So she actually went to India and took two years off, and she came back and she launched basically thinking of a luxury like E Salmorant kind of Chanel lipstick, but with organic ingredients. No, silicones, micro, plastic, vinyl, these harsh dyes that are in regular lipstick fragrances and all of that and packaged it beautifully and made a clean version of it. And it costs a lot to make. I mean, I'm sure her lipstick costs definitely dollars and dollars to make it, especially, she's very small scale, so like, a lot of the economies of scale that these beauty brands get are from making hundreds of thousands of items. But anyway, that's a really good lipstick example and that's kind of what we look for at Beauty Heroes. And the end of the story for all of these stories, every single one of them, is that the product that is made with the better ingredients is a better performing product than the original or the conventional. It performs so much better. And so I think we grew up with conventional beauty and thinking that, oh, if I'm going to go to something that's more natural and organic or cleaner or whatever, it's not going to perform as well. Well, it's kind of true in the sense that plastics, micro plastics and silicones sit on the skin in a different way than just minerals and waxes and all of that. But your skin looks so much better, right? And your overall wellbeing is going to be so much better without all the synthetic fragrance and these plastics that are being put on your skin and all of these other potentially harmful ingredients. For me, the perceptible performance, maybe from using silicones over some of these other ingredients is really not that big. I mean, it really only matters for Beyonce, who's being photographed under major lights and maybe on movie set where you need your makeup to last under camera. But in our day to day lives, you certainly won't notice it.
Carol: Yeah. And then, as you indicated, putting all of those micro plastics and chemicals on your skin over time is going to challenge your skin. It just has to. We did not evolve so effectively as to be able to metabolize all of this stuff. There's just no way. It doesn't make any sense. And it's interesting. I purchased a body oil at Beauty Heroes. When I went in for what I expressed to Jeannie was the absolute best facial of my life. I couldn't believe it when I looked in the mirror. And then I started using this body oil that I purchased from a brand that Beauty Heroes carries called Osia. And I originally looked at it as this body oil was transforming my skin. But then what I realized was the body oil was actually, in my opinion, again, this is not we don't have data on this by sight. My skin looked healthier. It didn't look transformed. It looked like what it should have looked like for the last ten years. So it's not like there was some amazing chemical in here that gave me a skin peeler, none of that. It was, in my opinion, my body going, Oh, thank goodness, I can breathe now. I don't have to deal with this.
Absolutely. I think one of the things that a lot of the chemicals that are out there, there's a lot of things that can cause irritation, including a lot of things in nature that can cause irritation. If you're working with any ingredients, plant based ingredients, like plants are super powerful. So if they're used incorrectly or in the incorrect concentrations, then you have to be mindful of all of that as well. But one of the things that I think that I experienced and I didn't really understand it at all, was that hormone disrupting ingredients. We have so many people who come in with hormonal acne. I can say this on a podcast when I'm talking to sort of not somebody specific. One of the things I don't like to do is scare people. Another thing is I don't want anybody to ever feel judged. Right. It's really important, and I don't want people to feel stressed out about ingredients. I think some people really stress out about these things. The stress from being concerned about it is worse than anything. Stress is like the most toxic thing. So if you're listening to this podcast, don't stress. Find a source for truly healthy products and shop there and take that burden off your shoulders. I will tell you, looking at ingredient lists all day, it's super stressful. You have to go down a rabbit hole, and I'm doing that all the time. Going down these rabbit holes all the time. It's not pleasant, it's not transparent, and it's not fun. So try not to do it. Find brands that you like. Find curators that you like. Find people that you trust to do that homework for you and take it off your to do list. Nobody needs to be doing that. Get beauty and skincare to be fun. It should be fun, for sure, and enjoyable, and it should be like a healthy experience all the way through.
Carol: Yes. Agreed. I think the thing that stresses me out is when and actually, I guess it comes post recognition of, like, I realized the stress after I realized what I didn't know. Being uneducated stresses me out. Like being in the dark and feeling like, oh, man, you mean I bought this product? And they must know that it actually is a problem for me, whether it's a skincare product or makeup or it's a home fragrance or it's a candle, for goodness sake. Just a candle that I'm burning in my house that is turning into not aerosol, but aerating, these chemicals in my home, and I'm breathing them in. So it's like just knowing it's good enough to know. There's a couple of things actually, Jeannie said that I just want to point out. One is that the ingredients in products that are not considered a drug do not need FDA approval. So they can formulate whatever they want as long as the ingredients that they're using are not clinically defined as being a drug or a medicine. And so it's important to know that they're not approved, they're not regulated, is really maybe a better way to say it. And so the responsibility falls on the people buying the products to do your research. But as Jeannie points out, it's impossible because you're looking at ingredient names that are completely impossible to decipher. And to go through the thousands of ingredients that you might encounter in the products that are in your environment would take forever. You wouldn't need to go work for Jeannie. You wouldn't have any other job, because that would be what you'd be doing all day long. So the cool thing is that and we should talk about this right now you did another amazing thing, superhero. You created a cheat sheet for that purpose. So can you tell us about that?
Jeannie: I did. And sorry, I wanted to go back to I didn't finish what I was saying before about endocrine disruptors and your skin looking so much better. The point that I was leading into was that people are so concerned about hormonal acne. Well, if you think about it, hormonal acne are hormones out of balance, and I really experienced that. I mean, that was a really hard road for me. I had hormonal acne until I was about 35, and it was really bad. It was really like an illness. I think we think of as acne as something that's cosmetic, but for me, it was an illness. It's the only thing I've ever really been sick. I ended up being diagnosed with PCOS and infertility when I was trying to get pregnant. That was a hormone disorder. And part of that was this terrible hormonal acne that I had. And it's one thing for people to look at you and to feel embarrassed and shame and self conscious about all of that. But the deeper piece, I was like, I don't even care that my face looks terrible. It hurts so badly on your it's so painful.
Carol: Really?
Jeannie: Yeah, hormonal acne is painful. There's these sort of pimples that are under the surface that aren't even expressing themselves. They really hurt, and you can't get them out. There's nothing you can really do. They're sort of, like, working their way through your system. And I used to just say, I don't even care. I went to every esthetician and did every treatment and every kind of thing to try to work on them topically. And I was like, I don't even care that it looks bad. I just want it to stop hurting me so badly because it's painful. So I think when I look at somebody who's got and is complaining about hormonal acne, I kind of want to tell them, hey, if you can if you have a doctor who's willing to do it, do a hormone panel, a really in depth one, and see what's going on with your hormones. And let's not just, like, sweep hormonal acne under the rug as a cosmetic disorder. It's really kind of a symptom of something bigger that's going on. And that is where I really feel I don't have the science or the proof or anything, but I've seen it in real life where we will transition people onto products that are truly healthy and their acne will subside, and not so much from what they're putting topically on the skin, but from the hormones finding their way into balance and not being disrupted and not kind of putting forth this undercurrent of acne. So there's many layers to this and all the pieces, I feel like, fit together. Yeah. So, like, your skin looks really good from using wonderful ingredients on it, but then your whole body is feeling more maybe nourished and not disrupted from not using things that have potentially harmful effects on you. I say potentially harmful because no one really knows. I didn't know what was causing all of this. I can't isolate the ingredients to the cheat sheet. When I was the spot director with these textbooks on my desk, I used to have a big index card on my desk and I'd have the list of ingredients that I had researched already that were no, because you can't remember all the names are really long and there are many of them and they sound very much the same. And the same ingredient can be called different things. And so I kind of just like, had to go a running list of things that I was like, yeah, these are the bad boys. And so when I started, the first thing I wanted to do was to create a pocket guide that anybody could use in their bathroom to look up, to have that sort of cheat sheet of ingredients that they can easily rule out. And so we had this pocket guide. We're on our 7th version. It's for free. It's available for free@beautyheroes.com. Or you can just Google Beauty Heroes Pocket Guide. It'll take you right to the pocket guide page and you just put in your email address. We send you an email with links. There's two versions, like a fold up version that you can put in your purse or there's like for older people like me, there's a full sheet piece so that you can just have this full sheet, large type, large type that you can have on your desk or have in your bathroom or give to your teenager or whatever the case may be. The idea is to kind of carry it in your purse when you go shopping. There's a healthy ingredient list and a harmful ingredient list. And the idea is, obviously we couldn't list all the harmful ingredients, but these were the most common. And the idea is that if your product doesn't have any of these harmful ingredients in it, it probably doesn't have the others. Because generally, if they're formulating in this specific way, they'll usually have at least three, four or five of these ones on the harmful list. So if you've got nothing in there, then it's probably a pretty clean product and you should feel pretty good about it.
Carol: That's great. So definitely go to Beauty Heroes.com and look for and what did you call it? A pocket guide, right?
Jeannie: Yeah, it's an ingredient pocket guide.
Carol: Okay, terrific. And what is your top ingredient to avoid, like, one thing that is just a deal breaker for you?
Jeannie: Fragrance has so many things in it, and it's a real tricky one because if they're not defining what's in the fragrance EU brands that are registered in the EU, and if they're just using essential oils, they actually need to put parfa and fragrance on the ingredient list. But then they'll define it and they'll say, okay, it's got a little bit of cedar and patchouli and a little whatever, jasmine. So that is fine. But if it's just fragrance and nothing full stop, which is very common if you were to go to any drugstore, fragrance is probably in almost 99% of the products. There could be anything in that fragrance. They don't need to define it. It's, like, considered proprietary. There's usually a lot of ingredients that make up that fragrance. And I will say the one thing, if I could tell all of my girlfriends transition from conventional perfume to truly clean fragrance because there's just a lot of stuff in there that would be like my number one thing. My number two is the number two thing that I really don't love or that I think is really potentially the most harmful are chemical filters. UV filters. So I'm big on sunscreen. I think people should wear SPF, but I like a mineral based SPF. Those chemical filters, there's many of them. There's not as many in the US. As there are in Europe. They are really engineered in a way that the lay person doesn't understand. But mineral SPFs are really good. There's really no reason for those UV filters, in my opinion. The UV filter, that's the chemical that filters that they use in the sunscreen that acts as the protector of the UV rays.
Carol: Yeah. So it's something that's like a piece of glass, only not glass because it's toxic. But there's something that it's like putting a barrier on your skin.
Jeannie: Yeah. So oxybenzones are really common one homophalate these are common ones in the US. You're right. They're like glass, but they're like a chemical glass that somehow filters out UV rays. And they've been engineered that way. Versus a mineral is literally a particle that just sits on top of the skin and it, like, blocks the UV wave from touching your skin. So it's just a physical block. It's like putting a rock in front of your face. I imagine all these little pieces of zinc oxide on your skin, they don't get absorbed. You want non nano zinc oxide, and it just stops UV rays. And obviously wear a hat. My biggest tip for SPF is not a product, it's a hat. It's not an SPF product.
Carol: Wear a hat. Yeah. When you go and travel to places where they have coral reefs, you'll probably be told that you should not wear traditional or common sunscreen there because it kills the coral. So if you just think about that for a second just think about that for a second, the product that you're putting directly on your skin is going to go on your skin into the water. And it is somehow so problematic that even though you're not allowed to touch the coral, you can't rub up against it with your body and offset that product. It kills coral reefs. That should be a heads up. And I know that there was like about five years ago, there was a big sort of dust up around sunscreen, and I don't know if it was the FDA or some other government organization started to put warnings out about them, but the thing is, there's so much that goes on behind the scenes with people calling in favors. And because this is not FDA regulated, if it was FDA regulated, well, actually, the sunscreen does have to go through the FDA, right?
Jeannie: Yeah. These chemicals do need to be approved by the FDA. They are considered a drug. And actually, any sunscreen that wants to be sold in the United States needs to go through FDA approval. And that's one of the other interesting issues, is that there are a lot of different UV filters that are being manufactured around the world, but if they are not approved by the FDA, there's a small handful of them that are approved by the FDA. And I think there might be better filters out there on the market. But I think the FDA there's lobbies all around all of this, so they may not want different filters approved. It's very hard. We have several brands that we work with that sell their product in the EU as a sunscreen, but they have to have completely different packaging in the United States. They can't sell it as a sunscreen, even though it's tested as an SPF 30 or whatever the case may be. They just can't market it. They can't make claims around it. It's illegal. It hasn't gone through that level of testing. So that's sort of nuanced. But I will just say, in general, those chemical filters, particularly in the United States, they make me nervous, really. And we're spraying them all on our kids and Splattering our kids, and just makes me really uncomfortable. I think there's so much more when it comes to ingredients that I would like to steer people away from, but those are like, if I could tell every woman that I know not to spray on conventional perfume, if you're using that, just transition because and there's beautiful products out there. The thing is, it's really not a sacrifice. We don't need to give up anything.
Carol: Exactly. Yeah, there's really beautiful products in the world. There's so many options now. There are so many choices and they're gorgeous. They're so much better than the conventional products to begin with that it's just an upgrade. Absolutely. All the way around, an upgrade. And I think it's interesting you pulled out fragrance. The first thought that I had was perfume, but fragrance, as you said, it's in everything.
Jeannie: Yeah, I mean, I think perfume is particularly something I would want to stay away from because you're really aerosol. You're like missing it into the area inhaling it. I would say if that's like the number one thing, if you wear conventional perfume, try to transition away from it.
Carol: When you brought up your experience with Infertility, did your shift away from conventional products happen before that? How does that factor in? Was there any sort of learning that you had that you could share with people listening who are dealing with chronic conditions just from your personal experience?
Jeannie: Yeah, as I mentioned, Carol, I didn't start Beauty Heroes because I was diagnosed with a hormone disorder at all. I really started being interested ingredients from a professional standpoint. So I wasn't really thinking about how these products affected me personally. It was never even really on my radar. I was using the products that I was selling in my spots, so I was using really clean products, but I wasn't super strict about it and I wasn't scared for my own health or really concerned. I wasn't like, oh, let me use these cleaner products. Maybe they'll make my hormonal acne go away. I just genuinely thought, this is what we should be doing in the world. And it was bigger than me for sure. And then I turned 33 and I wanted to get pregnant. And I tried to get pregnant, couldn't. And they diagnosed me with PCOS, said, Oh yeah, you've had this really terrible acne and weight gain and irregular periods. And they told me I had an 8% chance that we're getting pregnant, which I thought was harsh.
Carol: Yeah, that's a wake up call. I mean, that's basically when you're hearing that you're reducing that 8% to zero, you're not inflating that. You're like, Oh great, 8%. I'm never going to have kids.
Jeannie: Well, that's arbitrary. Like 8%. I really rejected that completely in my body. It didn't feel true to me, which you're so good, but yeah, and it took me a long time. I went through a three year battle with infertility that was just extremely depressing. It was towards the end, I was betting a brand and I was looking at ingredients. I was like, man, these ingredients are hormone disruptors. And I was like, Wait a second, we're talking about hormone disruptors over here. And I've been diagnosed with a hormone disorder. And I'm at this point where I'm going to the blood lab like several times a week to take my hormone levels. And I mean, I was really like, we were trying to pinpoint if I was ovulating, and I was ovulating super into the hormones, hormone disorder, hormone disruptor. That's it, right? Exactly. I was like, Shit, this is actually affecting me personally. And what I did that weekend was I took that little cheat sheet, that list that I had on my desk, and I went through everything in the house from laundry detergent to the cleaning supplies to the medicine cabinet, threw away things that I didn't really even never even thought about, like Vicks Vapor rub. You're rubbing that on your chest, right? And it's supposed to make you better. It's full of petroleum and all kinds of endocrine disruptors. My laundry detergent at the time, which was I thought I was being clean with, like, the arm and Hammer baking soda. Wait a second. I thought that was clean. That's not clean. It's been a really long time since I've looked at any of these products, so who knows what's in there now or if it's even changed. I mean, everything, like, my toothpaste, everything. I looked at all those ingredients and I was kind of like this rabid woman that couldn't have a baby. I just threw everything away and went to the store and found a few clean replacements for some things that I really needed. And lo and behold, it really was like, eight or ten weeks. And granted, I was doing a whole bunch of other holistic stuff that I got pregnant. I always wonder I don't know this to be true at all, but I always wonder if it was that little key, that little piece that needed to be unlocked to get me to get pregnant. That kind of was my story. What happened after that was that my acne went away completely to me. Like, I've never done anything to my skin because I'm so grateful that I just don't have this hormonal acne. Like, I couldn't want any better skin than the skin I have now because it was so bad for so long. They'll say, Oh, Jeanniehave beautiful skin. I haven't done a single thing to it except to use really great products, get holistic facials regularly. I think it feels healthy. I'm using really beautiful, clean things on my skin, and it's good. I feel good about it. So, yeah, that was pretty profound for me. And now I have a healthy 13 year old. And by the way, you said earlier, my son, he's just started using deodorant and his skincare like, it's important for boys to low sperm count, acne, hormone disruption, super important for boys. They use a lot fewer products than girls. That's one good thing for boys. But yeah,
Carol: I'm glad you brought up kids because I think it's super important that you keep an eye on the products that your kids are using and are exposed to, because some of these endocrine disrupting chemicals in the National Library of Medicine, they speak to this and I'll link the study in the blog post for this episode. They talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals as having the potential for generational impact. Transgenerational, I think is the word that they use, meaning that you're using something and it then can affect your children and it can affect your children's children. So we're putting stuff on our bodies that our bodies were not like AI. We're skin and bones and we haven't been around that long, relatively speaking. And we're putting all this stuff on our bodies. And our bodies, they see it as invaders. It's like wheat. Take wheat for example. I have celiac. When I eat wheat, my body sees it as an invader. So it goes into attack mode, which creates inflammation in my body. And that inflammation can cause cancer. Like legitimate direct line from wheat or gluten to cancer. And so to think that wheat, it's just you look at it and you think it's harmless, it's not a chemical. How could it cause that? Well, because our bodies aren't really cut out to absorb and metabolize these things. So when you are exposed to a lot of chemicals, for whatever reason, it could be in a workplace environment, you could work in a plastics factory. Whatever your environment is, when you're exposed to those chemicals, your body is taking them in and then it has to go through the process of getting rid of them. If it can, some of them build up over time and the body cannot get rid of them. So that's why connecting the dots between a chemical that you're exposed to and what that can do in your body is super important because which is why we all have to understand our anatomy. It's one of the things that I really like. I was such a moron about anatomy and I didn't care to understand it and so I didn't realize what the liver and the kidneys do. But once you start realizing what all these organs in your body do to keep your body in homeostasis, then you can really easily connect the dots. And that does make it so you don't have to be stressed about it. Because as Jeannie suggested, it's freeing, right? I have so much less stuff in my house. There's less stuff, less bottles. People talk about these clean products being expensive. As Genie referenced before, conventional products are formulated for profit, right? So they're going to give you the least amount of stuff beyond water that they can because that increases their ability to make a profit. And they rely upon marketing to create a story around the product so that you go in and you think, this is going to be the next best thing ever. And it's so funny when you read reviews about these products, people are like, oh my God, it smells so good. I'm sure Jeannie is like, no, that's the problem. We don't want that. So you really can simplify your life and you don't have to spend a lot of money to do it, because the products that you buy, that you decide to buy, while they might be more expensive than a conventional product, you're probably going to use a lot less of it. It's probably going to last you a lot longer, but also, it's probably not going to contribute to hundreds or thousands of dollars in medical bills as you try to go down this path of figuring out why you're dealing with these weird conditions that you can't seem to get a diagnosis for. So on that, I want to just end this talk with Jeannie by asking you, jeannie, what are the couple of products that we should invest in? So let's say I want to get rid of the we all have, like, 30 bottles in our bathroom, right? I know we do. So you say, I want to get rid of all the 30 bottles in the bathroom, and I'm going to just get this down to the bare minimum. What is that? Bare minimum?
Jeannie: Yeah, I don't know. I think it's very specific for every person, so it's a hard question to answer. But I like to have a really nice hydrating serum. I like to have accommodation. There's a really good, clean, moisturizer SPF that work well. I really love a hydrating mist. What people don't understand is that skin needs a lot of hydration with all the other wonderful products that we put on it. And people complain about dry skin all the time. Well, we need to sort of give it that water phase, too. So people love beautiful face oils, and there are some gorgeous ones, but you want to also give your skin some hydration, and that doesn't come in the form of an oil. It comes in the form of a hydrating step with either a hydrating serum or a hydrating toner. So we've got some really great hero products for that. What I will tell you is the Beauty Heroes Monthly Discovery is a really great way to find what works for you. And I think I really want to encourage people to really kind of lean into what works for you. There are no rules. You're not ever doing skincare wrong. What feels good and what looks good for you is the right thing for you. What I love about the monthly discovery, it's a subscription where we deliver full size products in a focused, educational, and intentional way. We really speak to our customers like they want to be educated, like they are educated, or they want to be educated about these topics and understand how these products work on their skin and why these ingredients are actually in the product. I think that's kind of the fun nerding out. The not fun nerding out about ingredients is to actually look and try to figure out what things are made of and why they might be harmful to you or the environment. The fun nerding out is like, oh, there's this ingredient like snow mushroom that is really great and has this benefit for the skin and that it helps it retain moisture. So that's why it's in this formula. And there's a beautiful burriti oil that actually helps with redness and inflammation. And it's been used traditionally for years in traditional cultures. Now they're using this oil in skincare and it's so beautiful and kind of new on the market, those kinds of things that's the fun kind of nerding out. And we do that in our discoveries. So I think a lot of people have really figured out how to take care of their skin through our service, which delivers it rotates between skin, body, son and hair care. And we have rituals and they're from the best brands in the world. So I think that's a really good way to figure out what works for you.
Carol: Yeah, and have fun doing it. Right. We can't do it all. So Beauty Heroes Behind the Store is a team of people that are vetting these products and that have the experience to know, is that ingredient being called a certain thing, but is it really a red herring or a distraction from another ingredient that sits behind it or within it? That's problematic and that's insane. Nobody has time to do that except somebody who's an expert in it. I can't thank you enough, Jeannie, because we started off this podcast talking about just the challenge. It's hard enough to be an entrepreneur. It's hard enough to decide that you're going to leave this career that you have and you're going to go out on your own and start this business. But then factor in that you're essentially calling out an entire industry that is so powerful, so big and so powerful. And that takes a lot of courage. And it should indicate to you how important this is because she could have opened up an ice cream stand and she didn't write, this is so important that you just recognize that there's a lot that we don't know about endocrine disrupting chemicals. There's a lot we don't know about hormones in the body and there's a lot we don't know about the chronic conditions that we talk about on this podcast. And so what we can do is take advantage of opportunities like this to learn and go to Beauty Heroes.com and expose yourself to the work that they've done there and check out their discovery boxes and turn this into sort of like a self love exercise where you make a commitment to yourself, where you just say, okay, I'm not going to stress out about this and I'm not going to make a huge deal about it and freak out because like Jeannie pointed out, that disrupts your hormone system cortisol super bad when it gets out of balance. So you're going to go ahead and have a fun journey with it every day. Do a little something that improves your environment on the way here. I took a stick of gum that my son had left on the counter, and as I put it in my mouth, I thought that might not have been such a good idea. I chewed the gum. I'm not, like, running to the garbage can to throw it out. I chewed the gum. But I'm probably going to say something to him. You brought up fragrance. My son, he's going to kill me for saying this. He's 15. He bought his first bottle of cologne. He and his friends went to T. J. Maxx and they bought a bottle of cologne. Now all of them are going to kill me. Jeannie when he sprayed that the scent I liked. When he sprayed it in the car, I thought I was going to die. I just felt the unnaturalness of it. And so I had a conversation with him, which is why I'm telling you all this story, to have conversations with your kids. I had a conversation with him and I said, you don't know what's in that bottle. We take that scent that you like and we go and we find something that's healthy for you. We went back to talk about another topic, and we got off the kids topic, and we're going to wrap up here now so everyone can get back to their lives. But please do pay attention to what your kids are putting on their bodies, and especially young, young children. They want to put the face makeup on or the glitter on or the stuff that you're getting at the dollar store. I hate to be a downer, but don't do it. There's no way to validate what's in there. And, I mean, I've had personal experiences with my kids where I did do it and it was a bad idea. My son breaking out after Halloween, he looked like he had been in a fire. You've got a cheat sheet? That's what I call it, but it's what is it again?
Jeannie: A pocket guide. But I call it a cheat sheet, too.
Carol: Go get that cheat sheet and have fun with this. And Jeannie, thank you so much for making it fun for us. And I also want to let you know something that we're going to launch, probably even before we launch our app, we're going to do something very cool for hello, Uterus listeners. We're going to gift you Discovery Boxes from Beauty Heroes. Hopefully getting that out into your hands, and then you talking amongst your friends and trying these products full size. Not just like little tester things, but full size products. You can start to learn about these things in a fun way rather than your face in a textbook getting pissed off. So thank you, Jeannie. It's just been a fantastic eyeopening conversation. And we're going to continue to talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals as we go on and how they affect us in our chronic conditions. And I just want to thank you for being here. Thank you for doing what you do. You are a superhero.
Jeannie: Thank you.
Carol: You're welcome. So check out Beauty Heroes.com before we close out today's show. We'll be right back with Ending on a high note.
It's Wimbledon time, and Wimbledon is getting a SmackDown from women. And it's about time, actually. Have you checked out Wimbledon? Have you seen all those crisp, white tennis outfits? Why only white? Because when the dress code was written in the 1800, sweatstains were considered improper. We have a real hard time, like evolving codes, don't we? Things we write in the 18 hundreds of the 16 hundreds, we just want to stay there, but there's no reason to do that so literally because sweat stains were considered improper. Well, guess what? Wimbledon, we have this stuff called antiperspirant, and actually, you can even get clean antiperspirants so that you're not putting aluminum on your armpits, which right behind your armpits are two clusters of lymph nodes on either side. So you probably don't want to be doing that. So we have solutions for this, but still, you got to stick with tradition. But I have a feeling the days are numbered. If there is a menstrual goddess, the days will be numbered because players are getting real about athletics and periods and they're just not putting up with it anymore. The mental stress caused by those menstruating during any sport has got to be so intense. But I can't imagine a more intense place in center Court at Wimbledon wearing a tiny little white skirt and you have your period. And not only that, you might have fibroids, you might have endometriosis. Could you imagine having to show up for the zenith of your sporting competitive life and deal with that? Well, Katherine Whittaker, who is a UK sports broadcaster, has been leading the charge this year to end the Allwhite dress code. And her criticism has gratefully sparked a much broader conversation about inclusivity in sports and not pretending that this isn't an issue, because it is one. I have a quote from Kathryn Whitaker. If they had a clothing policy that affected men in the way it does women, I don't think that particular tradition would last. I cannot imagine going into the biggest day of my life with my period and being forced to wear white. That's just a really common sense take on it. I mean, come on, people, let's get going here. Let's just change these rules. Let's be humane and compassionate and kind and loving and just go ahead and change them. So as of now, the dress code still stands. But the high note is that we're talking out loud in public about periods and how disruptive they are and how they impact athletes. That feels important because athletes have platforms. And what we need right now is more talking about periods. More, more. Give me more period talk. It's all I want to talk about. I hope in the future that by doing all of that talking, we destigmatize periods and all humans work to make the lives of urban kind better through support and respect. Pretty straightforward. We've got a lot of work to do. We know we're not going back, so we're headed to a future where girls, women and LGBTQIA plus have the same freedoms as cisgendered white men. That's the goal. And we're not going to take no for an answer. So thank you for listening today. Thank you to our guest, Jeannie Jarno of Beauty Heroes. We really appreciate the time and information that she shared with us. Tune in next week when we will launch our Beauty Heroes giveaway in honor of Fibroid Awareness Month. You can get your hands on a Beauty Heroes box and you want this. Trust me. Thank you, angel, for producing the podcast, and please do check out Hello Uterus.com, and our blog posts are there so you can get more indepth information about the topics that we cover on the podcast. And you can also go there for any links to studies, research that we've referenced in the show. Please send us questions at hello at hello uterus.com. So for our Hear Me, Hear Me Q and a segment, you can send in your questions, provide a stage name so you remain anonymous and we will get an expert to answer them for you because that's why we're here, to give you answers and information, and we're really glad that you're here with us listening. So take care. Have an excellent week and we will see you next week for another episode of Hello Uterus.
Angel: The Hello Uterus podcast is for informational use only. The content shared here is to not be used to diagnose or treat any medical condition. Please speak with a physician about your health condition and call 911 if it's an emergency. And thank you, Uterine Kind, for listening.