Hi, I’m Brooke.
I’m a certified nutritionist, founder of nutrition & lifestyle brand Lovewell, model and new mama. With all of those titles, it can be a challenge to balance daily life, and even more challenging to do so in a mindful, healthy way. I’d like to share with you how I came to know Inner Beauty Cosmetics and how this brand has made my mom-preneur journey a little easier and definitely cleaner.
For more than 12 years, I worked in front of the camera, modeling and acting. As talent, it was always vital for me to keep up with appearances. I paid top dollar for cosmetics and skincare that would give me the results I needed to maintain a “camera-ready” appearance. I worked out. I ate well. After becoming a nutritionist, I invested even more time and energy into creating a healthy lifestyle. So you can imagine my surprise when I became pregnant and learned that many of my “#modelife” and “#wellness” choices were actually pregnancy-health no-no’s.
It was time to make a healthy change. It was time to clean things up. My plan? Remove any and everything that’s not pregnancy-safe from my lifestyle.
As a nutritionist, making changes to my diet was the easy part. I read one book on prenatal nutrition and the rest was history. However, when it came to self-care, skin care and beauty, I was a little lost. As I began my quest for pregnancy-safe beauty, the first thing I learned from my research was that there's so much “junk” in the products we buy to care for ourselves. I also learned that many of the products being marketed as “healthy” or “natural” contain harsh chemicals that aren’t good for my health—or my baby’s. I sifted through all of my products. I felt like I was throwing away everything! However, after a couple of months, I began to find my happy place with pregnancy-safe products.
That “happy-place” looked something like this:
- No products with long lists of ingredients I can’t pronounce.
- No aluminum—found in many products but most commonly found as the main ingredient in antiperspirant.
- No retinol—Retinol is an A vitamin; it’s imperative to get an adequate amount of vitamin A during pregnancy, but too much vitamin A can be harmful to baby.
- No formaldehyde.
- No AHAs or BHAs—think “nothing that brightens or peels,” as these products have harsh chemicals that the body absorbs. These chemicals can be harmful to baby and can damage the sensitive skin of a pregnant woman.
Keeping this list in mind helped me navigate my personal care during pregnancy and I still use this same list as a compass for purchases as a breastfeeding mom.
Because of its clean, pregnancy-safe ingredient list, Inner Beauty Cosmetics has become a staple in both my self-care and beauty routines. I can rely on the products to perform well—I enjoy wearing the Skin Tint Foundation for work or running an errand; it feels like nothing, like skin! I love to layer on the Stay Calm Lip Balm + Primer and Shine Infusion Lip Oil at the end of my skincare routine as a bit of a “lip treat".
Brooke Slade
Model + Certified Nutritionist | Founder, Lovewell Nutrition Co.
May 10, 2020
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