Inside Yoga 251 (26/11/2018)

What happened to the idea that beauty lies within? One of the national papers is running a story about a beauty skin product called Yogaskin. It is a cosmetic product which claims to give the user “the look as a glow that looks as fresh and juicy as if you’ve just stepped out of the yoga studio”.

It is a shame that companies feel the need to exploit the name yoga to make money and promote brands which have very little or nothing to do with yoga. Yoga teaches us to explore who we are through practice by going “within”, not as this product is asking us to go external … to our skin and our vanity.
I appreciate that yoga is popular, and as a yoga teacher I am pleased yoga is popular, because I know it works and helps people, but I do not agree with the commercialisation of its name. This skin product is the icing on the cake of long line of products and gimmicks which use the word yoga and its popularity to make money.
It is fundamentally wrong that a company thinks that a skin treatment is a replacement for yoga. And even if the company says they did not mean their product to be a replacement, this is the message that will come across to many people.
Yoga can help us in so many ways, and our skin being healthy is one of the benefits. By the way, I am not against make up, but against companies exploiting the word yoga to make money for themselves, when their product has little or nothing to do with the practice of yoga.
Need I say more? Look around and see how the name yoga is used, trivialised and exploited, and ask, who is benefiting from this?
Let’s stick to practice.
Let me know what you think. See reply panel below or email me, gary@yogabristol.co.uk