Kimberly Snyder spent years hyper-focused on her physical appearance. She was a chronic calorie counter and dieter, and her approach to “self-care” was very surface-level. Then, she traveled between 50 countries throughout Asia, Africa, and South America and realized how imbalanced her approach was. Now, the holistic wellness expert and author of You Are More Than You Think You Are: Practical Enlightenment for Everyday Life ($20) approaches beauty in a totally different way.
“If someone is obsessed with their body or someone’s obsessed with the food part of their life, it’s because the other two cornerstones aren’t being nourished—the emotional wellbeing/mental health or the spiritual growth,” Snyder shared on the latest episode of Well+Good’s beauty podcast, Routine Rundown, hosted by Well+Good senior beauty editor Zoë Weiner. “If we wanna have great skin, if we wanna have a glow to us, if we wanna have a kindness, a softness, a magnetism—all of this is really beautiful—you build it from the inner energy.”
While Snyder’s beauty routine does include products like vitamin C serums and exfoliants, it also gives her time to focus on her emotional and spiritual well-being. Learn about three of the ways she does this below, and get all of her tips by listening to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1. Establish solid routines
Snyder approaches wellness with four cornerstones in mind: food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. “When I do my morning and my evening routine, it always includes the cornerstones,” says Snyder. “There’s meditation first thing, which is spiritual, and then there’s some journaling, which is the emotional. And then for food, I’m taking in hot water with lemon first thing, which the vitamin C and the enzymes are great for your liver, great for detoxification, great for your skin. And then the Glowing Green Smoothie when I start to feel hungry…and from a skincare perspective, I keep it simple. Cleanser, vitamin C serum, moisturizer. I don’t use a ton of products, but the ones I use are potent.”
2. Take your time and be present during your routines
It’s so easy to rush through your routines, especially when you’re low on time. But Snyder encourages mindful touch as a way to stay grounded and present during our beauty routines. “It’s really important that yes, we honor the bodily temple, we honor the times that we are coming into it. And so a big part of that is touch,” she says. “And in the Ayurvedic system, they say that the most powerful anti-aging practice, if you wanna say that, is self-massage because it soothes your nervous system…So when we’re doing these practices it’s not just rushing through another to-do list. And if you find yourself hurried…you just take a couple of deep breaths and you come back to this moment and you just wanna really treat it as sacred time.”
3. Be kind to yourself—always
“True beauty is letting your uniqueness come forward and being really comfortable with yourself,” says Snyder. When “you’re not beating yourself up every day, you’re not trying to be like someone else, you’re not living in your mind of anxiety and jealousy and envy and comparison all the time. You get to this real anchor, this place where you feel great and it’s very magnetic, right?”
She says we achieve this by dialing into emotional and spiritual well-being.
“A lot of people struggle, with emotional well-being, which we could say is mental health, right? When there are circular thought patterns, we find ourselves feeling like we’re not enough, we’re over-emphasizing the looks again because we don’t feel good on the insides. We’re trying to constantly change the outside,” she says. “We can work on the outside too, but the ironic thing is when we work on this comfortability—you glow, there is literally more light in your system.”
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