The Art of Daydreaming and Other Self-Care Secrets

As part of the Green Parent Natural Beauty Awards 2024, we asked 4 beauty brands to share their top wellbeing secrets

Arati Nar is the Founder & CEO at www.anaraskincare.com. She lives in West London.

“Launching my own skincare brand underpinned by my very own holistic ethos of self-care has been a life-long dream of mine. Everything about a beautiful skincare routine delights me. It’s been a consistent feel-good part of my life. When my skin is nourished, healthy, and looking radiant, I feel set to take on the day.

It’s this feeling of calm and empowerment that I wanted to share with the world. The Anara Skincare range has been designed to support the well-ageing process. Our products give your skin everything it needs to age beautifully and gracefully, whilst also delighting your senses. I wanted to create more than just skincare. I wanted to create a unique Anara Experience that is inclusive in the true sense of the word and makes you and your skin feel special and pampered.

Every step in the creation of Anara Skincare has been filled with honesty, integrity and loads of love.

I love all the products in the range and use them all daily, but if I had to choose just one it would have to be Radiance Moisturiser. I love how comforting it feels on my skin and the glow it gives and if I don’t use it for even one day my skin misses it.

It is a multi-use moisturiser, to be used day and night around your eye area, face and neck, and as it’s an all-in-one product, it’s also very handy to travel with. It was also the product that was the most challenging to perfect. It went through over 70 iterations before I signed it off and then a further one year of testing to get to the product we have today. It therefore feels extra special that it is our best seller.  

My ideal day

I like to start my day early and naturally wake when the sun rises. Natural light and being surrounded by nature give me a lot of joy. It’s when I am at my most productive and creative too.

I love variety in my day and tend to play a lot of different roles as any small business owner does, so the days that consist of interacting with customers, exploring new business opportunities, combined with being able to let my creative juices flow with design and photography are my perfect kind of days.

I always promised myself a good work/life balance with this business, so I like to spend my evenings surrounded by family and friends. My day is not complete until I have my few minutes of beautiful calm with my skincare routine at the end of the evening and I love to end my routine with a relaxing facial massage using our Replenishing Face Oil and Rose Quartz Gua Sha.

3 self-care secrets

1. Having quiet time to myself to truly get lost in my thoughts and my daydreams is my ultimate self-care secret. It gives me time to reflect and to clear my mind after a busy day and it also enables creativity to flow within me.
2. I am a true believer in the power of positive energy, both from within myself but also by surrounding myself with people that make me feel uplifted. It’s essential for my emotional well-being.
3. And of course, skincare is very powerful self-care for me. It’s my precious time for my skin and my soul at the start and end of each day.

Weiwei Wu is the founder of www.mybemora.com. She lives in the East Riding of Yorkshire, with her husband, Scott and children Tyler, 8 and Alexa 7. 

"I was inspired by my mother was the advocate of everything natural when I was growing up, and my eldest, Tyler. He suffered from eczema on his face when he was 8 months old, and I wanted to help him with a natural alternative, other than just zapping it with steroid cream.  

I love all my products of course! But at the moment as we are getting into warmer season, I particularly love our hydration boosting and refining serum. It's truly inspired by my mother. Besides a good skincare routine, she was very much of the mindset that ‘you are what you eat, if it’s good enough to eat, it must be good enough for your skin too!’ I remember some wonderful ingredients that she would use in our diet, and they all served different purposes.

For example, in summer, she always used to cook Snow Mushroom with Lotus Seed dessert soup, it has a silky texture and it was incredibly hydrating and cooling for the hot summer weather in the South of China where I was born.

Little known fact: Snow Mushroom extract is regarded as the plant based Hyaluronic acid. Each molecule holds up to 1,000 times of its own body weight in water, and that alone was good enough reason for me to incorporate this wonderful ingredient into our products!

3 self-care secrets

1. Eat well 
2. Make sure you clean/wash your face before bed every day! (then apply your favourite skincare products of course) 
3. Do something that makes you relaxed and happy (stress causes breakouts!), whether that's go out for a walk, spend time with your besties, or read your favourite book. 

Inge Cronje and Adele Da Graca are the founders of edendaysbody.com. This mother and daughter team live close by on the beautiful Gower peninsula in South Wales. Adele and her husband have 3 young children and a lively Bengal. 

“When my youngest son was born and suffered from eczema, our search started for products that I was comfortable putting on his skin. With that came the awareness of product ingredients, how they are sourced and their effect on nature.

We wanted to formulate clean beauty products with honest, ethical ingredients that are 100% natural and affordable. With that came the responsibility to take green living full circle.  It stretches beyond eco-packaging, starts with sourcing sustainable ingredients, and ends with biodegradable formulated products. 

Without a doubt my favourite product is Ylang Ylang Elixir. The smell is just heavenly and I love how versatile it is. I use it on nearly everything! Hair, bath, face and as my body moisturising oil. 

An ideal day

We both love a sea glass day! In reality, these “off-site business meetings” are when we take a break from it all and go down to our favourite beach, Caswell, to comb the little caves for sea glass treasures. We grab a coffee and can walk around for hours. Dream day!

3 self-care secrets

1. Gut health has to be first on the list for self-care as it is so important to your well-being.  Skin, hair, mood …
2. We both love a salt bath and it does wonders to relax your muscles and draw out toxins.
3. Scalp detox – underrated but your hair will thank you!  When my hair feels a bit limp and dull, I use Clay Day to get rid of the build-up of product and mineral deposits.

Alison MacColl lives with her husband Alistair and their two children, Iona, 11, and Angus, 9, as well as the family’s 12-year-old Yorkshire Terrier. She is the founder of Castle Apothecary

"During lockdown, I got bleeding eczema on my left hand due to all the handwashing and hand-sanitising, and made worse as I wasn’t using lovely carrier oils in aromatherapy massage treatments. While people baked cakes at home, I started making natural liquid handwashes, creams and lotions from the oils and butters I’d normally use in my clinics. Friends visited and wanted to buy them so I arranged for cosmetic assessments and insurance. I then attended a local summer fair and people loved the products, especially the Gardener’s lavender & rosemary hand cream (with Scottish and French lavenders), and things took off from there.

I love them all our products! My favourite is the Gardener’s hand & body lotion which I designed to be used after washing my hands with the Wee Bairns fragrance-free honey & oats soap. 

An ideal day

I get up, shower and do the school run and either go for a walk in the local park or hit the gym. When I get back to base, I grab a cup of coffee and I’m either having an admin day in the office replying to customers, labelling products, planning, processing and shipping orders or a manufacturing day in the apothecary where I set up and sanitise all the equipment needed for the day.

I love variety and have days dedicated to only soap making or only creams, lotions, cuticle oils and emulsifying scrubs. And it’s great when I can create multi-batches on the same day especially as my batch quantities are increasing. Then it’s time to go and collect the children from after school club, have dinner then head out to take them to whatever is on that evening, everything from swimming lessons to Guides and Cubs.

3 self-care secrets

1. Drink lots of water to avoid thirst, especially in the morning
2. Avoid caffeine after 3 p.m. 
3. Get a great night’s sleep and create your own bedtime ritual. I like to soak my feet in the Gardener’s lavender & tea tree liquid handwash then massage the Gardener’s hand or foot creams (whichever is nearest) into my feet so they feel lovely and soft the next morning.

MORE INSPIRATION

READ About all the winners of this year's Green Parent Natural Beauty Awards in the Beauty Bible, available with issue 120 of The Green Parent, which will be published next week. Click here to get your copy before everyone else.

DISCOVER For our next self-care instalment from beauty brand founders, check back on Friday 19th to read about why Pilates is the best!