RootsCo Skincare is 100% all-natural nontoxic skincare…because beauty should never harm your health! The RootsCo Tallow Face Moisturizing Beauty Balm and Whipped Body Butters are quite literally the bread and butter of our skincare line.
Using simple, clean, all-natural ingredients that I often joke are so clean you could eat them (but I don’t recommend it as they don’t taste very good). Our skin is our largest organ it is so important to take the approach, “if you wouldn’t put it in your mouth you probably shouldn’t put it on your skin”.
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A recent study found the average American woman puts over 550 synthetic chemicals on her body a day….. a DAY! (yikes) And up to four pounds of those chemicals are being ingested into our skin.
Pretty scary right?
There is no wonder that in the US 1 in 8 women have a thyroid issue (10 times the number of men) and 6.7 million American women have an autoimmune disfunction (which is 78.8% higher than American men).
If you are new to the Roots Tribe…. Hey, Hi, Hello there my name is K’Lee. Founder of RootsCo Skincare which is handcrafted by me with love right here in Oklahoma (shop US / support small buniessness) and author behind the Going Back to Our Roots Blog.
A space where I share my near-decade now journey of healing my autoimmune system naturally using food as medicine and clean nontoxic living. So welcome!
So happy to have you here, I hope you will connect with me on Social (join the Instagram Roots Tribe @goingbacktoourroots)!
I truly get so much joy connecting with all of you and hearing your stories and journies.
Where it all began….
Like any great story let’s start from the beginning, shall we? After having my second son something in my body was just off.
Looking back there were SO MANY warning signs my body was trying to give me. See our bodies, much like our cars, send us “check engine lights”. Not sure about you but I literally never look under the hood of my car unless I see smoke (lol).
Even when the lights come on I take it to get checked out.
Well friend our body is sending us signals all the time, we just have not been paying attention or possibly don’t know what to look for.
In high school, I started to get REEAALLY dry skin. Strange but just put some lotion on and went about my life. I started getting ridges in my fingernails and they were really soft and brittle. Nothing little fake nails couldn’t cover up (yall…. I know I know but I was a kid lol).
Then as I hit puberty (TMI coming just warning ya) I started sweating ALL the time… Like for no reason, even if it was freezing cold outside.
OMG this was beyond embarrassing.
So what did 14-year-old K’Lee do?
What all Americans are trained to do, I went to the doctor.
The doctor does what Dr. Mark Hyman calls, “diagnose and adios”. They tell you the name of the condition you have (like that helps) and then write you a prescription…. sound familiar?
Dr. Hyman is my FAVORITE holistic functional medicine doctor, go follow him on youtube or his podcast “The Dr’s Farmacy” because he too believes food is medicine.
I now cringe looking back at how the “fix” for everything seems to cover it up. And most of the time with chemical-filled synthetic BS from the multi-billion-dollar Big Pharma Companies.
That’s another topic for another day.
It was not until too many of these symptoms started to pile up so high that they could no longer be ignored that I finally decided I want to heal, not another pill or cream!
And here we are almost a decade later 100% fully healed!
Yep. If you have an autoimmune issue odds are that doctors and specialists told you “its not something you “heal” from”, or “sorry this is just a disease you have to live with and we try to keep control of”, both of which I heard multiple times.
Fast forward and cutting out the foods in the “SAD” Standard American Diet (coincidence I think not) and eating clean whole foods, cooking from scratch, and now even growing my own food in my little Urban Backyard Garden.
I can say without a doubt that the saying “food is medicine or it is poison” is complete truth!
Many of the diseases and illnesses we see in America today are directly caused by the foods we are eating.
But I am afraid stopping at cleaning up our diets (foods), aka what we are putting IN our bodies, alone is not enough….
There is one other big elephant in the room and it is what we are putting ON our skins that just as deeply affects our health.
We have all heard the lotions and shampoo commercials/ads, many of which have celebrities we all know are not using a Walmart brand shampoo…. saying that the products are “enriched” with vitamins (insert the list) or contain Aleo Vera Gel with a BIG aloe leaf on the front.
Couple of things to note here.
- These companies KNOW that the products they are selling are being ingested into your skin, why else would they tell you it has vitamins and aloe vera gel, etc added to it? But what they don’t tell you is to flip over the product and look at that laundry list of who knows what that it ALSO contains. Note the vitamins and aloe gel are most likely a synthetic knock-off cooked up in a lab somewhere for two reasons 1. it’s cheaper and 2. it’s more shelf-stable and could last well a decade. Pretty crappy right? They know it is sinking into our skin yet still use ingredients that other countries like the UK have banned. Fun fact the UK has banned over 1,300 ingredients that are known carcinogens from their skincare and cosmetics the US has banned 11. (mind blown? Mine was to the first time I discovered it!)
- Second, the whole spill about “infused with” then they go on and on about the “natural” plants and vitamins they infused it with…..this my friends is called “greenwashing”. A brilliant form of redirecting our attention.
We have all purchased something with a coconut on it thinking, “oh yeah coconut lotion” turned it over, and NOPE not even one ingredient in it is from a REAL coconut.
Cosmetic Industries Dirty Little Secretes
Though there are great tools nowadays like the (free) Think Dirty App that will tell us with a little more clear what the heck the ingredients lists on the back of a shampoo bottle mean. There is one more little bump in the road to really getting clarity as far as ingredients go….
“Trade Secretes”
Under the trade secret protection, cosmetic and skincare companies do not have to list ingredients that can be blanked under words like “fragrances” or “natural additives” and so on.
There could literally be ten to a hundred ingredients hidden under that one word. And worse, the companies are not even required to share those ingredients list with regulating entities unless they are under federal review for a lawsuit.
One of the biggest “scandals” that happened not too long ago was the $100,000,000 lawsuit against Johnson and Johnson the Pharmaceutical giants (quickly may I draw your attention to “pharmaceutical” giants…. not sure the first thing that comes to your mind when I say Johnson & Johnson but the pharmaceutical company was not the first thing I thought of……..but its true J&J fall under the Big Pharma category….chew on that for a moment).
Forbs said, “Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson JNJ-2.1% wants to claim bankruptcy to side-step any more talcum claims, which was a primary ingredient in its popular baby powder. Right now the company is facing more than 38,000 cases that allege J&J talc products caused cancer, after agreeing to a $100 million settlement back in 2021. The bankruptcy set up claim is even more concerning for Black women, who 15 years ago, were selected by J&J as “the right place” to sell more baby powder to, specifically targeting “under-developed geographical areas.”
Johnson & Johnson’s $70MM lawsuit in Europe for Bribery
If this was not proof enough, and not to pick on just J&J ….. but I feel as a baby product company SHAME on them and they help to drive my point all the way home.
Because if a company who we all know most for their Baby line is willing to cut these corners selling us, the consumers, how they are “the safe and loved baby products” …… then just imagine what else is going on!
J&J went to court and was found guilty of bribing doctors in European resulting in a $70,000,000 fine. The company tried to hide the illegal activity with offshore accounts, sludge funds, and shame contracts to cover its tracks.
Then they started snitching on other companies in hopes to lessen their fines….. OMG, I am glad I do not have emojis on here lol I would be blowing it up on here!
Friend this is just one company, one example. I don’t know about yall but 13 years ago the internet wasn’t what it is today, and I did not know what I know today, and I used this TRASH on my sons.
That to me is the most infuriating thing, using toxins on myself is one thing (knowingly or not), but on my babies?!?!?! UNACCEPTABLE!
You can read that full story here
Soooo now that I have your head spinning, and blood boiling I know you are full of emotions and your mind is racing with thoughts like “omg what the heck, what products am I using that are full of toxins?”
Well, let us dive into that next. I have a downloadable, printable free eBook for you to help guide you through your everyday products so you can check all of them and be 100% sure you are not using toxic ones in your home or on your body!
How to Ditch and Switch
Now before you go throwing your phone or laptop off your lap and running through your house with the trash can…..you may be thinking “did she just read my mind?”. (lol)
No. I know what you are thinking because I too was in your spot. My head was spinning, blood boiling at the fact this was even legal thinking that the regulated entities would NEVER let this happen!
But I quickly found in my research that, well simply put, this is the ugly face of capitalism…. the dark side that is ruled by money and greed at any cost.
I will never look at toothpaste the same again. The very first thing I discovered was how the fluoride in the toothpaste will completely throw our hormones out of wack…..
Yep. Floride. The same thing your dentists encourage you to use and even give you an ‘extra’ strong treatment of on your teeth cleanings. That fluoride.
Almost a decade later I still get “concerned” talks from the dental hygienists that are new (boy do they not know what is about to hit them as I can be a wealth of information they didn’t learn in dentist school lol).
Toothpaste of all things?!?!
So, my next question was ‘if toothpaste is harming my health what else could be?’ a question I am still finding new answers to this very day! That was defiantly a pandora’s box question.
I hope after learning what you have here today you are filled with that very same (pandora’s box) question…..” if my ___(filling the blank)___ is harming my health or my family’s health, what else could be?”
The printable list above gives you a checklist to take around your home with your investigator’s hat on and start questioning EVERYTHING!
Simple things most people in America have all-around their homes, like candles?
Seems harmless right? Who doesn’t love a good fall Bath & Body Works candle?
Wrong!
Candles contain this dirty dirty little ingredient called VOC or volatile organic compounds that are found in ALL artificial fragrances (so if you see the word fragrance on your shampoo, conditioner, laundry soap, hand soaps, and lotions, you get the gist….it means it has VOC’s in it toss that sh$% in the trash asap).
VOC is this ultrafine particle that has been found in the deepest tissue in our lungs ( WHAT?!?!) and they are able to break through our blood-brain barrier this is the protection wall our brain has in order to keep out toxins. Darn the mad scientist who created something to outsmart our own brains and do our brain damage at the same time!
My video game-loving boys would call this a “double kill”.
The other havoc those nasty little VOCs can hit our bodies with are:
- Cardiovascular issues (it can change the rhythm of our heartbeat….yes that is as dangerous as it sounds)
- Lungs – kinda obvious but knowing they have found VOCs in people’s deepest tissues of their lungs is absolutely horrifying
- Endocrine system – this is like knocking down every domino when it comes to your hormones
- Nervous system – why not lets hit all the big 3 + the added brain damage why not at this point
It has also been found to cause cancer, issues in toddlers such as chronic ear infections and diarrhea, cause infertility and miscarriages, and on and on…..
These VOCs go mostly undisclosed due to trade secrets (as mentioned above) so they do not have to disclose to us, the consumers what is really in the products under the “fragrances” name.
In a study I was reading they said that less than 10% of volatile ingredients are actually disclosed on the labels (so even tools like the Think Dirty App cannot fairy rate them not fully knowing what is in them).
A recent study by Steinburg suggested that the known effects most commonly experienced are:
- Headaches & migraines
- asthma attacks
- Dermatitis (eczema)
- Infant chronic earache & diarrhea
- Neurological problems
- Ventricular fibrillation (the heart is not beating properly)
I really hope that this quick overview of just one little ingredient that is found in JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING we buy is really something we need to be on the lookout for.
Download the printable checklist and I have lots of clean swaps you can make.
If you are interested in Thieves from Young Living reach out to me I would love to see if you qualify for a free $200 Gift Card so you can get the whole thieves cleaning line which replaced every single cleaning item in my home. (click the button and in the message let me know – have you never used YoungLiving and want to try it out? Mention your interest in the $200 gift card)
One-stop-shop. Easy Peasy!
RootsCo Clean Nontoxic Skincare
RootsCo Skincare is a 100% all natural, clean, nontoxic skincare line that is just about so clean you could eat it (I do not recommend it, but that is how clean it is).
Growing up in my moms salon, later putting myself through collage as a skincare specialist and makeup artist then working in the Medi-Spa industry around plastic surgeons you could say starting a skincare company is well going back to my roots!
Knowing what I know now about just how much toxins in our personal hygiene products, our skincare, in our makeup and beauty products effect our health my goal with RootsCo Skincare was to keep it clean and simple.
There are less than ten ingredients per skincare product I make and most of them you would easily recognize. Like Coconut oil, or Olive Oil, Tallow ….. ok this one if you are like me you may have never heard of but it has been used for literally thousands of years.
It wasn’t until the last 100 years or so that “fat became the enemy” did we stop using it. Heck it use to be what McDonalds french fries were fried in. When the farming industry decided to short cut the process and use seed oils did tallow or lard become a thing of the past.
We are now seeing the unfortunate side effects of that medically today.
Tallow (read the full benefits here) is found in almost every product RootCo sells because of its endless benefits for our skin!
RootsCo Skincare moto is ….because beauty should never harm your health!
Please check out RootsCo here if in doing your research you need to ditch some toxic products and make the clean natural nontoxic switch. We worked our best to not only make clean skincare, and to make it SO good that you will not miss those chemically filled ones you tossed in the trash.
But we also worked to simplify life. Be as clean, no waste, and eco friendly as we possibly could all while making your life easier!
Take our RootsCo Tallow Based Cold Pressed Shampoo Bars (if you have longer color treated hair check out our RootsCo Soap Nut Shampoo bars here) these shampoo bars are next to all all in one!
- Shampoo
- Shaving soap
- Face wash
- Body wash
Shaving creams are another chemically filled product, and if your buying the ones in the arosol cans they also have lighter fluid compounds to be able to push that foamy cream out (yep you read that right lighter fluid.. that is one reason they are highly flamible)!
All you need for RootsCo shampoo bar to replace it is a loofa. Get the shampoo bar lathered up nicely and apply just as you would a shaving cream . You will love the glide of the soap and the fact that you are using something safe, seeing as how ladies when we shave we are opening ou our skin folicules and anything we put on it awhile or after shaving is sinking even deeper into our skin!
RootsCo Shampoo bars are gental enough for babies and up.
So imagine this, you are taking a trip and packing your personal hygiene products and instead of needing to get a million tiny TSA approved travel contaniors for liquid for Shampoo, Body wash, Face wash, Shaving cream, then add the “baby” versions too….all you need is one bar of soap!
Dad, Mom, and all the kiddos CHECK! (Anyone with longer hair would need a conditioner as normal, but all my body just use the shampoo bar and they are good to go).
We are also not piling up the land fills with wasted plastics (that also leach into those products as well). No Waste CHECK!
We also buy our grass-fed grass-finihsed tallow at RootsCo from local rejenerative farmers. Support local farmers doing it right – and they are the minority for sure, CHECK!
Also, due to the lack of interest in the last 100 years of beef fat, most farmers and butchers just throw it away (our ancestors would be flipping in their graves if they could see us now! That was one of the most coveted parts of the animals due to all the nutrients it provides). So sustainable + rejenerative (aka healing the planet) + no waste, CHECK!
If you are local to Oklahoma here are two of our favorite family owned Grass-Fed Grass-Finished rejenerative farmers we buy all our beef from!
Conclusion
Ok, friends that was a LOT of information on how to find those nastey hidden toxins in your everyday products so that you can keep your health and the health of your family your top priority! Don’t forget to grab your free printable eBook that also has some pretty great and budget friendly DIY’s for you!
Also, browse the RootsCo Skincare store before you go. Not only are you supporting a small US based business, who takes a lot of pride in supporting local businesses myself, but you are helping our planet all while making your everyday so much simpler! Win! Win! Win!
Thank you for your visit today, I do this all for you my friend! Hoping my years of research the long and slow way will rocket full your clean nontoxic journey to better health and longevity!
Cheers!
K’Lee
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