We slather our bodies with lotions and potions morning and night – but when the average woman absorbs two kilograms of chemicals through her skin every year, do we really know what we’re using? The radiance of our skin is an immediate indicator of how healthy we are, and as the largest organ in the body that absorbs directly into the blood stream, we need to give our skin some special attention by feeding it only the finest ingredients.

Aromatherapist Alexandra Soveral has made it her life’s work to find these fine ingredients for her range of nourishing organic skin products. Soveral learnt how to prepare facial washes and heal wounds in the hills of Portugal from a young age, and she has now turned her childhood obsession into a Skin Aromatherapy practice in London, offering bespoke facial oil and other skin products. You know exactly what you’re getting with Soveral’s products as she only uses unrefined oils, unbleached waxes, and she often sources – and even picks – the herbal ingredients for her range of perfumes, lotions and facial oils.

Holy and Pure

The facial oils are made up of a base and an essential oil specific to your tastes and physiological requirements. Essential oils are the living, active and powerful essence of the plant which consist of small molecules that can penetrate the skin and move throughout the body. Each oil has particular healing properties; bergamot is good for psoriasis, for example, and has a light, green, citrus, flowery note. Clary sage, on the other hand, heals depression, nervous tension and stress, and has a sweet, nutty herbaceous scent. Whatever your skin problem, there will be an essential oil that can help you out.

“Scent is something holy and pure” says Soveral, and her work aims to harness an element of the celestial and naturally transformative qualities of the oils. Using Soveral’s facial oils does feel a bit like a holy ceremony, as you breathe in your specially selected scent and massage goodness into your face and throat that lasts throughout the day.

People come to Alexander Soveral’s practice looking for a youthful complexion, natural skin care products, bespoke perfumes or remedies for allergies; judging by her clientele she is good at what she does. She counts the beauty editorial team at Vogue magazine amongst her loyal customers, and she has a devotees returning from across the Pacific to use her Forever Young eye cream. Yet Soveral insists that her work place is a humble apothecary: “It’s not a fancy spa!”

Chemical overload

When we talk about the challenges of working with organic produce in a multi-billion pound beauty industry, Soveral gets quite agitated at consumers spending hundreds of pounds on beauty products that don’t work. During her lifetime, the average British woman is likely to spend £186,000 on cosmetics, contributing to an industry worth an estimated £6.4 billion a year. In 2004 a US study by the consumer Environmental Working Group found that a typical Western adult uses nine cosmetics containing about 126 ingredients every day. This results in a chemical overload that can cause allergies or even disease. “We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that something expensive is good for us,” says Soveral, with passion and integrity, “but we must look to nature instead of pharmaceutical medicines.”

Soveral has taken her natural, holistic approach into perhaps the most artificial arena of modern medicine: plastic surgery. Soveral worked with a plastic surgeon for five years to understand the skin’s elasticity, ageing process and pioneer her Non-Surgical Face Lift. Not as oxymoronic as it sounds, a Non-Surgical Face Lift comprises of a deep cleanse and dry brushing to activate the lymphatic system; Soveral then gives a deep tissue massage using pressure points to alleviate facial tension. There is a noticeable improvement in skin elasticity after just one treatment, however Soveral is emphatic that “continuity is important,” and she advocates giving oneself a daily facial massage to ensure the results last longer.

Soveral grew up watching and copying her mother give herself a face massage and do facial exercises every morning. “I thought everybody did it” she laughs, but as a teenager Soveral realised this was her mum’s unique secret to a youthful complexion. It’s easy to slap on your moisturiser whilst thinking about what you’re going to have for breakfast, but by giving yourself a facial massage from the neck upwards in circular movements after cleansing and toning every morning, you can stave off that enemy to every woman’s beauty: time.

Soveral’s work has been affected by this early experience of how daily natural methods of skin care can have long lasting effects. She says that her goal now is “to link beauty and health together; we have to work from the inside out and the outside in if we want really good skin.”

On the spot

However much you drink water, eat healthily and look after your skin, there’s bound to be that one day when a zit makes an unexpected appearance before a hot date or important meeting. For those moments Alexandra has this emergency advice:

• Make sure that the white head is ready and popping out of the skin (if you can wait a bit longer then do so).
• Wash your hands, if you have a hand sterilising lotion all the better.
• Cleanse the area well.
• Apply some toner to a cotton pad and wipe any grease left from the cleanser.
• Pour some hot water in a bowl, add 3 drops of lavender essential oil to the water and steam the spot for a few minutes. This will open the pores and encourage the white head to open.
• Apply a drop of neat lavender to the spot and around the spot area.
• With a tissue, apply gentle pressure on each side of the spot. Squeeze gently, be patient!
• Once the white pus is out, apply Spotless Gel.
• Please note that you only want to remove the white pus, do not try to squeeze deeper that that. It will only make the spot come back.
• Leave to dry and DO NOT TOUCH IT AGAIN.

Looking at the ingredients of my moisturiser, I notice scary things like Dimethicone cross polymer, Propylene glycol, and Palmitoyl pentapeptide-3 lurking inside it. The men in white coats may think that these work, but if I have trouble spelling the ingredients then I’m not sure I should be using them so liberally. Straightforward techniques like using simple, good quality ingredients and not picking at spots are another way to get healthy looking skin – without needing to go near a surgeon’s knife or an alien sounding polymer.

www.alexandrasoveral.co.uk