Areti, “What do they teach you in school?” She’s 18, she just joined us, and she’s studying beauty at Kingston College. She said, “We learn to use this machine. It dries acne, tightens skin, and helps with wrinkles.”
I paused. I asked, “But do they teach you what acne is? Why it happens? How to prevent it? How to heal it?”
She said no. They teach how to dry acne. They teach how to erase wrinkles.
So they teach how to manage symptoms after they appear.
And in that moment, it felt like the machine had built its own school, like it had authority, like it was the system. Young people who genuinely want to understand skin are being taught how to suppress it instead, by learning how to use a machine. This is what is taught in schools.
And then, in the same week, I found myself in a completely different conversation. One of you wrote to me and said you couldn’t even wash your face with tap water anymore because it hurt so much. You were buying bottled water just to touch your skin. And here I am, sitting with you, explaining in long emails something that should already be understood.
That it’s not the water. It’s that your skin is not being supported. That when your skin loses balance, everything starts to feel like a threat. Water, air, temperature, touch… everything burns. And that you don’t need to run away from life. You need to bring your body back to homeostasis, back to balance, to the place where it can meet life again.
I swim almost every single day. Water is meditation to me. Water is freedom to me. After healing from MS with meditation for a long time, I thought it was my mind that needed meditation, balance, and coherence only. I neglected my body. Hours of meditation—I needed to return to wholeness every single day. I didn’t realise how much the body holds.
Then I remembered how much freedom I feel when I swim. I returned to swimming. Since then, I feel like a complete human being. I feel whole, I feel free. I feel light as a bird.
But you know how harsh that pool water is. Chlorine, chemicals, people… and yet nothing happens to my skin. Why? Because I bring my skin back into homeostasis every single day. I would not only be ageing rapidly in front of you, but I would also have eczema and an enormous amount of allergies if I didn’t support my skin. I would have no sebum, no microbiome to defend me. I would be allergic to the air, swimming like that every day.
In fact, my black swimsuit turned grey. And yet nothing is happening to my skin. I am the happiest I have ever been.
My body is meditating in that water. I am not avoiding life. Flow ritual on my face and body. Raw Jojoba all over my body to signal sebum production again.
I lose sebum every single day. I have to help my body produce it again, and the most beautiful way is the closest oil on Earth, Raw Jojoba—not the one destroyed and sold on the market as beauty, but raw, real.
And then Rose Mist all over my body. The healthy bacteria on my skin die every single time I am in that water. Rose Mist not only calms my nervous system, but also the ferment inside, together with roses, feeds my microbiome.
And then the real work.
Forest Balm all over my body and the Face Elixir on my face. I feed my microbiome with real food—not natural skincare as a label, but real, whole plants—so that the healthy bacteria that protect me repopulate and grow in numbers again every single day.
In summer, I add the Sun Elixir Body instead of Forest Balm and Sun Elixir Face on top of the Face Elixir, so I adapt to the season instead of running away from it.
My skincare is not beauty or pampering. It is biology. Sebum balance and microbiome health. No pool water affects me.
I am not avoiding life. Because of that, swimming session every day, I feel light, I feel free. I am happy. In fact, the other day, a friend of mine said, “Ezgi, if I do what you do in terms of work every day, I would have terrible anxiety.”
Nothing is happening to me. Because I am supporting my body as I walk through life. We are here to live fully. I don’t know how many times we come here, if you believe in those things like “reincarnation.” Maybe once, twice, ten times… Who knows?
If I don’t live it fully, what’s the point of being here? Instead of making long lists of things to avoid, the question I always ask myself is "how can I make my body more resilient?"
And after healing from MS, I learned that the answer is: “Come back to wholeness. Come back to homeostasis. Come back to balance, Ezgi, every single day.”
Start the next day as if the day is brand new.
Is it meditation? Is it skincare that returns you back to homeostasis? Is it swimming that helps you taste freedom with all of you? Then do all of that.
I always have time to return to wholeness every single day. Because if I don’t, the next day is me dragging a dead elephant on my back.
I would not have the energy to be healing to me or to others. In fact, do not come near me :). But you know what—that’s how most people live. Saving themselves for a holiday destination once a year, where you can live as if every day is a holiday. A day you do not need to run away from.
Because did you realise you take yourself to that holiday destination? And that you are coming with you everywhere you go. There is no running away from yourself.
So don’t work to avoid life, but make your skin, your body, resilient so you can live fully right now, here, just where you are.
I would gladly come back here again and again to live and to speak, not as an authority who teaches how to use machines blindly, but as someone who lives what she says.
Now that’s a tasteful life...
with all my love,
Ezgi