Skincare for Fall and Winter with Wonder Valley's Alison Carroll

 

Alison Carroll, Co-Founder of Wonder Valley, speaks with The Post Supply about her beauty regime for Fall and Winter and her bicoastal life. Between the ocean of Maine and the desert of California, she offers recommendations to keep skin hydrated and radiant to get you through the drying seasons.

AC: Extra virgin olive oil truly is one of the oldest beauty ingredient - so my inspiration to start making skincare products was in line with my research and obsession with the rich history and mythology of olive oil as this timeless life-enhancing ingredient. For me, it’s the vitality that comes from our annual olive harvest practice. We pick our fruit rather underripe; which flavor-wise gives you this very bright, peppery-quality but it also gives us an oil with a higher concentration of polyphenols (antioxidants). The polyphenols and essential fatty acids of our olive oil make it an incredible superfood for internal health, but they also lend themselves for repairing, hydrating, and healing the skin when used in skincare products.

 

TPS: How has living in Maine affected your beauty routine in a way that is different from living in the Southwest?

AC: It’s lovely to spend half the year on Bailey Island and half the year in Joshua Tree, the two places could not be more different and I love the balance of the two. In Maine, we live on the water and there’s just an obvious amount of moisture and humidity where as in the desert I am extremely parched. I find that the quantity of oil I need to apply to my skin is less in Maine. I also am spending more time in the ocean so my skin is getting a lot of salt and can be dry in a different way. My go-to product in Maine has been our Face Oil, which has a rosy orangey hue for sea buckthorn and rosehip, and a very earthy floral scent of frankincense, blue chamomile, cedar, and neroli. It really helps me stay hydrated, addresses some of the sun-damage and oily/dry skin that can happy in the sun. It also has a low, but natural, level of sun protection in the plant oils used, so I like that for all-seasons.

 

 
TPS: Which skin care products would you recommend as we move into Winter?

AC: This time of year I do need a bit more support with exfoliation and hydration. Our skin naturally sheds skin cells (on average once every 28 days), but sometimes that cycle can be sluggish, or dryer weather or harder water can also impact that. I find that I need a little boost, or can get a breakout here and there from dead skin cells stuck in pores. We made the olive & lotus exfoliant as a plant-based manual exfoliant powder to add to our Oil Cleanser. It’s a totally customazable exfoliant; more powder, more pressure for a deeper scrub if that’s what you’re needing or less for a gentler scrub. I do this 1 x per week and it really helps keep chapped, parched skin away and primes my skin to receive all the benefits of a face oil or our Wonder Serum for extra repairing and collagen-boosting for instantly plumper, hydrated happy skin.