Low-Tox Living

I didn't go looking for a low-tox life.

Low-tox living found me. At the lowest point I'd known, through a friend and a simple question.

For two decades I worked long hours in closed treatment rooms. Good ventilation, careful practices, all my PPE, but I spent my days surrounded by chemical peel fumes, laser and IPL plume, hospital-grade cleaning chemicals, bleach, all of it. And that's before you count everything I was layering onto myself each day: the lash glue, the shellac, the makeup I wore from morning to night, the perfume, the lotions. It was simply part of the job, part of the look, and I never thought twice about any of it at the time.

In September 2024 I was at one of the lowest points I've known. I'd sold my clinics, my health had unravelled, and I'd more or less withdrawn from the world. I was under a rock, and I was content to stay there.

Then my friend Christie reached out. Not to sell me anything. Just to say hi and see how I was. Christie's in Tasmania, she's a science teacher, and she's one of those people who has always paid close attention to what goes into the things her family uses. We'd known each other a while, so when we talked, it was open and easy, the way it is with someone you trust.

She'd recently changed where she did a lot of her everyday shopping, swapping supermarket products for cleaner versions of the same everyday things. And at some point she asked whether I'd thought about what was in the products around my own home.

I hadn't, not really. And once she said it, I couldn't unsee it. After all those years breathing what I'd breathed at work, and wearing what I'd worn every day, it started to dawn on me how little thought most of us give to the everyday things we surround ourselves with. The spray under the kitchen sink. The laundry powder. Who would ever stop to think that the toilet cleaner you reach for could matter, not just for you, but for your kids on the bathroom floor and the dog that drinks from the bowl. Here's the part that still gets me: I'd spent twenty years as a professional being meticulous about skin, and it never once occurred to me, even as I was getting sick, to ask whether the sheer accumulation of what I was putting on my body and breathing around me might be worth a second look. I just never asked the question.

I came for the cleaning products. That was it. My very first order was just kitchen and laundry. I had nothing to lose, so why not.

What I didn't expect was that it would change the way I think about how we consume and where our money goes. One swap led to another. These days there's very little I buy from the supermarket at all. Even our toilet paper and tissues come from Who Gives A Crap now, delivered to the door.

Then came the part I genuinely didn't see coming.

Christie asked about my skincare. I laughed. Two decades as a dermal therapist had made me deeply sceptical, every "clean" skincare brand I'd ever been shown had underwhelmed me. But I tried it anyway, and the trained eye in me was surprised. It was good. Properly good. I've since shared it with beauty therapist friends who've loved it too.

My skin and I go back a long way, and it's never been the easy, uncomplicated kind. It's sensitive and particular about what it likes. I adore pure essential oils, I diffuse and use them in my home every day, but my own face doesn't tolerate fragrance, so I stick to the simplest, gentlest things on my skin. That's the thing I've come to value most: being able to choose what suits me, without the ingredients I'd rather avoid.

I don't think I'd ever truly understood, until then, that looking after the body and home God entrusted to us is its own quiet kind of stewardship. None of this is about fear, and none of it is medical advice. I'm not a doctor, and this is simply my own experience and what I've come to care about. I just think there's something worth paying attention to in the ordinary things we use without a second thought. Whether you're navigating a health issue or you're the picture of health, it starts in the same place: your body and your home, and a little awareness about what you fill them with.

The biggest surprise of all wasn't a product. It was the people.

For years I went to beauty expos and industry conventions. Competitive, comparison-driven, always a little cold. The first time I went to a wellness convention, on the Gold Coast, it felt completely different. Christie's become my travel buddy, we go every March, and I look forward to it for months. That first year I walked in and found myself surrounded by soon-to-be friends, people I'd gotten to know online along the way and was meeting face to face for the first time, a whole community of them. A community where I felt seen and valued, and where my faith didn't feel out of place. And I felt something I hadn't felt in that kind of room before.

I felt like I was home.