#304 Natural Skin Care for Glowing Skin - Andy Hnilo

Andy Hnilo (0:00)

You know, your skin is your lovest organ. You have to treat it like another mouth. There are thousands of ingredients. The United States allows, Europe doesn't. If you wouldn't put it onto your skin or any of your mouth, for the most part, don't put it onto your skin.

Siim Land (0:11)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is Andy Hnilo. Andy is the founder and CEO of Alitura Naturals, which is a 100% natural skincare company. In this episode, we talk about the dark side of the commercial skincare industry and how to take care of the skin with natural food grade products. This episode is brought to you by BluBlox, my favorite light and sleep optimization companies. Artificial light at night exposure is associated with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. BluBlox provides the highest quality blue blocking glasses that filter out the specific wavelengths that have been shown to suppress melatonin in studies. Melatonin is more than the sleep hormone. It's also vital for longevity, anti-aging and immunity.

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Siim Land (1:31)

Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Hnilo (1:32)

How's it going? Thanks for having me.

Siim Land (1:35)

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show. And we've actually been trying to organize a podcast for like maybe like a year. But yeah, eventually we've managed to do it.

Andy Hnilo (1:44)

Hey, here we are. Here we are.

Siim Land (1:46)

I've like I get a lot of questions often about like skin care and skin health and that kind of thing, but I've never been like any.

I have never had like any much knowledge about it. So I figured I'll get like the expert on the podcast to talk about all kinds of things related to skin health and skin care. So yeah, here we are. But how you, you know, how did you get into, how did you found your company and how did you get into like, you know, skin care products?

Andy Hnilo (2:09)

Oh, man, it's a it's a much different story than I don't know. I mean, a lot of other businesses or many other companies are planned.

People write business plans, they have partners, they have, you know, staff, usually a business background, not me.

I was in the entertainment industry for, at that point. Well, yeah, I was modeling when I was 18, but I got into acting about 2005 So that was my career. And one Saturday night, March 20, 2011, I was just walking, crossing the street after dinner, looking down at my phone, just kind of lost focus for a little bit. I got hit by a westbound heading vehicle, lost consciousness, hitting the eastbound lane.

Clothes cut off me in the middle of the street, my first responders. And yeah, I mean, I was coming in and out of consciousness at that point on the short drive over to Cedars-Sinai Hospital. But I quickly found out about the severity of the situation. I mean, I was on a morphine drip in an ICU bed looking at my, well, yeah, I mean, I kind of see it out of the bottom left corner of my eye. My chin was one of the worst compound fractures that the resident maxillofacial surgeon Dr. Rosenberg had ever seen. So we had to hire a private guy to come in and get me repaired. I had a titanium plate inserted up top, one on the bottom, put the particles back together, waited, what, eight, right around eight weeks for the bone to grow back.

You know, just a zombie from antibiotics, seven broken ribs, collapsed lung. And I, my jaw was out to, you know, it was, I was very banged up, unrecognizable, but I also, you know, I'm not going to pretty, pretty resilient. So, I mean, I just, I was alive, right? I had that perspective. And I mean, absolutely nothing to complain about. People don't survive actions like that. In a weird way, I was excited. I mean, I don't know if it was because, I mean, I wouldn't say excited, but like giddy, like just on edge. It may have been something like from my body's natural response to going through physical trauma or something like that, like the, I don't know if it's cortisol response or I'm not sure. But I also had my family around me and I was, which rarely happens, you know, all of us, my sisters have their families too. And even during holidays, we very rarely, all of us get together. But so we had that and I had a lot of love in my little small 660 square foot apartment in North Hollywood, California. But I needed that love right there during that time of recovery. I mean, just coming down just like what, you know, job, wired, shut, no teeth, and just really banged up.