Vanessa LaVéy, creator of the LaVéy line of clean skin care products, has always been drawn to beauty and helping other women feel beautiful. As a former model, she learned from experience what helps women to bring out their natural beauty. And in the last several years she’s been on a mission to combine natural ingredients to create clean, healthy skin care products.
It began when Vanessa’s best friend passed away from breast cancer. While she was going through chemo treatments, the doctors asked Vanessa’s friend to bring in the products she’d used on her face. They were looking for needles in haystacks, for ingredients that could have caused the cancer or aggravated it.
In the midst of this heartbreaking experience for Vanessa and her friend, Vanessa began to wonder—as an aesthetician, could she be hurting her clients? Could the cleansers that she was slathering on their faces in the name of health contain damaging chemicals that were hurting them?
Vanessa began researching chemicals to discover just what dangerous things she might be using. She learned as much as possible. She dug into the processes that large companies used to make massive batches of facial care products.
She learned about the stabilizers and other preservatives that they used in order to stay on the shelf for a long time. She discovered that in a way “good product” can be very toxic for our skin and overall health.
In her research she soon discovered that even products that were organic or that felt good and smelled good just weren’t clean. Our skin can’t actually digest and utilize ingredients like cranberry or blueberry or other things that are put into some products under the guise of being organic, natural, or more healthy and pure.
The skin is being aged and damaged because the cell has to detox and clean itself of these chemicals and unusable ingredients.
It took ten years for Vanessa to develop her line of skincare products.
“I basically simplified all the ingredients and then everything that’s in there is an anti-inflammatory ingredient. We’re working on healing the skin on a cellular level and helping to take all the inflammation out of the cell. One of the key ingredients we use is matcha tea, which has one hundred and thirty times more antioxidants than green tea.”
Her line of products, known as LaVéy, are made in the US in small batches. They’re vegan and cruelty-free, and even the most sensitive skins can use them.
