123: Everything You Know About Skin Care is Wrong – with Danny Neifert

Everything You Know About Skin Care is Wrong – with Danny Neifert

Before our guest Danny Neifert dove into the four pillars of optimal skin health, show host Wade T. Lightheart asks her about the “dark arts” of skincare that mislead people into painful procedures and applications. Many skincare routines and products do more damage than good — or they do nothing at all. Danny talks about all of this from her years of experience as a licensed aesthetician with over twenty years of experience with natural product formulating and hands-on individual treatments with clients.

She is a clean beauty advocate and speaker, author of Relearning Skincare, The Story of Skin and the New Way, who loves to bring skin health back down to earth through story and practicality. 

In this podcast, we cover:

• How Danny ended up going down the rabbit hole of skincare and emerged an expert
• How our skin is our first line of defense – which is why we should treat our skin well – not burn, clog or scrape it abusively
• The “caveman” and “cave girl” skincare method
• The dodgy marketing techniques that suck you into the beauty aisle at your local drug store
• What types of skincare you should avoid
• The four pillars of skin health – the “bill of rights for skin”
• Functional medicine model: skin is hydrated, nourished, and unclogged

How Danny’s skincare career started with a bottle of horrible pink goop…

In her early twenties, Danny was a young mother – when she brought home her first child from the hospital. This is when Danny became mindful of the importance of taking care of our skin. She bathed her infant daughter, then applied something from KMART called baby magic. Danny remembers the product was pink and smelled like melted plastic. “Even back then, I had the good sense to give her another bath to take it off.” 

Before her first child’s bath, the skin was not something Danny thought much about. Becoming a parent sent Danny on a quest to understanding our skin. She went down the “rabbit hole” of the skincare industry, spent thousands of dollars to further her education, and the twists and turns of this 20-year journey led Danny to her current skincare business that she describes as a hybrid of medical skincare and natural skincare.  

Got acne? Be careful which products you choose.

Danny talks about acne – what causes it and how to treat it. Most acne products you find on store shelves are astringent, which will dehydrate your skin. Danny says dehydrated skin is the most significant contributor to congested skin. Congested and dry are the same thing with skin. Our skin is supposed to be soft and permeable and a release organ. You are supposed to have a whitehead once in awhile. If you never have a whitehead, your skin is probably dehydrated. 

Acne products dry out our skin at an extreme level, which causes the skin to get congested, and Danny describes the build-up as like your skin is constipated below the surface. So don’t use acne products. If you use them and don’t have acne, eventually, you will.

Tune in as Danny Neifert tears down the myths of skincare. There’s a difference between cosmetic industry skincare vs. natural skincare. Stop getting ripped off by “Big Skincare.” Change the way you care for your skin and start glowing with a new radiant look – like we’re all supposed to look! Men will benefit from this episode, too. You can look years younger by implementing some simple skincare changes! 

Episode Resources: 

Subscribe here for the coupon code for 20% off your first order: www.skinharmonics.com/podcast
Danny’s Book – Relearning Skincare: The Story of Skin & The New Way 
Skin Harmonics Instagram
Skin Harmonics Facebook

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade T Lightheart: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. It's Wade T Lightheart from BiOptimizers with another edition of the Awesome Health Podcast and boy oh boy, you are going to love this today because we are talking everything about skin with Danny Neifert. Now, before we get into the four pillars of optimal skin health, the baseline protocols, everyone needs to know and do, we're going to talk about some outdated skincare practices. What the new functional medicine model is. And Danny is going to blow our minds about some of the dark arts that are out there and what you can do to avoid getting caught in their web of deceit. Danny is a licensed aesthetician with over 20 years of experience with natural product formulation, as well as hands-on individual treatments with clients. She is a clean beauty advocate and speaker author of relearning skincare, the story of skin and the new way who loves to bring skin health back down to earth through story and practicality. Ms. Neifert practice in both Boulder, Colorado, and just up the road in Santa Barbara, California, where she beautifies skin and spends as much time as possible. Surrounded by nature sounds like a good life. She is the mother of two adventurous adults in as a chocolate yay and bubble bath lover, Danny, welcome to the show.

 Danny Neifert: Thank you. Thank you. Wade, I love the dark arts spin that you already are savvy too. I love that

 Wade T Lightheart: It turns out a funny story for our listeners. So this is really, and this is doubly funny because it's also my own ignorance. I have one of my best buddies of all time was in biomedical skincare 20 years ago. And he was all in and doing the things or whatever, and then he got into it and then he got, as we got more and more educated, he moved away from that into more holistic skincare, but he used to do all this stuff for this guy. And I kind of a little like a little Metro, their brother, a little off right. And over the Christmas holidays and he's all about the skin. And now he does all, he was first on the medical side anyway, to the natural. He knows I'm pretty knowledgeable and I'm going up there at Christmas time and I'm looking at him, right. We're hanging out and I'm like, God, your skin looks good, dude,. All these wrinkles and stuff, and he doesn't have any. And I was like that all that stuff for 20 years, I actually worked. So I thought, well, we better get some experts in here to talk about skin. So thanks for joining us today, Danny.

 Danny Neifert: Absolutely.

 Wade T Lightheart: So let's just get a little bit of background. What got you into scan? Why is it so important and maybe what are some no-nos that people are kind of conditioned to just think that that's what you're supposed to do with your skin?

 Danny Neifert: Right. Well, I got started pretty young really young in my early twenties. I ha I was a really young mother and gave my daughter a bath, like right when I took her home from the hospital and became like somewhat intrigued, like, well, what do I do for this baby's skin? And so I remember putting something on her called baby magic from Kmart and it was pink and it smelled like melted plastic. And it was like just horrible. And even I had the good sense even that many years ago to take a, give her another bath and I actually took it off. And I just, I had never really thought about skin before. And of course, when you become a parent, it's this huge responsibility. And so I think that was, I did some gardening early on in my life too. I was surrounded by a lot of people that gardened and thought holistic. And so all of that stuff started flooding back to me, luckily as a young parent and it set me on this whole path of just like wanting to understand and just loving skin. It's just so beautiful. And it of course is a whole rabbit hole to go down. I mean the skin hair, the skin care industry is enormous. I mean, it's an ocean of information and products and services that, I've spent 20 plus years in now and it's been so many twists and turns and journeys and thousands of dollars that I spent on my education and on equipment and procedures and all of the formulations out there, like, I've just been curious, I've been like, just so curious about skin and it's taken me to some difficult places because I came to some dead ends several times in my career and I just felt lost several times. Like, what's really happening. What's going on? Why am I spending all this time and money? Like there was just so, so much in that. And what finally emerged about, well, I think it was streamlined about, Oh, maybe somewhere around 12 years ago, it started to really firm up and become streamlined. And it's this hybrid of medical skincare and natural skincare that I practice now.

 Wade T Lightheart: Now, that's really interesting because I think traditionally there's been two camps, the medical skincare industry, which is, everything from, cortical server road, steroidal based creams to, injections and fillers and surgeries I had this crazy hairdresser is a really good friend of mine and he's in the cosmetic and he's, he's a very avant-garde hairstyles, come to work in a kilt and chains and purple hair and everything. And he was talking about when he was getting his face done. Cause he wanted to look young again. He was, getting up there and ume says, yeah, I said, well, how, what do you do when you get done? He's like, yeah, I want to look like I'm doing 60 miles an hour down the highway to go [inaudible] of course being around Venice here, we see some of those people are walking down the street,

 Danny Neifert: It's part of California culture for sure.

 Wade T Lightheart: And then there's the natural people, which like, don't put anything on your skin unless you can eat it. Da da da .So you got that side, but now there's this emergence of kind of the middle ground extracting the best from both sides. So where is…

 Danny Neifert: I'm so thrilled. I can tell you like read my book a little bit or at least you read the contents, like I'm so thrilled. So yeah, the summary is that the quick summary is that medical skincare that's being practiced. Probably I think since the 1930s, it's all trauma based. And if you want to heal your skin, there's this old belief that you harm to heal. It was discovered that if the epidermal layer was completely melted off through a chemical peel, that the dermal layer will replace it. And that set the precedence for every anti-aging procedure that came to follow.

 Wade T Lightheart: So would just burn your face off with chemicals and start over again. That's really what people

 Danny Neifert: And the upside, I will have to say. The one upside to that is that that top layer, the epidermal layer does get replaced. I mean, that's the good news. And that's what defines clinical and medical skincare is that it's resurfacing, it's increasing skin cell turnover so that we really truly can replace more often that utmost layer of our skin, because that's the layer that can hold more water. It looks fresh. It's like, keeping the lampshade fresh on the lamp. Like the light bulb would be our dermis and the lampshade would be our epidermis. And so if that lampshade is fresh and has been replaced more often, it's gonna help that glow and met better. So that's why everybody wants new skin cells just you know.

 Wade T Lightheart: For people who don't know, your blood will be 7.35 pH, but your skin will be slightly acidic because that increases the turnover. And then they just said, well, what if we make it really acidic and peel it?

 Danny Neifert: Well our acid mantle is acidic because it's our first defense in our immune system it's acidic so that it kills bacteria. So the first line of defense is our skin. And if it's slightly acidic, we would be on dead. And with that little acidic temperature that's there, it kills bacteria and viruses. So keeping that acid mantle and we can go back to that later is super important. And of course, all of medical and clinical skincare is all based on destroying that and melting that and this old approach of harming to heal. And so, yes, we do get new skin cells, but what we have discovered and something that I've seen firsthand through my own practice over many years is that when skin is constantly being scrubbed and melted and lasered and zapped this harm to heal approach it, tragically ages at a faster rate. And so

 Wade T Lightheart: So you start creating scar tissue essentially.

 Danny Neifert: It's not so much scar tissue. It's that the dermal layer is the causal mother layer and that's what makes the epidermis. And so when that dermal layer is always given work orders like replace, replace, work, work, work, work, work without the means to support that output it thins at a faster rate. So dermal thinning is what happens when our skin is over-exercised.

 Wade T Lightheart: I got a question for it, just as a guy that doesn't know anything about this stuff. And that is, I have always thought about this. And I was talking to a friend of mine who was another kind of ignorant dude. And,he grew his beard out for a year and put all of his beard oil on it and everything. And then when, eventually he shaved it off, we were like, God, your skin looks good. He goes, yeah. I says, I think that the shaving for all these years was actually ripping up my skin. He says, and, when I grew this beard out and put all this oil in it, cause, and then I, when I did shave it off, I was like, who is this guy? Cause he said, hell, is that? It's true?

 Danny Neifert: There's something to that. There's it's called the cave man or the cave girl method. You can Google it. And it's basically doing nothing for your skin. And the reason it works for a lot of people is because all of the cleansers and all of the moisturizers and even natural products that have too many astringent essential oils in it, they're all disrupting. They're all so disrupting. And there's this American obsession with cleanliness that people are just wanting to cleanse and cleanse and cleanse their skin and so afraid of clogging their pores. And so afraid that's what's causing the congestion that this over cleansing dehydrates, our skin, and then therefore causes congestion from the inside out. Nobody has acne or congested skin because their skin is actually dirty. I mean, good clean soils, actually not a problem for even gardeners that are in soil. Like that's not a problem.

 Wade T Lightheart: [Inaudible] And just wipe some dirt on my,

 Danny Neifert: That would be better, in all truth, that would be better for your skin than so many products that are being sold on the market today.

 Wade T Lightheart: And identify skin skin products that are better than dirt. Okay. really low and then move up from here.

 Danny Neifert: And I mean, it's, that's a really great story about your friend with the beard, because that speaks to how bad clinical skincare is for our skin that actually doing nothing is better.

 Wade T Lightheart: Okay. This is my question comes up now because I'm really having fun here. If it's like, I walk into CVS, I'm from Canada. So up there it's shoppers drug Mart or London drugs here it's CVS or something like that. And I go down, I see that those kind of glazey, right. Chemical infused first couple of aisles in the store, which is all beauty care that I never go down, but I just looked down there and it's kind of like Neo in the matrix when they said, Hey, don't go down that aisle. All the indicators in my body because, says don't, don't .

 Danny Neifert: Danger, danger. Well, I think that you have a very intact intuition and a lot of that is packaging. Cause you're looking a lot of the, the actual colors are concealed in the packaging. It's, just the sea of like unending promises and neon colors and bright lights to, because the industry can be so profitable that everybody wants in on it. Everybody wants in,

 Wade T Lightheart: Because you can make a bottle of $3 this and sell it for 25 or 30 or 50.

 Danny Neifert: Exactly. And that's in more. And that's what exactly what skincare companies traditionally have been doing for a really long time. And now consumers have become educated and more educated and we're asking for naturals and there we're forcing them the same way that us as consumers forced the organic, a company, all the organic companies and all the groceries, we forced that. Not because, you know, all of a sudden Walmart was being nice and decided to, let sell organic milk. No, we vote with our dollars and consume. That's why I love to do podcasts and why I wrote my book because the only thing that's going to change, like how diabolical and sinister this market is, is an empowered consumer that can look at ingredients and make decisions and make choices about what they're putting on their.

 Wade T Lightheart: I always say if it says Paulie, Paulie sorbet, what the hecklate? Probably shouldn't put it on you.

 Danny Neifert: Well, sometimes you just Google the web is amazing because now we can get on and we can type ingredients into the search bar and find out exactly what that is. Sometimes it's just the fancy word for olive oil and people don't know the botanical names. And sometimes it's absolutely not. It's parabens, it's synthetics, it's preservatives, it's all the things. And the beauty industry and especially the skin industry has not been regulated like very, very little. I mean, if you ever get on and look, it's like criminal, how little regulation the skincare companies have had to adhere to. And it's quite shocking.

 Wade T Lightheart: Yeah. I just had a guy on the suntan works sunblock industry and he's a company. It was on a podcast recently for third rock from the sun. And he was saying the same thing. Like it's like almost every single sun tanning company in the world is using these chemical agents that aren't really good for you. So he was a chemical engineer and figured out, well, how could he build something that wasn't going to mess up.

 Danny Neifert: It's so refreshing. And a lot has happened over the last few years. And especially with sunscreens, there used to be hardly any clean choices and now there are, and that's just absolutely fantastic because another thing that happens in the skin industry, because it's can be profitable is they figure out the one thing that they know will sell and then they just keep selling it over and over and over just robotically because obviously for a lot of people, it's just business and numbers and profit, but when you come across somebody like me and some of the are grass grown women who have been like, I've been rolling in essences from all these different herbs and plants and all these different things like for so long that it's a completely different way of creating a skincare line. Of course try to do marketing and this like crazy seeming my Instagram account. I try to post every day, but it's a whole different thing because now we have responsibility. Number one for packaging, because packaging is so disgusting in America, everything is, Oh, it's just horrible. And in the beauty industry is no exception, in fact, so, so bad because everything is single use. Everything is plastics, all the dyes that are used, like it's so ugly actually made a little video about how ugly the beauty industry is, from packaging. And then of course it's all the chemicals and the shelf time, then you know how companies are protecting all of their profits. So when it comes to, my whole journey has been this. I just, I never thought I would ever have my own skincare line. I never even knew that I would work hands-on with people. It was like this love that just snowballed over the years. And as I tried to solve problems for myself and my family, and of course my clients like it just this whole other thing happened and that it, then I would love to talk about that at some point.

 Wade T Lightheart: Yeah. So let's quickly go from what are maybe the biggest things that you want to avoid first in skin care? What's kind of common in the industry.

 Danny Neifert: Yeah. This is a lot. I'm going to open my mouth and say some big things right now, in my opinion, all anti-aging and acne products should be avoided. 90% of what's available for consumers.

 Wade T Lightheart: Anti-Aging and acne, into the trash.

 Danny Neifert: Yeah, acne products are all astringent and they're all going to dehydrate our skin, which is the biggest contributor to congested skin congested dehydrated skin. Like they're the same thing. If the skin is dehydrated, it's going to get congested because it literally is like cement. Our skin is supposed to be soft and permeable and it's a release organ. So it's supposed to have a whitehead now. And again, if you've never had it, if you haven't had a Whitehead in years, it's probably because your skin is chronically dehydrated. So our skin needs to be bouncy and soft and permeable and has to have water in it. And so all acne products are built on several strategies, number one, dehydration, because the only, ever previous strategy with acne was just to dry it out.

 Danny Neifert: We have to dry it out. We have to dry it out. So what happens is that skin gets super dried out. It fails to function as skin and all of the congestion just gets built up and stuck constipated if you will underneath. And so that's why acne products are not a good idea because if you don't even have acne and you start using acne products, you eventually get acne, maybe not full blown, but it will throw your skin. So out of balance that it's just a dead end. And then with the anti-aging products, the what sums up every anti-aging product on the market is that it's all acid based. It's either has glycolic, lactic or salycilic acid in it, which are all dissolvent or AHS, alpha hydroxy acids. The old strategy of anti-aging our skin is to exfoliate it exfoliate, exfoliate, exfoliate.

 Danny Neifert: It's like the answer to everything. And if an, if an exfoliant that is chemical, it literally dissolves the upper layer of our skin cells, micro, little, little things, but it adds up. And so then our dermal layer gets that work order, make new skin cells, make new skin cells, make new skin cells. And we have a whole beauty that's obsessed with exfoliating our skin. And I know because I was on that hamster wheel at some point, like I, I started natural and I was trained. I went to aesthetic school in my twenties and learned how to peel and burn and zap everyone's skin and followed that…

 Wade T Lightheart: I liked that peel burn and Zap

 Danny Neifert: And followed it to where to the dead end of like, I'm just going in circles. And I don't think, and we're going down in circles. Like if there was a spiraling down, I'd never saw an increase of skin health. So those two things, those, the anti-aging and the acne products arenot okay. And we finally have another way.

 Wade T Lightheart: So what, is there any other things to avoid when it comes to your skin?

 Danny Neifert: Well, benzyl peroxide, I didn't mention that one. That's another astringent tea tree, and lavender oil. Most essential oils are too astringent to be using on our facial skin. Our body can take a little bit more, but if you look at it, any kind of natural skincare products, they've basically just put a lot of citrus in it and tea tree and lavender and astringent so where now they're saying it's natural, but just because it's natural doesn't mean that it, I mean, not eucalyptus oil, peppermint, some of those really potent essential oils, they might be natural, but don't think that they're sissy in any way and can't do any harm and they smell so good. They smell so good that consumers are just buying all these, all of these, like, floral bouquets and they're better off using essential oils and a personal centered oil and for cleaning and in some massage oils, but for our skin, it's just not a good idea.

 Wade T Lightheart: Got it. Okay. Any other things, and then we'll get into some good stuff.

 Danny Neifert: Well, I want to talk about the good stuff.

 Wade T Lightheart: Let's get into maybe you can tell some of the good stuff and maybe share a client story or two that comes to mind. Always love those stories. Cause they go, that's just like me.

 Danny Neifert: Yeah. Well, the cool thing is about 15 years ago, a medical doctor invented something called dermal nutrients. And this medical doctor used to be on the treadmill of selling medical spas and lasers for skin. So he was all about lasers and went through a period of reorganization, if you will reassessment. And he, what he did is he took the bioavailable form of vitamin A and wrapped it in in a very special liposome so that it is deliverable and absorbable. It's a PC liposome fossils, [inaudible], and it's something that we use for brain function. So it's not anything weird. It's from lecithin granules. It's a lot of companies are using it. People have been using it in transdermal patches for, so now we have this nutrient that is like a calorie for the skin. If you will. And it's encapsulated with this liposomal this PC liposome surrounding it, we apply it topically.

 Danny Neifert: It drops through the epidermal layer is released and recognized by our dermal layer as like food pizza, a burrito, something that the skin can actually use to make new skin cells. So instead of creating new skin cells from a place of trauma and anxiety for the skin, now we can feed it in this really beautiful and profound way, topically fairly affordably and get the skin, making new skin cells so that we can resurface our skin, make new skin cells. We can lift out pigment, we can lift out congestion, we can lift out sun damage and it doesn't age us. It doesn't cause all of the sun inflammation that is so, every time we go and get a peeler or zapper retinol cream, we're creating a sun sensitivity, like we're creating a net loss eventually because all of those things create more aging. Ultimately. Whereas if we get the right amount of dermal nutrient dose into our skin, our skin can resurface clear itself, maintain balance, and then we can maintain dermal thickness and regain some dermal thickness too, that we've lost through over procedures and menopause. So it was really exciting.

 Wade T Lightheart: That brings me to another thing that I've always noticed. I'm a big fan of people might find this odd, but I'm a meditating Yogi guy, but I'm a big fan of the UFC. And what's interesting is there's a big difference in the durability of skin types. So another words, some athletes will cut or swell very easily, which is a real tough thing. If they're in a fight, cause their eyes might swell up or things like that, which doesn't allow them to continue. And then there's other people that could just get pummeled and their face and skin doesn't cut or break is easy. So is there particular aspects, like, you have to kind of see what type of skin you might have if you have like thick, like literally, thicker skin.

 Danny Neifert: Well, we all have, we're all held handed a deck, right. When we're born, it's like genetics. And so we're never going to be able to escape our genetics. Of course there's the field of epigenetics, which is fascinating. I love that, but what we all skin craves, dermal nutrients, our skin is actually hungry. It's an organ that wants nutrients, like the rest of our body and so dermal nutrients and topical, hydration and barrier restoration are all of the things that can strengthen what you got. I mean, it can only help maintain and improve what you were given.

 Wade T Lightheart: So really though, that's what, so would there be a few differences? Like for example, let's say you were coming in and doing a specific consultation with somebody. Who's trying to figure out that, you know, they've been struggling with the skin problems for a lot of times, you're going to kind of go down, see what they've been doing. Can explain what that's like, because I think is there's a, a lot of people would like, you know, have skin issues. They don't know what to do. They're getting the run of the mill stuff from this person, that person they're spending time and money, but they've maybe never been exposed to someone who's coming at this from you. What's it like if I'm like my skin's a disaster, Danny help me, what am I going to do?

 Danny Neifert: So we're touching on these, what I call the four pillars of skin health are the skin. The skin rights, the bill of rights for skin. And the first one is dermal nutrients, like seriously, like all skin is hungry and it would be about me trying to find the right dose for that particular individual. And that has to do with a lot of different variables. And that's why I make three different serums and three different strengths to fit. Everybody's all the different appetites, if you will. So finding the right amount of dermal nutrients and that's a fundamental. And then the second one is hydration like water is universal, all skin craves and needs water. And that's a thing that's quite easy to help, with the right skincare products. It's like pretty much fixed overnight and then gets better as the weeks and the months go on.

 Danny Neifert: And then the third is something called barrier restoration and that's sort of a fancy way of saying, using an oil rich moisturizer because of this big phobia about clogging our pores and this strategy of always trying to dry out acne or dry out congestion that acid mental that we touched on earlier, which is this the mix of our own sweat and oil. That's what our acid mantle is. And it's invisible. You cannot see it. It's like a very invisible, thin residue. That's on our skin film. And it's supporting that. It's, adding oil to that from avocado, from I'm a big fan of Shea and cocoa butter. I make multiple moisturizers when they all have most of them have that base because it's just so dense. And that's what traps water in our skin, because we can hydrate all we want.

 Danny Neifert: But if we're not using a moisturizer that has a liquid in it, that creates a barrier. So that, that doesn't evaporate. It's all like lost, and of course there's all these oil-free moisturizers, which, Oh, that's the thing that I'm like, no, those just need to be taken. Those need to be renamed something else like a serum, but they're not a moisturizer because you can't have hydrated skin and skip that step. So the third the bill of rights, my third one is barrier restoration, which is using an oil, not being afraid of oils in your moisturizer and making friends with that little bit of residue. So many people have been brainwashed that if it's sticky or it leaves any kind of residue that it's dirty and it's gross and it's grimy and it's just not true. Like that little bit of residue is the difference between being a raisin or a grape. And it's the difference of having pores that are functioning properly or not, or, and it's also the difference of your skin over producing oil. A lot of skin that's dehydrated and doesn't have an acid mantle in place overproduces oil. So I have a lot to say about that, but the fourth one, which is really interesting and something that I, it took me years to really understand all of the phases is this need of release. Our skin is truly a release organ

 Wade T Lightheart: It's the largest organ in the body.

 Danny Neifert: It sure is. And it's so complicated on our face. I mean, the skin on our face has so many nerve endings and is different than any other skin anywhere on our body.

 Wade T Lightheart: Why is that?

 Danny Neifert: I don't know, why is the sky blue? I don't know. I mean, there's so many miracles in this world about why things are as beautiful and as amazing and as intricate as they are.

 Wade T Lightheart: I'm so excited to apply these things tomorrow I wake up even more beautiful tomorrow.

 Danny Neifert: Oh, but our faces they're extraordinary. I mean, they're just, there's miracles everywhere. We look right.

 Wade T Lightheart: I'm here and I'll go, well, I don't know if it's extraordinary. So how do I get to extraordinary? What are some best,

 Danny Neifert: Well, I want to talk about this detox, this release thing a little bit more because it's actually super fascinating. Our skin goes through a whole process and song and dance as it heals. And this is, I have several chapters in my book dedicated just to this process, because what I discovered is when the skin has access to dermal nutrients, it has optimal hydration. It has barrier restoration in place. What happens is nothing short of a healing miracle, our skin detoxes, and we can only detox and truly heal when our skin is in a stable place. And it's getting these things day in and day out. It becomes healthy and stable enough to truly heal. And so it starts shuffling any of the congestion that's in our skin, blackheads, milia, I've typed like so many different types of Milia. Milia is basically like a Whitehead that never made it out.

  Danny Neifert: And so the skin just isolates and stores it as these little white things underneath the kin. And there's lots of different classifications of those because I've seen so many at this point. So what is so fascinating is as our skin heals, there's a migration of this congestion towards the surface of the skin where it can be taken out where there's fight, that there's freedom. And that's the process that I offer people is permanent because once we detox the skin, our skin, and the average is people usually need two to three sessions the first year in this process. And then I see people less than once a year because their skin has literally been detoxed. We've irrigated the performers.

 Wade T Lightheart: What comes out of their skin when it's detox?

 Danny Neifert: Blackheads, And milia.

 Wade T Lightheart: That's coming out of your skin. Because some people don't understand what detox is.

 Danny Neifert: These little hard things that you feel it'll feel like a grain of rice under the skin. And people often think that they have cystic acne like this whole thing and cysts in there. And I have seen a few cysts, but almost 90, like 98% of the time, it's these little tiny, hard milia. It's basically a whitehead that solidified, it's like a pus pocket that got hard and it has, the skin will store it for years. I've had clients come to me and they're like, this is a mole. The dermatologist told me it was a mole. And we discovered it was not a mole. It was a big fat milia in their skin that had permanently been stored there. This for 10, 12, 20 years, once I had a client where off that out that came.

 Danny Neifert: So it's really remarkable this process that our skin goes through as it heals. And that's, what's different about my method of what my method is. It's holistic resurfacing, conventional resurfacing is just about beating the skin down and giving it a ton of anxiety. Over-Exercising it. And basically wearing it out and constipating it all at the same time. Whereas my method goes in it hydrates, we feed the skin for real, like beyond lip service. We give it actual nutrients that it can use immediately restore the barrier and the skin completely changes in texture. Like it's really an amazing, beautiful process. It's why I love what I do so much is because it can be for people who have a lot of congestion in their skin, such a radical process and skin can just be turned around. Whereas, and you know, a lot of people have spent so much money on acne, so much money on sun damage, and it's just not good where these people were ending up,

 Wade T Lightheart: Let's walk us through a person. Okay. So maybe let's say I'm a 40 year old woman. Let's pretend I'm a 40 a woman. I've been struggling with skin conditions. I got some blemishes coming out on my face. Maybe some acne, I got stuffed, maybe some scuffy marks on my regular body. And I'm like, what do I, how do I correct this? Like what would I do? I've tried everything I've been to skincare, I've been taking medications, have been scrubbing my skin and putting creams on my skin. I've tried to go natural, I am not getting the result at all.

 Danny Neifert: You are describing many of my clients because I do something strange and different if they haven't already tried everything else. So I get a lot of people like, Oh my God. I'm so desperate. I'm even going to try this strange lady. That's doing this like bizarre thing with skin. So you've actually described a lot of my clientele. So it's so basic. There's a hydrating mist,getting you on, I would get this woman on the right serum. There's three serums. Uthey're all hydrating meeting, exactly her appetite for her skin and a moisturizer. And so that would be morning and night. There would be a monthly exfoliation. I sell a monthly exfoliation pack, possibly a vitamin C powder to add fresh a few nights of week. I would also recommend minimal cleansing. And also most, very importantly is sending her to an internal functional medicine doctor because so much of what's happening on our skin is because of gut microbiome and hormones,

 Wade T Lightheart: Which are, can be interrelated.

 Danny Neifert: Absolutely. And so what I find is if we can clear up everything on the inside and support the skin from the outside, like that's when skin can transform so quickly.

 Wade T Lightheart: And then how long would it take? Let's say someone's in this situation, what is a reasonable amount of time to heal the skin in a kind of a systematic way that you would go?

 Danny Neifert: It totally depends on how off center, how unharmonized their skin is. I've had people do complete turnarounds in a few weeks. If they're coming to me and not so bad shape, and even overnight, they're like, Oh my God, my skin, if it's just thirsty and we fix the thirsty skin, like done, they're plumped up, there's, everything just starts working again. So I would say for somebody with like mediocre skin problems, like nothing extraordinary, skin can turn around in like one to three months and look like completely different skin texture wise. And, and that's what I am. I'm a texture expert. So that's what I, that's what I focus on is texture and health. And that's the thing.

 Wade T Lightheart: What is that texture?

 Danny Neifert: Texture is like that beautiful, yummy thing that clear hydrated pours have, like when you look at skin up close and you can see the pores and they're clear and they're open and there's not junk in there stuck.

 Danny Neifert: It's that it's like when you look at a seven-year-old skin, right. That's really healthy. And you see that beautiful, just that continuation in the texture of healthy skin. And that's the thing that's not being addressed in the skin industry, conventionally. It's all about like pumping it up, synthetically. It's all about like scraping at it and, and believe you me, like I've worked with skin in California since I moved here 12 years ago, that has, some of these women have spent so much money on their skin and the confessions I've had of how much money they have spent at Medi spas and dermatologists and it's Botox, it's injected, it's been peeled. And when you really look at this skin close up, the skin is miserable. The texture is horrible. There's no glow. And it's really sad because these women have spent a lot of money and when you get to the bottom of it and you really look at their skin up close in the magnifying lamp, that skin is like, it's making a sad song.

 Wade T Lightheart: I got a question for you because I noticed this, it was a number of years ago. And it came out around the Kardashians as they kind of Rose to fame. And it kind of went concordance with Facebook. And most of my guy friends noticed this, that there was this look that looked what I called it. The caked on clown look. But like girls started to make their faces look like clowns, like, and there was like all these layers and stuff. And it was like this really artificial thing that they were taking pictures for on Instagram. And it's still trending, not maybe to the extent it was, but, and we used to all kind of wonder, we'd be like, Whoa, well, wait, what's going on here. Right. And I understand there's so much pressure, but what is it going on with people with that look?

 Danny Neifert: When is that? Well, this is my assessment. This is my assessment of it. I mean, beauty, right? The beauty industry, and then a woman's beauty. It's our radiance. It's very personal, and it's very precious to each woman's heart, no matter how tough any woman tries to act like our beauty and our radiance is valuable. And it's something that we want to keep and hold on to. And I also think that it has to do with self-love and self-acceptance, and we play that out in the theater of the beauty industry as like, am I lovable now? Am I acceptable now? Am I beautiful now? And it's, it's I think karma that we women and, men too, to a degree we're working out, with self-love and self-acceptance, and, and it just takes us down some strange path, some strange pathways, especially when we live in a society that, there's so much pressure to be all of those things and there's, and I it's changing now, but there's multiple ways that, my whole message is that like, there's a million ways to be beautiful.

 Danny Neifert: I mean, a million and it's the diversity of women and, humanity that makes us this beautiful. And so we were handed that deck of cards. We have to just that we have one job like be you, like, we just have to be ourselves. Then that intersects with all this pressure that we have, about our worth and all of those things in society and our mortality, \aging is a very tricky topic. And I think that women, and especially in California, we can just get in our little bubbles with what the definitions of what that looks like. And ultimately I, I think what I've learned for myself is that health and beauty are the same thing. If we're healthy, we're beautiful.

 Wade T Lightheart: I wanted to take a little bit of a detour here into another area that I think we kind of touched on. We'd never went into. And, and that is when you talked about kind of using both sides of the aisle. Like, so let's say, okay, there may be a point where someone says, yes, I need surgery or it needs something like, what procedures do you have from the medical side that you would say are acceptable under certain conditions?

 Danny Neifert: And I have a whole chapter in my book called The Skin Health Bank. And instead of saying like, these procedures are bad and these procedures are good. The idea is, imagine that you have a bank account and you want to put deposits in when that's dermal nutrients, hydration, barrier restoration, allowing your skin to release there's acupuncture. There's I've listed all of the things that are deposits and I've listed all of the things that are withdrawals. And so I'm not a Nazi about like, you can never do this. This is a hard and fast rule. It's more like how many deposits can we make? And then how can we carefully choose and more like garnish from the other side of the aisle. Like you say, to enhance that, taking everything into consideration. And it's very unique for every woman, depending on what they want to achieve for some women, they don't really care about the spots on their skin for them. It's just the volume in their skin. And it could be totally different for another women. It's, fascinating to me what each person will glob onto is the thing that must be fixed in order for them to have, to feel good about themselves. So that's more of my approach with that.

 Wade T Lightheart: And generally, would you, before someone was going to do maybe surgery or something like that, or some kind of treatment, I don't even know all the treatments that they do, but would you kind of like prep them beforehand?

 Danny Neifert: Ideally. Yeah. I mean, I would, I mean, my big dream is to change the conventional method to where we weren't treating teenagers from the get go and young skin from the get code to be dehydrated, to be starved, to be congested. I want to flip that to where we're using a functional medicine model, where skin is hydrated, it's, dermally nourished, people know not to over scrub their skin. Like all of this is intact because then when we, first of all, we're going to have better skin. How about that is something that actually works. And then too, when we do want to elect to do something as we age,we're coming into it in a better place. We're not already in the red getting our third facelift or a way in the red and we're going in and getting Botoxed every month, like, cause those are all like, you know, withdrawal, withdrawal, withdrawal, withdrawal, and people are going into it with their skin compromised.

 Danny Neifert: So I would always advocate for people to have the healthiest skin possible. And that means these four pillars, hydration, dermal nutrients, barrier restoration, and creating a skin culture and a beauty culture where having a blemish now and again is okay, like it's in that's dynamic. And if by suppressing one, by suppressing one milia or Whitehead, you're creating a way bigger problem down the road. Like it's just like, have the feelings, have the, have the thing. And so it's not biting you in the ass later. And, and because there's so much pressure that skin has to be cardboard and it has to be pressed and it's this like object and in reality skin is this permeable soft, beautiful dynamic thing that is so exquisite when it's healthy.

 Wade T Lightheart: So Danny maybe you can share with us some where you can get the book. What's your, the name of the book, your social media and where they could reach for you for maybe a consultation or things like that. If someone wants to really kind of go all in, what would they, where would they go and what would they do?

 Danny Neifert: Sure, if people want to really nerd out, my book is amazing. It's 90 minutes, it's on YouTube. It's called relearning skincare story of skin. And the new way you mentioned, it's how I just came to everything. It's not a clinical studies book and it's not me being in a white lab coat, being like this harsh dermatologist type per person. It's like the story. It's like how this all really came to be and everything that I saw or have seen over the years and what emerged. So that's on YouTube. And I have a PDF if people go to my website, which is skin harmonics, and if they sign up for my newsletter, they'll get that PDF. And furthermore, just for your people, I have a special landing page, skinharmonics\podcasts. And that will take them to a page where if they sign up for my newsletter, they'll also get a coupon, they'll get a PDF of the 10 things that their skin wishes they would stop doing. That's like a good time putting that together and a PDF for the book, or they can get on YouTube and listen to it. And then I'm on Instagram and on Facebook as skin harmonics.

 Wade T Lightheart: Well, there you have it. It's www.skinharmonics.com/podcast. Make sure that you check out the book, get the PDF. The 10 things was that the 10 things that your…

 Danny Neifert: But your skin just wishes you would stop doing. Like you're given the microphone, like what it would just like shout into the microphone to you to stop doing. And it's pretty awesome because I think the main thing is that people just need to know there's another way. Like people are just shelling out all this time and not getting anywhere in so many cases to this industry standard that in my estimation is a dinosaur it's like on its way out. And it, people just need to understand that there is another way. And if they go to Skin Harmonics, there's like a lot of information about it. And of course, all of my expertise is available. They can click a con, like to get a free consult from me that can be scheduled for my website as well. Like break this. We're hypnotized, the beauty industry has hit monetized us and it's not for our own good I'm telling you. And so we have to like, kind of take that back and just know that like there's another way

 Wade T Lightheart: Right on. So thank you, Danny Neifert for such an interesting topic on skin. Please check out her book, Relearning Skincare, the story of skin and the new way, of course, check out the links that we have in the social media. You want to download the PDF on the 10 things that your skin wish could say to you to doing? Or how are those or whatever, but Hey, this has been enlightening. I think I'm all excited. I'm going to go up to my skincare covered and look to see if I'm violating any of these things that I lhave earned about today. So thank you so much for joining us and for our listeners. I want to thank all of you for joining this podcast. If you'd like to smash the like button, if you hated it, make sure you put a comment in either, or we love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you have an awesome day.