Lifestyle, Mamazine Moment

“The Beauty Chef” Carla Oates on Fermentation + Probiotics

| November 28, 2017

Based in Sydney Australia’s Bondi Beach, Carla Oates has been researching, writing and teaching about organic beauty and health for the past fifteen years. She is the author of best selling book “Feeding Your Skin“, editor of Wellbeing Beauty Book and a natural beauty columnist. She hosts regular Beauty Chef workshops in Sydney. She is also the Goodwill Ambassador of Australian Organic.

Her beliefs that organic skincare living food is the most sustainable choice for the health and wellbeing of both the individual and the environment is aligned with our principals at Mama Glow. She is a healthy chef and formulator. Her lifestyle site and store features beauty products and herbs from her kitchen and garden and now they can be yours.

What is The Beauty Chef brand?

At The Beauty Chef, we believe beauty begins in your belly. Digestive health is key for healthy, radiant skin. We embrace the time-honored art of fermentation in our products because fermenting ingredients not only pre-digests them to make the nutrients more available for the body to use, but it creates probiotics to help balance digestion.

Our gut is where 70% of the immune system lies, where we metabolize hormones, where we make detoxifying enzymes and where we make nutrients, and so much of what goes on in our digestive system can impact our skin. The skin, hair and nails are the last places to receive nutrients, as they go to more important organs first, so nutrition is important for glowing skin, and fermented foods give you dense, super charged nutrition.

My topical products also embrace fermentation for the same reasons. The nutrients are made more bio-available for the skin to use and probiotics help balance the skin. They are super active and super healthy. I love the fact that lacto-fermentation is a completely natural biological process too. We don’t need to make super-duper synthetic ingredients in a lab (that may send our skin into imbalance and often our health too) to achieve “active”.

Here, we have this incredible process that turns natural ingredients into super natural and active ingredients – active, balanced and rejuvenating. And it is all done by nature!

What inspired you to embark on the path of wellness and beauty?

I established The Beauty Chef in 2009. I had been researching the benefits of plants and natural biological processes such as lacto-fermentation for around 10 years and was writing in the area of natural health and beauty. I had published a book called Feeding Your Skin with Penguin (in 2004) and had a DIY beauty column for the Sunday Telegraph for eight years as well as being the natural beauty editor for Wellbeing Mag for the past 12 years. During this time I made all my own skincare from scratch from plants and organic foods and was giving them to friends and family to use. I created quite a demand and that demand grew to friends of friends. It seemed a natural progression to create a brand.

One thing that really stood out, too, was the difference in people’s skin when they ate my lacto-fermented vegetables. People were addicted to my fermented veggies and kefir coconut water – hence why The Beauty Chef started with my lacto-fermented inner beauty superfood powder, Glow.

Can you share your personal philosophy on inner and outer beauty?

Organic beauty for me is embracing and employing organic, chemical free ingredients and processes – such as fermentation – as well as natural ideologies around beauty. It is a win-win; it better for outer beauty and is reflected int he skin, better for wellbeing and better for the environment.

Your products contain ingredients that are health supportive and are good for you inside and out. What are your product essentials for glowing skin from within?

Each Beauty Chef Inner Beauty Powder is formulated for different skin and health benefits, but each is designed to improve gut health and digestion, and promote healthier, glowing skin from the inside out. My Glow Inner Beauty Powder feeds the skin super charged nutrition from the inside while helping to improve digestion at the same time – two of the most important things for glowing, healthy skin. The Glow Inner Beauty Powder is an anti-oxidant packed multi-vitamin, prebiotic and probiotic in one, which helps to balance gut health on the inside, to promote glowing skin on the outside, it’s a must, to help you look after your skin from within. The Glow Inner Beauty Powder contains twenty four skin loving super foods offering a powerhouse of nutrients which the skin needs to be healthy and radiant.

The Beauty Chef’s Glow Energy Bars

Can you speak about the importance of probiotics and your specific flora culture bio-fermentation process and why it’s a key part of your product?

There is more and more scientific research showing the ways in which digestive health and probiotics play a huge role in skin health. Fermenting foods not only makes the nutrients more available for the body to use, but it creates probiotics to help balance digestion. Probiotics are good bacteria, and to achieve a healthy gut and look and feel our best we need to support good bacteria. This is why, at The Beauty Chef, fermented foods and probiotics are key to our products. For example, our new Inner Beauty Boosts – Antioxidant, Hydration and Collagen – contain a minimum of six billion digestive balancing probiotics in every serve.

What is your self care ritual? Can you share your tips for radiance inside and out?

I firmly believe that beauty begins in your belly, so I eat lots of fermented foods full of nutrients and natural probiotics and where possible I avoid processed food and unhealthy chemicals that compromise gut health. I eat lots of wholefoods and clean protein and I drink lots of filtered water.

Visit The Beauty Chef online + get your glow on!

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