Our Vision
Health + Beauty … at what cost?
The cruel irony of the beauty industry is that most products are designed to give the appearance of health, when in fact the glows and glistens they provide are often detrimental to our health. The intimate, kissably close world of beauty and skin care is overrun by many of the same companies that make harsh household detergents and toxic cleaning agents, and guess what - their ingredient lists are often remarkably similar. Why? Because it’s cheaper to add a slippery petrochemical bi-product than it is a high quality, perishable organic ingredient. We're talking everything from everyday drugstore lip gloss all the way up to Dr. So-and-so “medical” lines with their extravagant claims, or the most exclusive high end department store brands. The worst part is these beauty companies are not required by law to disclose their toxic ingredients. They can simply put the word “fragrance” on the ingredient list, for example, and thereby happily wash their hands of a host of known cancer-causing, neurotoxic, hormone disrupting agents employed to tart up perfumes, cosmetics, and skin care products. Did you ever wonder how it is that your skin care products have a shelf life that rivals Twinkies?
Compound exposures = BIG problem. How could a “gentle” face wash contain potentially dangerous ingredients? Here's how: Cosmetic companies often place inexpensive ingredients with known dangers (like parabens, phthalates, sodium laurel sulfate, lead (yes, lead!)) in their products in supposedly “safe” levels. This cynical strategy completely ignores the fact that when that same application (like washing your face) is repeated daily for an entire year, the ingredient builds up and is stored in adipose tissue (like our breasts) at anything but safe levels. To that add the environmental toxins which we move among on a daily basis, and it becomes clearer why allergies are rampant; why breast and reproductive cancer is on the rise; and why more children have neurological disorders and suffer from juvenile cancers than ever before.
Can I afford to care? YES! This is one area where the answer is quite literally at hand. Do we want you to fill your cabinet with Venus & Vetiver products? Yes, we do, but it’s more important to us that you take care of yourself. When your budget doesn’t allow the full complement of botanical formulae, you can still take good care of your skin, simply and organically. The trick with natural products is efficacy- so many (present company excluded) don’t seem to have a noticeable effect. Food products bought straight from the market shelf - things like eggs, avocados, honey, shea butter, castile soap, olive leaf extract, and vitamin e – can be used to great effect, and tide your skin over without having to resort to toxic, ineffective alternatives. In fact, those three aisles at the supermarket designed to make you think you need a different colored plastic bottle for every body part? You don’t have to go down them anymore.
Email us at if you have particular questions about food as body care (this includes hair, teeth, face, you name it….)
A Course Correction. We can decide what to put on our (and our children’s) bodies. It requires us to educate ourselves a bit more, and to come to the realization that nobody is going to take care of our good health but US. You don’t have to become a vigilante, but you could decide that you won’t put anything on your skin that is unpronounceable. To go a step further, you could commit yourself to bringing about your own good health by putting products in and on your body that actually SUPPORT good health.
Judy Godec, GerminatrixI started V &V out of the belief that self care is the very basis for women as caregivers of children and the planet. WE are the medicine that will change our destructive trajectory.