During an interview with the New York Times, actress Gwyneth Paltrow shocked the room with one of her ancient methods of beauty treatment. Paltrow spoke about her beauty routine combining popular products from brands such as Drunk Elephant, Tata Harper, Shu Uemura and her line with Juice Beauty. Oh, and a dose of bee venom.
That’s right, you read correctly. BEE VENOM.
“I’ve been stung by bees. It’s an ancient treatment called apitherapy that people use to get rid of inflammation and scarring. It’s actually pretty incredible if you research it. But man, it’s painful” says Paltrow. Yikes.
Although Paltrow includes bee venom into her apitherapy methods, apitherapy usually includes the use of any bee product for therapeutic effects. These products are honey, beeswax, bee pollen and bee secretion.
The horror behind it all, personally, is the process of the therapy session. The practitioner picks up honey bees with tweezers and places the bees onto your skin, motivating the bees to do exactly what you would expect them to do. These therapy sessions allow individuals to get stung as many as 80 times in one shot!
I mean, could bee stings be the natural alternative to collagen lip fillers? Why spend thousands of dollars for expensive lip filler when you can basically get one for free from bees?
Social media and internet sources are constantly depicting the concept of “beautiful” as a woman with full, pouty lips. That’s where the whole “duck-face” pout pose comes from! We know that lip plumpers are temporarily lip-swelling gloss that aims to enhance the shine of your lips as well as to make them appear fuller.
There are claims from The American Apitherapy Society that bee venom eases symptoms of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, wounds and bacterial diseases. However, they emphasize that research is limited and more needs to be discovered in this realm of therapy. While this may seem like a believable treatment that even I would participate in, Gary Goldenberg, dermatologist from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City emphasizes “I do not recommend bee stings as anti-flam a Tory agents to patients. Many patients are severely allergic to bee stings and may not know it.”
We can clearly see that this may not entirely be a good idea to include into your beauty routine, just in case the bee venom may actually cause a fatal reaction depending on how your body handles it. It’s safe to say that we should be conscious of apitherapy treatments and what this therapeutic realm believes is good for you.
Thanks Gwyneth, but we’ll pass on the venom.