Beauty Care & Skin Health: Detox with TCM!

Skin Beauty Care health is what we all want! Chinese medicine can show you what you’re doing wrong, and what could help.

And you’ll pick up some theory along the way. Here goes!

Your Single Most Important Organ? Your Lungs!

At what point at birth are you reckoned to be OK?

Well, the first thing is, can you breathe? If not, no matter how fast your heart is going, you won’t last long. You have to breathe!

In Chinese medicine, the first listed energy organ is/are your Lungs. (Then the next one, believe it or not, is your Large Intestine! You’ll see why later.)

So for beauty care skin purposes, your lungs come first!

Your Lungs rule your Skin

What does that mean? (Picture is of Sage, from my garden: one of many herbs used for ‘restoring’ the lungs, stomach and intestines.)

The Chinese system of medicine is, in its own way, as sophisticated as Western Medicine. It can deal successfully with many problems that Western medicine struggles with: it thinks about health very differently, and expresses things in another way too.

One way it differs is that it puts parts of your body under different energy organs, or zang-fu. For example …

• Flesh and muscles come under your Spleen
• Tendons and eyesight comes under your Liver
• Blood comes under your Heart
• Bones and joints come under your Kidneys
• Your skin comes under your Lungs.

What that means is that, other things being equal, if you have problems with your flesh and muscles (overweight, underweight, losing weight etc), your acupuncturist would probably first consider your Spleen energy. Or at least, it would be very high on his list.

For skin problems, he thinks of your Lungs.

Your Lungs open and close your pores

This has partly to do with adjusting your body’s temperature through perspiration. But it goes much further because you have various kinds of skin pores, and they all need to work properly. That includes the pores that moisturise and oil your skin.

So dry, oily, scaly or just troublesome skin, your Lungs are in charge. That’s really important when it comes to your beauty care skin.

Learning to Breathe properly

There aren’t many bodily functions that you can control without help!

• Can you regulate the speed at which your liver metabolises?
• How do you slow down the action of your large intestine?
• Tell me how to make your kidneys work better?
• But you CAN learn to breathe properly! As you read this, you can take a large breath or a small one, or even stop breathing for a minute or so (please don’t!). You have enormous control over what and how you breathe!

You can also seek better air quality. Clean air is essential for your beauty care skin health.

• Avoid air contaminated eg with smoke
• Go for a walk at lunch, preferably outside in fresh air
• Spend spare time outside, playing games, gardening, walking in the countryside, and (carefully) tanning your skin

What naturally benefits your skin beauty care will benefit your lungs.

Why is this so important for Skin Beauty Care?

In Chinese medicine, your Blood nourishes all of your body. As you’ll read if you click on that link to the page on Blood, there are a number of reasons, besides your Lungs, why these need attention:

• What you choose to eat and drink (see Nutrition)
• How you store and prepare it, ready for consumption
• How you eat or drink it (see also Stomach)
• What your Spleen does with what you eat
• How your inherited constitution and energy help
• How your circulation and thoughts affect it all (Heart)
• What your Lungs pick up from, and return to, the air, before your heart pumps the blood off round your system

Detox! – the word we think of first

Here’s a picture of a pot of parsley growing in my garden.

Parsley is rich in Vitamin C and its root is used for warming and moistening, but also nourishing and restoring.

Why not grow your own herbs?

But actually, given half a chance and the right foods, sleep, water and air, it can often do it naturally given a few days.

It would be better to avoid stimulants, alcohol and more garbage-foods during that time, and do what you body actually wants, (which might include an occasional fast) and you’ll detox perfectly naturally.

Talking of stimulants, if you often take what many countries regard as illegal substances, you may be over-stoking your Fire energy. (This may make more sense if you read our page on 5 Elements acupuncture. Also the page on Fire.) The Chinese discovered that one class of foods has the ability to steady your Fire energy. They are the bitter foods. Include them in your diet.

Skin Beauty care health comes together when a whole range of factors come together.

Lifetime of a Skin cell

The cells in your blood that make it red each live for only about 4 months. They nourish all your body and other cells are nourished by them. How long do your skin cells live for? 14 – 21 days!

The reason is that you shed skin all the time. That dust in your house? Probably a good deal of it comes from, or rather off, you.

That means that if you have bad skin, within a few weeks of starting to do the right thing, your skin can be improving, as the old, poor quality skin cells get replaced. But that still comes back to your Blood and that’s why the right food is so important.

(And what will you be doing with that old, bad skin during those 3 weeks? Why! You’ll be plastering on rejuvenants and moisturisers to try to keep it alive – when it’s dead! That’s a bit like putting moisturiser on the clot that naturally forms over a wound after you cut yourself. But your body forms the clot only as a temporary measure and eventually discards it when new, healthy skin has formed underneath it. When discarded, the clot takes all that expensive moisturiser with it.) 

Bad food

In most countries until around 150 years ago, ‘bad’ food was only rarely available. Given that, and that our bodies evolved during times of only sometimes plenty and often famine, we are made to store food reserves when we can.

Also, our bodies can put up with the occasional garbage. (Perhaps it’s even quite good for us, just like Candida, if under control in our guts!)

But from around 100 years ago, depending on your country, all sorts of luxury foods became available. Once just there for festivals, they were on sale all year round. These luxuries include:

• sugar and sweeteners
• sweet fruit eg bananas, appropriate in hot countries, less so in cold, wet places because of the energetic actions of the fruit (for example, bananas are sweet and give you energy, yes, but they are moistening and cooling in nature, according to Chinese medicine. Is that what you want if you live in a cold, wet country? Also, too much sweet food weakens the action of your Spleen, and that tends to produce Damp and Phlegm.)
• refined food (white flour, white sugar, tasteless preservatives) which mess with your large intestine (and your Spleen)
• concentrated foods – can be harder to digest
• ice cream and chilled foods (both weaken your Stomach Yang energy and ice-cream may also produce Damp and Phlegm)
• oils that keep fresh indefinitely, because ‘purified’ to remove the necessary nutritional bits that do you good, but make them go off quickly (read Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill)
• preserved foods
• flavourings

Each of these has its place but not as a daily food.

What’s More for Natural Skin Beauty Care …

We all took more exercise (see Lungs, above). I had to bicycle to school in the 1940s and 1950s, and many walked.

Sometimes children walked a mile to school in the morning, back home for lunch and then back to school for the afternoon, then walked home again after school: 4 – 6 miles every day! At weekends we played outside.

So we ate less and exercised more. Now we eat more and exercise less.

Not good for beauty care skin health.

What’s more …

Food used to come from good earth

Over-farming for yield has meant farmers use fertilisers to squeeze more crops from the ground. The fertilisers used are usually just three – phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium – instead of the necessary 70 plus minerals that make up the earth. 

So, put in three and take out 70.

Eventually the crops, lacking the soil nutrition they need, become weaker, more prey to bugs and beasties. Then farmers need herbicides, pesticides and fungicides to prevent plant disease and maintain yields. Those often end up in us.

So does the sub-standard food.

Eventually the top-soil blows away leaving – perhaps – sand-dunes.

Consequently, the foods we eat are less rich in essential ingredients.

That doesn’t help your blood. That doesn’t help your beauty care skin health regime either!

But even that’s not all …