Most of you have heard about slow food. It’s a movement that promotes local food and traditional cooking. The goal is for one to slow down and sit peacefully while enjoying a conversation with friends and family while relishing delicious cuisine without any hurry. Bravo Southern Europe, you’ve mastered this!

What we eat and how we eat it is becoming very important to many people, placing the onus on using high quality and naturally produced ingredients. Out of the slow food movement came the slow fashion movement. In slow fashion it is important where the clothes come from, where were they made, what they are made of and who made them. In general, slow fashion recommends against buying too many clothes from popular chain stores and instead advocates minimalism and focusing on ensuring good quality materials sourced locally and not in a factory at the far end of the world.

Lately, we have noticed the rise of a new trend following similar lines: slow beauty. Slow beauty encourages a lifestyle that concerns our beauty and precisely how we should take care of it. Have you ever noticed that amazing feeling when you are at a Spa? Its very mention conjures images of a warm and cozy place, with no stress and where no one rushes about while you lie back with eyes closed and enjoying a relaxing massage. This is the essence of slow beauty, encouraging you to treat your body in a ritualistic way, with no rush and no short-cuts. This is exactly how we need to pamper our skin every day at home.

This philosophy flies in the face of most cosmetics manufacturers who promote quick fixes and promise immediate results. Slow beauty makes no allowances for chasing artificial youth and fighting nature with fillers and botox injections, either. Instead, it places great importance on being particular about what products you use, and whether they truly are beneficial to your skin, your health and the environment.

Live Slowly? How is that possible?

Choose products with more natural ingredients

Many things that we put on our skin can go directly into our blood stream. This means that chemical based product can get absorbed and enter our bodies while fed directly to the skin. Natural cosmetics are definitely a better option, if you care about what goes in your body as well as on it. The best way is to start by learning how to read ingredients and understanding how to choose products that are safe to use on your skin. Consider using powder face masks, which are fresher, avoid preservatives and are not invasive for the skin.

Change your mindset about aging

It is very easy to feel pressured to emulate the models you see everywhere – with no fat, no breakouts on their faces, perfect skin with no wrinkles. This causes us to also start to filter our pictures before putting them on social media. But we must remember that this is all an illusion. That girl staring at you from the billboard is probably quite young and the image is heavily altered. Slow beauty wants us to embrace aging as a natural process in life that cannot be stopped. That being said, we still need to pay attention to our body and take care of it to the best of our ability. Slow beauty is a long-term process and it is unrealistic to expect visible results after just a single application. It requires an investment of time, effort and patience, just like in Ayurveda.

Be ecological

Choosing cosmetic products carefully is important not only for your skin but also for the environment. It is not sufficient that the product be made with natural ingredients and is helpful for the skin, if it ends up causing damage to the environment with plastic or non-ecological packaging. Slow beauty requires you to pause and think: do we really want to use this product, and do we want to contribute to any negative effects it might be causing?

Be true to yourself

Slow beauty is a movement that asks us to slow down and give ourselves the breaks we deserve and embrace our diversity. Slow beauty does not prescribe any fixed beauty standards, instead promoting diversity in beauty because beauty in itself can have no definition. Though it is hard to ignore the pressure to conform to certain beauty standards, we need to cherish and celebrate our individuality. This is the essence of slow beauty, loving the skin we have, giving it the best and taking care of it. We are all individuals with different needs, and we need to explore and discover for ourselves which skin care and beauty rituals are right for us.

What do you think about slow beauty? Is it easy to “live” slow beauty?