Mir Sensitive Skin Care: Caring for sensitive skin

Caring for your skin

Soothing, balancing, non-pore-clogging Mir is the only range free from irritants, fragrance, essential oils, sulphates, fatty alcohols and comedogenic substances. It is ethically manufactured without testing on animals. Generous samples of all products including Mir Argan Beauty Oil can be found in Trial Pack B - and we ship worldwide!

Skin care is largely a matter of logic and commonsense - the skin has specific needs, it is designed, to work in a certain way and if you want it to look and feel its best, you need to:

Aim for balance: restore and protect the water lipid layer - the acid mantle - and adopt a holistic attitude to skin care - and life.
Listen to your skin and adopt a less is more approach: allow the skin to carry out its functions naturally and with as little interference as possible
Avoid using irritants such as alcohol, cetyl alcohol, cetearyl alcohol, fragrance and essential oils on your face because an irritated skin is more likely to absorb toxins. Avoid chemicals and toxins in body care products - a larger area of skin has greater potential to absorb them.
Avoid using products containing comedogenic (pore-clogging) substances such as avocado, coconut, sunflower and peanut oils

Balance
Have you noticed the yin yang symbol in our logo? Balancing the skin is the focal point of the Mir range. If you only do one thing, always aim for balance - in every sense of the word: Balance the oiliness and dryness of your skin, understand how the acid mantle and pH benefit your complexion and the skin on your body, and remember that beauty is a holistic issue - it's not just about what you use on your skin, but also about what you eat, how fit, healthy and self-aware you are, physically, emotionally, spiritually. You could be the most stunningly beautiful person in the world but if you aren't happy, fulfilled etc then you won't look your best.

Listen to your skin - less is more
Check it twice daily before you wash it. Learn to read what it needs and give it just that. If it doesn't need moisturiser, don't use it. Optimal skin care is simply a matter of common sense and treating your skin with the same respect you'd give to any other bodily organ. Close your eyes and ears to advertisements and beauty articles telling you that you need this serum or that miracle lotion or - worst of all - a peel to make your skin look its best. The skin is a functioning, living, breathing organ which belongs to you - not the beauty industry.

Let it breathe
Mir is a light, water-based, skin-balancing, gentle system because that is precisely what your skin needs in order to be healthy, clear and beautiful. Using heavy, oil-based products to cleanse your face and moisturise - however natural these may be - is simply too heavy for day in, day out use.

Keep fingers off
Keep your fingers off except when cleansing or applying products. Don't use products involving rubbing and scrubbing, unless you want to look like a scrubber. Don’t pick, scratch, pull, pinch, slap, rub it or sit with your hand supporting your face or sleep with your hand under your cheek.

Be ingredients savvy

Ignore what it says on the front of the bottle (the manufacturer's claims and elaborate product descriptions) and read the ingredients list on the back. Some of those incredibly expensive miraculous products touted in beauty magazines contain absolutely dreadful ingredients (see Section 3 for the brilliant botanicals we use and Section 4 for a list of what to avoid).

Just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's good
One of the most expensive moisturisers on the market today contains 16 of our banned ingredients and has a mineral oil base. Just because you've read about a celebrity using something doesn't mean it's good either. Celebrities are paid to endorse products. Use your head, not theirs. (No offence to our celebrity customers!)

Anti-ageing and exfoliating products
Avoid commercially manufactured "anti-ageing" products, peels, AHA products AND do not over-exfoliate or use chemical exfoliants. Irritating your skin - which is what these products do - does not make it look better and will accelerate ageing. Stick with Argan Beauty Oil and Skin Silk Lotion which will keep your skin supple and silky. Gentle Exfoliating Cleanser will do exactly what it says, exfoliate gently. Some people mistakenly think that using grainy exfoliating products is bad for your skin, specially if it is sensitive and that only chemical exfoliants should be used. Absolute nonsense! When you use a grainy product then you are in full control of the degree of exfoliation and provided you keep pressure at a minimum - the idea is to move the product around, not to scrub - then this is beneficial. Whereas with a chemical exfoliant the product may feel smoother but you have no control over the damage that can be done.

Be aware of organic hype

Some organic ranges sound so virtuous and good enough to eat but your skin and stomach are two very different organs and it really is very important to understand that your skin perceives ingredients differently. You may like the idea of cleansing with a blend of edible organic oils which has to be wiped off with a hot face cloth but your skin will perceive this as a pore-clogging mess whose method of removal will lead to redness and irritation.

We were recently sent a sample of a 100% organic product, every ingredient in that product is on our banned list: heavy, edible, pore-clogging edible oils such as avocado, coconut, olive, peanut and sunflower, essential oils which are as irritating to the face as chemical fragrance, comedogenic waxes, cetyl alcohol and cetearyl alcohol known to produce cumulative irritation.

Many truly wonderful natural ingredients are used in percentages too small to be effective. Whenever you see long lists of botanicals you can be sure they are only included to impress potential buyers and are not used at effective levels. After all, the more ingredients a product contains the smaller the amount has to be.

Cool to lukewarm water
Use cool to lukewarm water for washing and rinsing your face, never hot or cold and never, ever apply ice or hot compresses to your face as this stimulates capillary action and can damage capillaries - resulting in permanent redness. Greasy, waxy and oil-based cleansers which claim to melt away your make up have to be used with hot water which will give you a lovely red face and broken capillaries - and invariably leave a pore-clogging residue behind, plus removing them involves skin friction.

Bottled or filtered water may help if you are hypersensitive as tap/faucet water contains chemicals such as chlorine and fluoride. Mir rinses off very quickly so you won't need much.

Keep in a shady place and protect well: – see Sun Protection.

Feed it from the inside
Eat 6 walnuts - preferably straight from the shell, or 12 halves if from a packet to get in those vital Omega 3 oils. This is my personal preference, look into other possibilities if you have a nut allergy - fish or flax oil for example. But, if your skin is oily you may find topping up your Omega 3 intake makes it oilier.

Avoid sugar It really helps to give it up. Whenever my skin flares up it is usually a result of eating sugar or feeling under stress. The odd bit of celebratory cake or piece of dark chocolate, a little sugar in your ready made salad dressing, that won't make much of a difference. But if you can't stop the next day or regularly find yourself tucking into biscuits, desserts, pastries and by "regular" we mean as little as once a week, then stop. Have some dried fruit with your walnuts instead. Use Mir, stay off sugar, go for a daily walk - commit to this for 21 days and you really will see a difference.

Cheese, particularly blue varieties can have an adverse effect on some complexions.

Stress Protection

Be aware of stress and take time off for yourself. Everyone is aware of the importance of sun protection but how about some stress protection? In my opinion stress is much worse for your skin: you can look "off colour", blotchy, spotty, red, flaky and all the frowning and face rubbing will give you a fine set of wrinkles. Stress can make you eat and drink the wrong things which in turn will take their toll on your health and skin - and add a few pounds. When stress is the question, exercise is the answer so get moving, go for a walk, jump on your bike, stick some music on and dance.

Last and least

Ten excess pounds can add ten years to your face. When you lose the definition between jaw and neck then you lose the grace and elegance of your facial contours. Losing a few pounds, if you need to, will do more for your face than any anti ageing product, use our Argan Beauty Oil and Skin Silk Lotion too for a real boost!

Skin Facts

Acid mantle and pH
Hydrogen potential or as it is better known, pH, is measured on a scale of 0 to 14, 0 being the most acidic and 14 the most alkaline. Water is neutral at 7. The skin is covered by the acid mantle and is therefore slightly acidic with a pH of about 5.5.

One of the functions of the acid mantle is to protect the skin from bacteria and the formation of pimples. It also helps to prevent moisture loss. Most foaming cleansers and all soaps, (however natural or moisturising) wash it away.

Skin care products can affect the skin's pH, for example soap and foaming cleansers tend to be alkaline and will lessen the protective functions of the acid mantle, possibly resulting in unhealthy spots and blemishes. That's why we don't recommend that you use soap or foaming products on your face. It doesn't matter how natural or moisturising the soap is, the very method of manufacture renders all soaps too alkaline for the face. Simple as that. In a healthy skin, the pH level will revert to normal within 20 minutes or so of using products which are not pH balanced. But if you constantly bombard your skin with "unbalanced" and/or aggressive skincare products - including most "problem" skin lines and anti ageing products - its health will suffer and its natural functions may be impaired. Gentle, yet effective Mir will care for your skin, respecting the integrity of its natural functions and helping to keep it perfectly balanced.

Exfoliation
As noted above, your skin needs the protection of its acid mantle. Using chemical exfoliants (AHAs etc) disrupts its delicate balance. Use Mir's Gentle Exfoliating Cleanser which contains hydrogenated jojoba oil - not in fact an oil but gentle jojoba scrub beads - puts you in control of the degree of exfoliation. The skin naturally renews itself every 28 days through the process of desquamation: new, plump cells are formed deep within the layers, these flatten as they move towards its surface becoming completely flat and eventually loosening and falling off. The aim of exfoliation is simply to remove any cells which are just about ready to go. The aim is not to peel the skin or interfere with its natural functions.

Cumulative irritation
There are two types of irritation: immediate/acute irritation which is self-explanatory and cumulative irritation, the more worrying of the two because unless you've been researching the link between cosmetic ingredients and skin health for over ten years - as I have - you won't know which ingredients can produce a cumulative irritation and you won't know why it's so important to avoid them. This is why I have over 200 ingredients on my banned list and it's also why Mir is quite unique. It is the only range to exclude fatty alcohols (known to produce cumulative irritation). See our list of ingredients to avoid.

Sensitivity
In recent years there has been a tremendous increase in sensitivity and the incidence of sensitive skin diseases such as rosacea. Despite all the so-called technological advances, cosmeceuticals, miracle creams and claims by cosmetic companies promoting the "healthy" benefits of their "well-researched" products (frankly, rubbish and now proven to be such by the ASA) there are now more people than ever before with prematurely aged, damaged, irritated skin, red noses, pink cheeks, broken capillaries. We can blame stress for some of it - but the stress we experience in our daily lives is minimal compared with what our parents/grandparents experienced in the war years - and they've got better skin!