Why You Should Incorporate Honey Into Your Beauty Regimen
Buzz on.
As with many trendy natural beauty ingredients (Google searches for terms like “honey skincare” have risen and risen over the past decade), honey has actually been used in beauty products for millennia. “There’s documentation about Cleopatra using honey. It’s referenced in the Bible,” says Angela Ysseldyk, who grew up on a honey farm and now works for the family business, Dutchman’s Gold in Carlisle, Ontario. “It was really nature’s first apothecary.”
What’s so good about it? “Like a lot of herbal and natural medicine, they figured out in the beginning that it does something and then proved it with science later on when they had the ability to do that.” Ysseldyk says that virtually all the ingredients of the beehive—not only honey but also propolis (the glue used for making hives), bee pollen (flower pollen packed by honey bees), and royal jelly (food for larvae and the queen bee) have proven beauty benefits.
One thing they all have in common: antioxidants, which counter the effects of free radicals. Honey is also naturally antibacterial and contains enzymes that can exfoliate skin—though whether you’re applying it to skin or eating it, make sure to buy the raw, unpasteurized variety. It is generally safe for people more than a year old who aren’t allergic to bee pollen. “You can buy raw honey in the grocery store, and it’s perfectly fine and legal and good,” Ysseldyk says. “Unpasteurized honey will crystallize a lot faster than pasteurized honey because, when you pasteurize it, you’re burning off a yeast that could make it crystallize a bit faster. But crystallization isn’t bad—honey actually never goes bad.”
Oresta Korbutiak, a holistic aesthetician and owner of Oresta, a beauty spa/store based in Ottawa, is a fan of manuka honey, a variety that originates in New Zealand. “It has a high level of methylglyoxal: MGOs,” she says. “This is the compound that’s responsible for its powerful antibacterial and healing properties.” Products are graded according to their concentration of MGOs, the higher the better, with more than 800 milligrams per kilogram considered high. There’s also a standardization process managed by the New Zealand government to ensure that the manuka honey that leaves the country is pure. The downside: it tends to be significantly more expensive than other varieties of honey.
Activist Mānuka Honey Mask
Ysseldyk says that Canadian honey also has similar properties but without the weight of research behind it yet. “The colour, the taste, the aroma, all of that is based on the region, the season, and the floral source that it comes from,” she explains. “The darker the honey, the higher the antioxidant content. Wildflower honey and buckwheat honey tend to offer even more skin-loving benefits.”
How concerned should we be about the welfare of our bees? “They are so intelligent,” Ysseldyk says. “They know what’s going on, and they will tell you if they’re not happy.” Her father founded Dutchman’s Gold and was responsible for training many of the beekeepers in Ontario and beyond. “It’s a very small network. There’s about 10,000 beekeepers in all of Canada, including hobbyists, and they check all the boxes for us” from a welfare point of view. We also all need bees to do their jobs in order to keep our ecosystems alive and thriving and our food supply steady. In fact, many of the brands that use honey in their products invest in beekeeping as a way of giving back to communities and supporting the farming industry. Burt’s Bees has a foundation that offers $3.5 million in grants to support honeybee health and biodiversity. Guerlain, which has a bee as its company emblem, has 15 partnerships under its Guerlain for Bees Conservation Program.
If you want to use raw honey as a beauty treatment, Korbutiak says you have many options. “Some people will cleanse their skin with it. You dampen your skin, and then you take a little bit of the honey and you massage it into the face and then remove it with a warm face cloth,” she says. “You can use it as a mask. You can use it as a spot treatment. The other thing that I really love to do is honey tapping”: applying honey to the face, then using a tapping motion to give yourself a facial. “You incorporate your face, your neck, and your chest. It really helps with exfoliation, and if you follow lymphatic drainage [techniques], you can work on that too.”
You might think it’s too sticky and messy to use honey directly on your face, but because it’s water soluble, it’s surprisingly easy to remove. However, if you’d like the benefits with zero mess and additional good-for-skin ingredients, here are 10 products to try.
It’s raw manuka honey with a high level of MGOs, but in a tube so that you can easily dab it on a pimple or use it as a mask or cleanser.
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Honey is combined with vitamin E in this lip balm made from natural ingredients. It tastes slightly sweet, and it softens and moisturizes even dry lips.
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Garnier Whole Blends Honey Water Moisture Restoring Shampoo
This honey-coloured shampoo contains honey nectar, which the brand says is rich in amino acids (the building blocks of healthy hair), nutrients, and antioxidants. It also has floral water, which adds vitamins and minerals into the mix.
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Gisou Honey Gloss Ceramide Therapy Hair Mask
A weekly hair mask, this contains honey from the garden of Negin Mirsalehi. Her family has been in the beekeeping industry for six generations, and she founded Gisou a decade ago. The mask also has a blend of oils, ceramides, and hyaluronic acid to give it extra moisturizing power.
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This light but rich moisturizer from the Toronto brand contains colloidal oatmeal, manuka honey, turmeric, carrot seed oil, zinc, and cocoa butter and is designed for barrier repair. Apply it morning and night as your moisturizer. You can mix a serum into it for extra oomph.
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Guerlain Abeille Royale Youth Watery Oil Serum
Three types of honey have been combined with royal jelly to make this extremely light serum, which the brand says can boost production of collagen, elastin, and other proteins that make skin smoother, firmer, and more hydrated, with fewer lines.
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Hello Joyous Ultra Moisturizing Body Butter
A rich body moisturizer, this has cocoa butter and shea butter, as well as chaga mushrooms and propolis. It’s great to soothe winter dryness, but also as an after-sun treatment, thanks to the anti-inflammatory properties of the propolis.
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Lush Honey I Washed the Kids Shower Gel
There’s honey for moisture, and orange and bergamot oils to cleanse (and add citrusy notes to the sweet, toffee-scented blend). The brand’s shower gels all now come in thinner bottles to reduce plastic use.
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May Lindstrom The Honey Mud Enzyme & Facial Pudding
This cleanser/mask has raw honey with bee pollen and propolis for exfoliation and soothing skin. There’s also salicylic acid, another exfoliant. You can mask with it for up to an hour, wear it in the shower to release the fragrance (sweet orange and cedar along with the honey and cocoa notes), or mix it with the brand’s powder treatments such as The Clean Dirt and The Problem Solver.
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SkinFix Redness Recovery + Antioxidant Peptide Treatment Mask
An overnight mask to use under or instead of night cream, it contains honey and a peptide complex to soothe, and antioxidant green tea. Like all the brand’s products, it’s designed for sensitive skin and is made in Canada.
