I used to think I was the problem.

I tried everything — every brand — and nothing worked. My skin was always dry and dull, no matter how much money I spent or which miracle routine I was promised was going to “fix my skin.” I had truly given up.

Never for one minute did I think that the beauty products I was investing so much money in were the actual problem.

Then I spent time living with a tribe in the Amazon in South America, and one of the first things I noticed was how incredible not only their skin was, but that they had the shiniest, healthiest hair I had ever seen in my life.

So I started observing what they were doing, which, to be honest, at first felt completely counterintuitive to what I had been advertised into believing my whole life. Raw oils from crushed seeds blended with cocoa butter they traded for from a local plantation.

So when I returned home, I started to do what they were doing.

The results were immediate — almost overnight, my skin changed. For the first time in my life, it glowed with health. The dryness I thought was my burden to carry for life was gone and replaced by supple, soft skin.

My hair, which even the best hairdressers had told me was beyond help, went from dry and permanently frizzy to nourished and shiny.

I was blown away and I had to understand how it was that this worked when everything else had failed.

Why I wrote this Deception, Lies & Beauty Products

Why was it that these simple, straight-from-nature solutions I had discovered them using in the Amazon, gave me the results that commercial beauty products had promised me my whole life but never delivered?

I started looking at beauty products in a new light and, for the first time, actually looked at the labels and started asking uncomfortable questions.

What are all these chemicals in there that I have no idea what they are, never mind how they are meant to be beneficial to human skin?

I started looking some of them up, only to be horrified by what I found.

How are ingredients made from petrol by-products meant to benefit skin?

How can the same chemicals used as bases in jet fuel, wastewater and sewage processing, anti-freeze for car engines, oven cleaners, and drain cleaners—among many more—be used in expensive beauty products that are meant to “beautify” the skin?

If our skin is waterproof, why are we putting products that are mostly water on our skin and expecting to get results?

So I started researching not only beauty products and what was in them, but the industry itself. To say I went down the rabbit hole—I think it’s safe to say I went all the way to the very bottom.

What I uncovered left me speechless, shocked, and outright furious. The deeper I looked, the more disturbing—and outright horrifying—the industry became.

I felt deceived. I felt lied to. I felt like I had been played for a total fool and had been playing a game that was rigged—one I was never meant to win. I felt that, as someone with a background and education in advertising, PR, and marketing, I should have worked this out a very long time ago.

Yet I hadn’t. I had believed, right up until the point where I was shown a different way in the most unlikely of places, that I was the problem.

So I decided to put everything I had learned into a book to show other people the truth hiding in plain sight so they can take that information and decide whether they want to keep playing a game that is rigged—or choose another way, where they stop throwing away their money and actually get the results they have always wanted.

I wrote this book to help people who were blindly believing the beauty industry lie see the truth—and laugh at the pure absurdity of what we have been gaslit into believing and never questioning along the way.