Episode 18: Dry Brushing

The Why • When • How of dry brushing, plus more tips on how to build this all natural beauty practice into your daily routine

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, and welcome to the Amber Moon Podcast. I'm Stacey Schwam,
owner of Amber Moon Boutique and Amber Moon Beauty. You
may know us on social media as at Shop amber
Moon or at amber Moon Beauty or it's actually amber
Moon Underscore Beauty, and I hope you're following us on there.

(00:21):
Today's podcast episode is on the beauty side of things,
all about dry brushing. And it's been quite a minute
since I've done a podcast, and that is because I
am still searching for a podcast platform that I like
that just works as seamlessly as one I used to use,
where I can record everything in it and it just
uploads really easily to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google podcast and

(00:46):
you'd be surprised because a lot of them don't. There's
a lot of steps in between. So I'm always needing
to streamline the way I'm doing things, and I'm just
really trying to find a podcast app that I like
that does it. So I think I have a good
one here and I'm going to record this episode. Hopefully
you're listening to it now, and I've uploaded it and
it all worked really well, and I'll continue to like

(01:08):
it and use it and we can have lots more
podcast episodes coming out in the future, like at least
once a week hopefully. As I said, today's episode is
all about dry brushing, how to dry brush, when to
do it, and all the associated things with that. So

(01:38):
let's get into dry brushing one oh one. What is
dry brushing. Dry brushing is the act of taking a
brush that is dry and brushing it onto your dry body.
And that's it. That's why it's called dry brushing for
those two things. It does not involve using any oils
or scrubs or lotions. Your body must be dry and

(02:00):
the brush must be dry. The point of dry brushing,
or the purpose of it, is to exfoliate your body.
It also helps promote better circulation and lymphatic drainage. So
those are the benefits of doing it. When you are
using a dry brush to exfoliate your body, and you're
using this rubbing motion which I will explain how to

(02:22):
dry brush in a few minutes or a little bit,
you are using the brush to exfoliate. The brush is
doing the exfoliation for you, is what I'm trying to say.
So you don't need any kind of scrub or any
water like you might if you were using a washcloth
to exfoliate. You're simply just using the dry brush, and
that is exfoliating the skin on your body. For you

(02:43):
do not dry brush your face. I will probably repeat
that several times during this episode. The skin on your
face is too thin and you can pop blood busts,
blood vessels on your face. And I've actually done that
from dry brushing my face because I did not know
that when I first started dry brushing. So when we
talk about dry brushing, we're only talking about dry brushing

(03:04):
your body. When you're dry brushing your body and you're
rubbing this brush all over you, you're also promoting better
circulation in your skin. You're just moving the skin and
sort of not necessarily the muscle, but kind of think
of it almost like massage, but not as deep. You're
just using this brush to move in circles around your body,

(03:26):
and you're not doing it too rough, but in some
sense it's just promoting like almost the tiniest the light
massage with the bristles of the brush that are helping
the circulation of your body to improve. And then it's
also helping with lymphatic drainage. Similar to guasha. If you
use a Guasha stone, except Guasha is getting a little

(03:47):
bit more underneath the skin a little bit. I mean,
all these have just such fine differences. And I'm not
an esthetician or trained person in any of this, so
it is not my place to exactly explain the medical
or clinical definition of all of it. Just as a

(04:07):
beauty enthusiast in someone who sells skincare and as a
makeup artist, I'm just telling you my experiences with these
things and what I know about them. But if you
want to dive deeper or consult with anybody that does
know more about that, definitely do that. But anyways, the
dry brush is giving you just the slightest bit of
massage to help promote that circulation as I was saying,

(04:28):
and helping with lymphatic drainage, which is fluids moving through
your body and draining through systems in the proper way
that they need to through, getting your blood flow increased
and circulation increased and all things moving. That's what the
dry brushing is doing. Let's start at the very beginning.
You heard me say you use a dry brush on

(04:48):
a dry body. What type of brush do you need?
There are certain brushes sold and marketed as dry brushes,
and those are the ones you should buy. Just look
it up on Google or Amazon wherever you want to
buy one, and anything that comes up as a dry
brush will be good enough as long as you're just
not using the one that's for your face, which is
typically sold as a smaller dry brush. The size of

(05:11):
a dry brush is probably about like the palm of
your hand, a little bit bigger than the palm of
your hand. It usually comes with kind of a cloth
strap that you slip your hand into and that's how
you hold onto the dry brush. It doesn't need to
have that strap, and sometimes but it can. And sometimes
they come with a long handle, which is helpful in
reaching your back. Some of them come on that long

(05:33):
handle and you can actually slip it off the handle
and use it as a handheld drybrush, or you can
use it as a handle a dry brush. And then
some of them come with sort of like a mid
length handle where the size of the bristles on the
brush that surface area is the size of the palm
of your hand, and the handle maybe extends to like

(05:53):
halfway up your forearm something like that. So any of
those are absolutely fine and will do get your dry brush,
and you're gonna have a dry body, and you're gonna
want to do it before you take a shower. Because
you're exfoliating your skin and using it on a dry body,
you want to do it before you shower. In your shower,

(06:13):
that water is going to rinse off any of that
skin you've exfoliated, which a lot of times is microscopic.
You're not going to see skin coming off during dry brushing.
You shouldn't really be seeing that at all. If you did,
I wouldn't worry about it. But it's this is more
like on a much more microscopic level. I mean, I
don't even want to say it microscopic, because maybe it

(06:34):
is visible. I've just never noticed skin coming off. But
in any case, you want to take a shower after
you dry brush and get that skin off your body,
and then you want to moisturize after with your lotions
and your oils. And that's just kind of the process
that I think everybody uses for dry brushing. If for
some reason you don't end up taking a shower after
your dry brushing, don't worry about it. There's going to

(06:56):
be absolutely no harm done. That's just the preferred method.
Of dry brushing. So now that you know what tool
to use and when to do it, how often you
do it should be every single day. If you don't
do it for a day, again, no cause for worry.
These benefits are only for you. If you don't do it,
you're not hurting yourself in any way. There's no system

(07:19):
that you have to do it a certain number of
days or you won't get the benefits. It's just beneficial
for you to do it every day, and if you don't,
you don't. But once you start doing it, you become
kind of addicted and obsessed with it. So you will
love the feeling of just how good your body feels
because your circulation is flowing. Your skin is going to
feel so soft, just like anything else in your beauty routine.

(07:42):
Building and dry brushing, you'll just only feel increased benefits
in the way you look and feel, even how your
body feels when you touch it, and you're going to
want to do it every day if you can. I
talked in my last podcast episode about beauty overwhelment, meaning
when we have to add in all these extra things,

(08:03):
like I always start talking about oil pulling because that's
the first thing I think of doing in the morning
before you've done anything else, including brushing your teeth, is
your oil pulling, but it can be overwhelming to add
in oil pulling and guasha and dry brushing and exfoliation
and the long list of other things that we do
to help ourselves look and feel our best. So dry brushing,

(08:24):
like anything else, is a practice or a habit that
you will grow and fall in love with. And if
it feels overwhelming at first to hear somebody say do
it every single day, then don't do it every single day.
Start with once a week, start with once a month,
start or start with once a week, or do it
on Mondays and Wednesdays. You know, just build a schedule
for yourself that makes sense to you to not get

(08:46):
overwhelmed at first by adding in something else. Because all
of us do fill time shortage consciousness, probably on a
daily basis, because we all need such busy lives. So
the thought of adding in one five or ten minute
more thing that you are gonna do sometimes can feel overwhelming.
So start small and build up, or jump in right
away and just go for it every day. Once you

(09:10):
start your dry brushing routine, the idea is to go slower.
I mean, I think you are supposed to do it
for like five to twenty minutes if you wanted to,
but don't get scared. I never ever do that. I
probably do it in two or three minutes. I do
it pretty quick before I get in the shower, and
I still feel all the benefits like anything else, being

(09:31):
more present and moving slower, taking your time is always better.
But a lot of us just don't have that time
in our especially in our morning routine, to do that.
Or you could do it at night whatever works for you.
Probably in the morning's best just for circulation, but you
could also do it at night anyways, because we need

(09:51):
good circulation at night too. But in the morning I
think is just kind of better throughout your day, but
you are supposed to do it for longer. I do
a very fast method of dry brushing. You don't want
to brush so fast that you're hurting your skin in
any way. But if you need to just move over
the surface areas of your body pretty quickly because you're
trying to get ready for the day, then do that.

(10:13):
You're still going to have the benefit of the dry brushing.
Now that we've covered every single thing, I think about
where to get it, how often to do it, when
to do it, why we're doing it. Let's talk about
the how to actually do it. So the role of
thumb with dry brushing is you start at your feet
and work your way up your body. So you're going
to want to be naked with a dry body before

(10:34):
you get in your shower or your bath, and you're
going to take the dry brush and the pump of
your hand, or you're going to slip your hand through
the handle if it has one, or just hold on
to it on the outside of it. Usually it's water
bamboo on the outside. Hold on to your dry brush
on the outside, and you're going to make kind of
soft circular motions on your body. You're going to start

(10:56):
with your feet. You're going to work with the top
of your feet and slowly go around your foot the
top of your foot. I don't think you really need
to do the bottom of your foot, but you could,
because you can use maybe something else on the bottom
of your foot to help a circulation, like a scrub
or a pumice stone. But you can use the drybrush
on the bottom of your foot if you want. I
always feel like my feet or maybe like the slightest

(11:17):
bit journey before I get in the shower. So I
don't really do that on my drybrush, but you could.
You probably should because it's part of your body and
all parts need to be treated the same. I think
we're pretty much the same. So you're gonna drybrush in
circular motions. Doesn't matter which direction you go. You can
go in one direction, you can alternate directions. You can
only ever go in one direction. You don't need to

(11:39):
worry about that at all. Do whatever your intuition tells
you as best to do. Just follow your body's lead,
and you're gonna work your way up your ankles and
your calves, doing the front and back of your calf.
You can switch legs in between this. You can do
one leg and then do the other leg. Really, there's
no rule with that. There really only is one rule,
which I'm just gonna mention in a second and tell

(12:01):
you why. But just continue your dry brushing in your
circular motions, all up your legs and your thighs, your booty,
your stomach, up to your chest, and at that point
you're going to actually want to stop what you're doing.
Just make sure you got both sides of your body,
and as you complete your dry brushing on the rest

(12:21):
of your body, you actually need to work from the
top down. So the reason you need to do that
is because you are sending the circulation and lymphatic drainage
and everything. You're this blood flow up to your heart.
So you're starting from the bottom and working your way up,
and then when you get to around your heart area
your chest, that's when you're going to stop, and you're

(12:43):
going to switch to dry brushing down your body from
the top down, from the upper parts of your body
down to your heart. So you're going to take your
arms and I would say lift them up in the
air and then use your other hand to dry brush
your hand while your arm is lifted or just straight
out in front of you's okay, dry brush your wrist,
Dry brush your arms. Get your top of your chest

(13:04):
like above where your breast would be, like your collarbone area.
Dry brush your shoulders. Get what you can reach on
the back of your neck and your back. You don't
really have to dry brush the front of your neck.
You can, but just be careful getting too close to
your face because again we're not dry brushing our face.
And then if you can reach any part of your back,

(13:25):
dry brush there, and you should have kind of gotten
the lower part of your back before you switched from
going from up to now the down portion. You're brushing
down towards your heart. When you get to your arms
and your collarbone area and like the top of your back,
you're brushing sort of down to your heart. And then

(13:46):
if you have a long handled dry brush, you are
going to want to take that and dry brush the
rest of your back. That's the order that I do
it in. There is nothing dangerous. You're not going to
cause any heart problems or anything like that. If you
forget and you start with your arms first and brush
down towards your heart and then do your leg second,
you're not gonna do any damage or anything like that.

(14:08):
I think the idea is and also I should say
dry brushing is totally safe, gentle, and just safe for
your body. There's no harm being done. But the recommended
method is to brush from your feet up towards your
heart and then from your arms down towards your heart,
just with the idea of the best possible blood flow

(14:29):
of circulation and lymphatic drainage that you could possibly get
from this beauty practice. I think you know everything there
is to know about dry brushing. That's pretty much it.
All you need to do now is take your shower,
wash off any dead skin that's been exfoliated, and make
sure to have plenty of moisture after your shower with oils,
your body lotions or a lotion first and then an

(14:51):
oil to lock in that moisture. And some people say
to drink water after, just because that's typical with Guasha Massa.
Anytime you're doing anything with circulation or lymphatic drainage, you
just want to drink some water after. But again, if
you don't drink water after you don't feel like it,
don't worry. You're going to be just fine. Totally safe

(15:12):
and gentle practice. These are just extra recommendations to get
the most benefit from this whole experience. And I was
going to say something else about exfoliating in your shower. Oh,
I know it's that a lot of times with exfoliation,
beauty people estheticians will say, do not exfoliate every day.

(15:33):
That's way too much. That's talking about facial exfoliation with
a scrub or some kind of peel pad, and body
exfoliation with a scrub or any kind of acids does
not need to be done every day. That kind of
exfoliation should be done only once or twice a week.
But with dry brushing, it's just a very very gentle exfoliation,

(15:54):
not the same as doing it with a scrub or
any kind of alpha hydroxy acid or beta hydroxy acid
like lactic acid or silic acid. Those are too harmful
to be used every day. The dry brushing just because
it's the they're stiff, but they're also soft. The bristles
of the brush are gentle enough to be used every

(16:15):
single day on your body and don't have anything else
to do with any other kind of exfoliation you're doing.
You still should be exfoliating your body with a scrub
every single day, I mean not every single day, like
once or twice a week, but you can do the
dry brushing every single day. And lastly again again again,
do not dry brush your face at all. You can

(16:36):
exfoliate your face with a gentle scrub or a peel
pad kind of thing like Lime Life has the glowing
green wipes that I love if you're familiar with those,
that are great for very even exfoliation on your face.
But do not dry brush your face. If you want
circulation improvement on your face, then using your fingertips for
a gentle massage on your face, or a Guasha stone

(16:59):
or a jade roller something like that to give yourself
a little facial massage that feels good is what I
would recommend for your face. But never a dry bristle
brush because it will pop blood vessels on your face
and tear skin and it's just way too rough for
the face. Over the years, I have taught a lot
about dry brushing on my various beauty pages. In my

(17:23):
Facebook VIP beauty group. On my personal Instagram stories, I
talk about dry brushing probably twice a year in depth.
I love it that much. Once I started dry brushing,
I never wanted to stop. It was just a practice
I fell in love with. And if you've seen any
of that content, my facts about it have never changed.

(17:43):
It's always kind of the same system. It's just an
old practice that's tried and true and loved by many
people across the world. I first learned about dry brushing
probably twenty years ago when I was at a spa
getting a massage and a facial and an Eastern European
woman was asking me if I dry brushed, and I

(18:04):
had never heard anything about it, so she taught me
about it. And the reason I mentioned where she's from
is because I've learned over the years through going to
many spas and talking to estheticians who are also from
Eastern Europe. It is just a huge practice over there
that supposedly almost all women do. And feel free to

(18:25):
correct me if I'm wrong or making any kind of
stereotype here or anything, but it's just a practice that
I've been learning from people from those countries for a
long time. That's I think started to make its way
into more of its way into the beauty mainstream in America,
and more people have been learning about it. So that's
when I started dry brushing. Lately, I keep forgetting to

(18:46):
do it. I don't know why, but I love it
so much I want to go back to it. I
miss it every single day. In fact, I think the
reason I don't do it every day is I started
to work out so much in the morning and be
kind of sweaty, so I didn't want to use my
dry brush on a sweaty body. So I've kind of
my dry brushing practice has fallen by the wayside, but
I really need to pick it back up and start

(19:07):
it every dig and because I miss it so much.
So if you want to use your dry brush and
you are sweaty, you could dry yourself off with a towel,
or I guess if you wanted to use it on
sweaty skin, you could, but the purpose is to drybrush,
so that sort of doesn't really feel right right, but
sometimes I do that. If I'm just my skin is
a little damp, I don't worry about it. And then

(19:29):
I think the last thing we should know that kind
of falls after that is how do I clean my
dry brush. I just take mine into the shower every
so often and rinse it with hot water and like
a body soap, some kind of body gel, body soap,
liquid soap, something like that, or you could scrub just
a bar of soap on it. Just get it into
the bristles really well, let it get rinsed out with

(19:53):
the hot water, and then hang it up to dry.
But be careful it's not drying sort of like backwards
or tipped over. Like I would recommend with cleaning a
makeup brush is you don't want any water to be
dripping down into that base or a handle of the
dry brush. You want to keep it tipped so mold collects.
You want to keep it kind of like tipped forward.
If it has a strap, you can hang it kind

(20:14):
of like tipping forward, or put it maybe face down
on a paper towel, the bristles down on a paper towel,
so it's drying thoroughly and not collecting any moad mold
on it. You will want to replace your dry brush,
like I don't know. I'm sure somebody a drybrush company
would say like every three months or something, or every month.

(20:35):
I probably just buy like one a year or maybe
even longer, and I just try to keep it clean
every so often. But you'll be able to tell. You'll
be able to tell when it gets dirty, when it
needs to be cleaned, You'll be able to tell when
you need a new one. Keep in your mind that
you can probably keep the one that you're using for
at least a couple of years before you need to
replace it. And they're only like six to ten bucks

(20:58):
on Amazon, depending on which kind you buy. I'm sure
you could buy much better versions, maybe in some kind
of spa or boutique or something like that, But those
are the ones I've always used and they've been great.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk about dry
brushing on this Amber Moon Beauty podcast or the Ambermoon
Podcast is not only because I absolutely love it so

(21:19):
much and I will talk about it all the time
to anybody who will listen, because it's such a great
beauty practice that's easy for everybody to do and really
is beneficial. But this month, in the A Maze Box,
which is a monthly beauty subscription box that we sell
through Ambermoon Beauty that has all Lime Life by All
Cone products in it, this month's A Maze Box has

(21:41):
a dry brush in it and has a really good
body oil to put on your body after you shower
and after you've dry brushed. And the oil that's in
the box is what I've been using for five years
and really saw lines erased on my chest as I'm aging.
I saw those lines really get a race, not completely erased,
but just diminished a lot from using this one body oil.

(22:06):
It's called Do Confidence and it has hazel nut in
it and rosemary and it's so great for your skin.
So that is what is in the Amber Moon Beauty
a Maize Box this month, a dry brush and the
body oil and some skincare samples. So if you're somebody
who is looking to dry brush who subscribes to a
maze box, already, thank you first of all, and it'll

(22:29):
be coming in your box this month. Or if you've
been thinking about trying out Lime Life by all Cone
Ambermoon beauty products and you've been wanting to sign up
for a maze box, you can do that. The link
to sign up is on the website Shoppianmbermoon dot com,
or it's in my profile on all social media. Any
social media account of mind that you go to has

(22:50):
a link tree, which is just a link you click
on that gives you a drop down menu with all
the various links to buy Ambermo beauty products, to visit
shopping and Bermoon, to join vip Facebook groups, to sign
up for There's even a link right on there to
sign up for a maze box, and you will find
everything you need on that link tree. So if you're
somebody who's been wanting to try Lime Life by Alcone

(23:13):
makeup and skincare, a Maze Box is the best way
to do it. It's only forty six dollars per month,
and it's always a value of like sixty two one
hundred dollars worth of products in a maze box, and
it has a really nice dry brush in there this month,
nicer than ones that you would buy on Amazon. Thank
you so much for coming back to the Ambermom podcast

(23:36):
despite it being absent for a little bit, or if
this is your first time listening, welcome, and I'm so
glad all of you are here. Whoever's here. I see
people from Germany and Switzerland and all over the world
on the analytics of who's listening to ambermun podcasts, So
I so appreciate you. I hope you learn something about beauty.

(23:57):
I always want this to be a place where I'm
sharing about beauty in fashion and thinks about life and
a place where you learn something every time that you
come visit, or you find a tip that's helpful to
you to implement in your life. Thank you so much
for being here. To see you next time.