A few years ago, if someone told me that I would be launching a skincare range swift on the heels of a brand selling organic period products, I would pretty much have laughed them out of the room.
Once the laughter would have had abated, my first query would have been the most obvious one; what’s the connection between the two?
The connection is precisely what we learned of this past year of running LUX, our sister brand, that specialises in organic and eco-friendly period wear.
We started with the lofty aim of creating period products that were eco-friendly, completely fired up by the devastating images of plastic littering ocean bodies around the world and polluting our soil.
But little did we know of the adverse and sometimes severe impact of plastics on period health.
Bear with us, we will address period and hormonal health for a moment here, but there is a method to our madness here. We will demonstrate to you a vital link and why that is a core consideration when designing a skin care brand for you.
We learned that the plastic fibres that market leading pads were made from, was generating an oestrogen mimicking hormone, also called xeno-estrogen, which was negatively impacting the hormonal balance in women.
Oestrogen is a hormone most of us will recognise, it’s the precise hormone that differentiates women as a gender. But oestrogen does a host of other things in women.
- It guides our period health
- It guides our sexual health together with progesterone and testosterone
- It supports our metabolism; roughly put metabolism covers digestion, excretion, weight gain or loss, by enabling thyroxine (the hormone our thyroid produces) to bind to protein receptors
- It supports our sense of wellbeing by enabling the generation of serotonin
- It ebbs and tides through our monthly cycles to prepare women’s wombs for the arrival of a follicle bearing egg.
That’s a lot of things for one single hormone. It follows therefore that even the slightest imbalance to this hormone can upset all of things listed above.
Oestrogen as it happens also controls the level of dermal water and collagen levels in your skin.
In primordial times and today, the first half of a woman’s monthly cycle sees her ostrogen levels rise until the point she ovulates. Perhaps as an old seduction ritual nature intended for our skin to looks its best, most supple self just as we ovulated and were the most fertile.
All so we appeared attractive to a partner – you may laugh, but while as a society our collective psyche has certainly gone past our very basic instincts, our hormones haven’t.
What follows then is a further merry dance of hormones depending on whether there was a foetus to care for or not. But the result is that the oestrogen levels decrease, then progesterone (a fellow sex hormone in women) increases and finally testosterone (the third of the sex hormones) ebbs.
The result of all this show directly on your skin with dryness, lack of suppleness, enlarged pores and pimples.
I hope then that you can see the connection starting to form. Through our interactions with several hundreds of women we learned that our skin changed along with our cycle, but sadly it appeared that our skincare didn’t.
Life they say is what happens when you are a busy making other plans.
We were busy crusading for better period health for women and learned that we could serve our audience two-fold by supporting their skincare ritual too.
So how do we identify ourselves? Are we a period and health company that also does skincare or a skincare company that also does period health? Simply said, we are both, we are an organisation that creates organic, natural and vegan products to support women’s health.
For the longest time these range of products, skincare or period care, were produced by men for women and so they were created and sold in silos.
But now with an increasing number of women working as founders and at the helm of young ambitious start-ups like ours, means that our endeavours grow organically to offer solutions to the women we serve.
So this is our first step in the direction of skincare.
LUX stands for ‘light’ and so does Cahaya. Our motto is to enlighten and so empower.
With Cahaya, like LUX we are on a journey ourselves. We have carefully curated a set of six products that will care for you during your cycles. Our products are vegan, organic and natural. They are made from the finest ingredients to blend in and compensate for your skin’s needs depending on the time of the month.
Our blogs are here to share with you, the little pearls of wisdom we have acquired, so that you may benefit too.
It would be fantastic to hear your thoughts on skincare. What is your ritual? Have you tracked how your skin changes throughout your cycle? What remedies do you use to keep your skin looking great? What ingredients do you like best for your skin? What is your skin type?
These and so much more. We are always here and waiting.
Welcome to our little club, we hope you will enjoy our products, as before, we aim to serve, because, you matter, period.
