#373 Dangerous Chemicals in Personal Care Products - Andy Hnilo (Rebroadcast)

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.

SPEAKER_2 (0:11)

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Siim Land (0:49)

Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Hnilo (0:51)

How's it going? Thanks for having me.

Siim Land (0:53)

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 (1:02)

Hey, here we are. Here we are.

Siim Land (1:04)

I've like, I get a lot of questions often about like skincare and skin health and that kind of thing. But I've never been like any, I have never had like 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 skincare. So yeah, here we are.

But how did you get into, how did you found your company and how did you get into skincare products?

Andy Hnilo (1:27)

Oh man, it's a much different story than, I don't know. I mean, a lot of other businesses are, many other companies are planned. People write business plans, they have partners, they have 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 20th, 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, 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, jobwired shut, no teeth.

And just really banged up. But I needed, you know, that kind of started off my recovery on a somewhat positive note. And I'm a pretty, you know, I had perspective before that accident.