Pigs and Skincare

In this episode of Coffee in the Barn, we welcome Charles Mayfield, founder of FARROW Skincare, whose unique journey bridges CrossFit, paleo nutrition, and regenerative agriculture. Charles shares how his personal experiences—ranging from a painful sunburn to deep-rooted agricultural practices—led him to create a skincare line using rendered pig fat (lard) that promotes natural healing and supports sustainable farming. 

We explore the links between what we eat, what we put on our skin, and the larger ecosystem of health and farming. Charles opens up about the surprising regulatory gaps in skincare safety, the microbiome on our skin, the truth about modern sunscreens, and how honoring animal by-products can reduce waste and support both people and the planet. 

What You’ll Learn in This Episode: 

✔️ How Charles’s sunburn turned into a skincare business rooted in regenerative farming.

✔️ Why most modern skincare products may be harming more than helping.

✔️ The connection between gut health and skin health through a paleo lens.

✔️ What regenerative agriculture really means—and how it builds soil and community.

✔️ Natural ways to protect your skin from sun exposure without chemicals.

✔️ How Charles’s farming background and paleo cookbooks shaped his mission.

✔️ The surprising origins and benefits of using animal fat in skincare.

🔹 Guest Spotlight: Charles Mayfield 

• Founder of FARROW Skincare 
• Regenerative farmer, paleo cookbook author, and CrossFit enthusiast 
• Advocate for toxin-free skincare and sustainable agriculture 

🎧 Tune in to discover the untold story behind skincare, agriculture, and the simple, powerful ways we can protect our health and land. 

Resources & Links: 

🔗 Visit FARROW Skincare: https://farrow.life 

💸 Use Discount Code LARDFTW for 20% Off 

📚 Check out Charles’s cookbooks: Paleo Comfort Foods 

🌱 Learn more about Animistic: https://animistic.co/

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Transcript

0:00:00
(Casey Bradley)
Welcome to Coffee in the Barn, where every cup tells a story. With a rotating lineup of hosts, we invite you to join us as we explore the diverse challenges and triumphs of modern life and the heart of agriculture. From the fields to the classroom, from innovators to everyday visionaries. Each episode brings a fresh perspective and a new voice. So brew yourself a cup of coffee, settle in, and let's uncover the stories that shape our lives, our farms, and our communities. Well hi everybody welcome to this week's Coffee in the

0:00:48
(Casey Bradley)
Barn. We have Charles Mayfield here with Faro Skin Care which may sound a little different but Charles has deep roots in agriculture. Would you mind telling us a little bit about your background and your journey in agriculture and entrepreneurship Charles? 

0:01:06
(Charley Mayfield)
Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. This is the real play. And neither of us are in a barn right now. It's very, we both should be. We both, we can aspire to a re-record this in a few years from a barn.

0:01:20
(Chantel P.)
The virtual background of barn.

0:01:22
(Charley Mayfield)
Well, fair enough. But, but, but is that really a, from a Barn? I mean, come on. Um, no, thanks for having me on. Yeah. Pharoah our skincare company is really an amalgamation of sort of three career track paths that I've been on. Uh, the first I would say is health, wellness, fitness, uh, came to the CrossFit community in about 2008 and it was CrossFit that sort of led me to the Paleo diet. And so fitness, wellness and

0:01:52
(Charley Mayfield)
then Paleo, you know, sort of what to eat or a way to eat. I still tell people all the time it's a wonderful template to work from. And then it was the Paleo world that really introduced me to regenerative farming and regenerative ag As a as a means to securing food Sovereignty food security and really healing our land

0:02:16
(Charley Mayfield)
It's not talked about often enough in terms of our soil degradation and various things but yeah, it was it was those three things that melded together to ... I was farming at the time. It was born out of ... I love cooking. I'm a co-author of a number of cookbooks in the paleosphere. We still hand-batch make our products in the kitchen and so love tinkering in the kitchen. And so yeah, it was those three things, so sort of a lens on health, metabolic health,

0:02:57
(Charley Mayfield)
wellness as it related to food. You both have heard this all the time, if you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it. And so, you know, had that lens, really got just absolutely neck deep in agriculture, meat agriculture to be clear. I don't grow a lot of grains or crops,

0:03:16
(Charley Mayfield)
but certainly know plenty of people that do. But yeah, it was so, so health, wellness, and cooking met regenerative farming. And then sort of the watershed moment for me happened in 2019. I got an awful sunburn which you know I could argue is the most common acute skin care problem and half

0:03:39
(Charley Mayfield)
desperation half curiosity decided to take some of the lard from the pigs I was raising and try it to, to soothe my burning skin. And when it worked and it worked absurdly well, that was sort of the next light bulb. And so when I shined, you know, back to that paleo lens, when I shined that lens over on skincare, it was, it blew my mind. How many chemicals, how many preservatives, how many things I could not pronounce were

0:04:11
(Charley Mayfield)
in skincare. Coupling the toxicity with the fact that this stuff truly alleviated my sunburn in a matter of days, that was the first watershed moment. But then over the course of maybe three or four weeks, I washed my skin like a hawk and I never peeled.

0:04:31
(Charley Mayfield)
And that was really the tipping point for, huh, this might be worth something here. This might be an avenue to pursue, because you always peel. And so, yeah, that was really sort of the origin story as succinctly as I can tell it.

0:04:50
(Casey Bradley)
Well, it's very interesting because, you know, I'm a hog farmer, grew up a hog farmer, and I used to make soaps and lotions as well, and tinkered in, I guess, skin care back in the day, but a previous life just for fun, but.

0:05:06
(Chantel P.)
I have a question. You mentioned the paleo diet and comparing that with your gut to your skin, me being a nutritionist, I'm really passionate about gut health. Could you elaborate a little bit more on what you meant by that?

0:05:22
(Charley Mayfield)
Sure, well, and I end up saying this a lot if again if you look at the diet industry nutrition world and all the ills that that sort of plague it, skin care is no different. It doesn't get quite the microphone or megaphone that that food does but our skin is our largest, a couple things, our skin is our largest organ okay. It is. Our skin is our largest organ, okay? It is a, I'm going to call it a semi-permeable membrane. Our skin eats things.

0:05:50
(Charley Mayfield)
A lot of people will refer to it as our second stomach. And so, you know, if you put, the cool thing about your gastrointestinal tract is not everything that goes in your mouth gets in your body. This is just really sophisticated, um, system, uh, highly acidic system that's built on breaking things down. And then, you know, in a healthy gut, we don't have to go too far down, you know, SIBO and some of these other sort of microbiome plaguing issues in our gut.

0:06:22
(Charley Mayfield)
But in a healthy gastrointestinal tract that your your body, your small intestines are going to absorb the components that it wants or needs and that's fantastic right this highly acidic environment we've also got a really effective exit strategy you know you eat something that doesn't agree with you you know there's a there's a fast train out the North Tunnel or the South Tunnel to you know, again rancid food various things that you know, the the

0:06:53
(Charley Mayfield)
there's a I Don't know if it's an old wives tale, but but when pregnant expectant mothers, you know that have food aversions most of the time those aversions are to meat because rewind the clock, thousands of years ago, rancid meat was probably the number one thing to avoid. Smelling it, ingesting it, anyway, our skin does not come with a similar defense system as our gastrointestinal tract. And so not only do the preservatives that they put in most products,

0:07:27
(Charley Mayfield)
you know, if in fact, well, you may know this. I'll tell your listeners, our bodies are covered in bugs. OK, it's the human microbiome. And of course, obviously, everybody sort of knows about the gastrointestinal bugs. There's all sorts of microbiotic material in our gut, but our skin, our hair follicles, every square inch of the human body is

0:07:50
(Charley Mayfield)
inhabited by a host of different microscopic organisms.

0:07:55
(Chantel P.)
There's even these little bugs, I forgot what they're called, but they live on your eyelashes.

0:08:00
(Charley Mayfield)
Oh yeah, I mean if you think about your body as a conglomeration of ecosystems, right? You've got damp, wet skin that never sees the sun, and like your armpits and inside your nose, you've got dry skin. You've got skin that's ... I mean, again, think about it as a multifaceted ecosystem that's inhabited by a number of creatures. Gosh, what was the ... Oh, just tying it to nutrition. Again, we've got this very sophisticated gastrointestinal system that over years has evolved with a very, very

0:08:38
(Charley Mayfield)
simple system for getting bad things out and keeping good things in. Our skin, you know, frankly our skin hasn't had to do that, okay. So you know most of the stuff, again talking skin care, most of the stuff that is in skin care products today didn't even exist 50 years ago, much less a hundred years ago. And so all these chemicals, these preservatives, parabens, phthalates, good Lord, I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

0:09:10
(Charley Mayfield)
Our skin really doesn't know what to do with that kind of stuff. And so, and it does eat things. And the problem, again, the problem there is once it gets on your skin, once it's inside, it's directly into the bloodstream.

0:09:22
(Charley Mayfield)
And so there's just this host of problems that are frankly created by a lot of these compounds that frankly our skin, our biology has not had enough time to adequately figure out how to handle. And so...

0:09:40
(Chantel P.)
The skin has a natural phospholipid layer and when I heard about your lard or your product, the first thing I thought of was, well, that gives the skin an extra barrier of what the skin already is, but it's giving it that extra protection.

0:09:58
(Charley Mayfield)
Agreed. And if you want to talk about a substance that we as a species have co-evolved to tolerate and welcome, it would be animal fat. If you were lucky, again, living out in a hunter-gatherer scenario or even just out on the prairie, think little house on the prairie. If you were lucky, you were viscerally and intimately involved in animal fat every week because you were eviscerating a carcass, you were cooking, which was all done with animal

0:10:37
(Charley Mayfield)
fat prior to 1911, right? It was, I mean, olive oils and some of these plant-based oils are fantastic. You know, coconut oil for frying, great. But those didn't exist in, in, in nearly the capacity or form that, that they do today, because we, we didn't have the machines or the equipment to be able to create it in mass. But you know, you, you go out to your backyard and harvest a pig.

0:11:04
(Charley Mayfield)
There's there's, or, or go hunting and harvest a deer, you're covered in fat for the next couple of days because you're skinning the carcass, you're eviscerating it, you're butchering it, and then you take all the excess fat, render it, and put it in a cup

0:11:22
(Charley Mayfield)
or some kind of holding device bowl or whatever the case may be and it just sits in your un-air-conditioned unrefrigerated you know cabin log home for the next couple of months or weeks and every night every time you need to fry something or bake something you just spoon it out.

0:11:40
(Chantel P.)
Speaking about that old age living and farming, I wanted to ask the question of what does regenerative farming mean to you and why is it so important for today's agricultural landscape?

0:11:54
(Charley Mayfield)
Yeah, great question. Y'all's questions were phenomenal. I've actually printed them and I'm saving them. I like to keep regenerative agriculture very simple. Okay, if you are building soil You are farming regeneratively Okay

0:12:10
(Charley Mayfield)
And now I can unpack that a little bit if you look at a natural system the the Corn Belt in the United States of America some of the more fertile landscapes in the world historically those landscapes and those deep deep top soils were built by a natural process of herding herbivores followed by migratory birds.

0:12:32
(Charley Mayfield)
Okay. And so you've got the herbivores doing the mowing and then the depositing of organic matter on the soil. And then you follow that up with sort of the cleansing of birds coming through and then sort of orchestrating all that, you had predators.

0:12:48
(Charley Mayfield)
In today's agricultural system, we've removed the predators by and large. We don't have bears and lions and tigers, so to speak. And so, as a farmer, as a regenerative farmer, you're acting as the, not the predator, but sort of the gas pedal on the brake.

0:13:09
(Charley Mayfield)
We'll just use cows as the best example here in the States. It's called a herd of cows, they stay together. That's a process that was built over thousands of years of predation, any ruminant herbivore, the wildebeest on the Serengeti, zebra, any horses, they're going to herd together and that's to disguise any one individual animal from a predator. Well, we don't have predators, so we use highly sophisticated, super awesome, you know, poly or poly wire and electrical fencing to act

0:13:47
(Charley Mayfield)
as the gas pedal on the brakes so that the impact to the land by those animals is controlled. If anyone's ever had backyard chickens, if those backyard chickens stay in the same place for more than a week, you have a moonscape, right? They just eat everything. And so herbivores are the same way

0:14:06
(Charley Mayfield)
You want you want to you want to allow the land? To function as close to a natural system as possible and in a natural system They eat they poop and pee and they leave and then they allow the land to rest And so you get this sort of cycling just like we breathe, right? you want the the landscape you want the ecology to breathe and so you get this sort of cycling just like we breathe right you want the the landscape you want the ecology to breathe and so so regenerative agriculture accelerates and maintains soil health and growth as fast as a

0:14:38
(Charley Mayfield)
natural system can some of the benefits of doing that are your animals are healthier you know they don't require shots or injections or anything like that. They're getting plenty of fresh air and sunshine and then in conjunction with that the landscape is getting the adequate rest it needs to recover.

0:14:53
(Casey Bradley)
How did your experience, obviously we came from CrossFit to paleo nutrition to regenerative agriculture, how did that farming practice lead you into pharaoh skin care? And I love the word pharaoh, so I had to learn more because it is a term we use in the swine industry on a regular basis. So what was that next step of bringing in a skincare versus regenerative farming and that evolution?

0:15:33
(Charley Mayfield)
Yeah, well, I mean, again, sort of a moment of desperation and curiosity. Well, back up. So I grew up in an agriculturally adjacent family. So my family's in the dairy business. Very successful, hyper, high-integrity brand of you know rewind the clock 40 years this country was loaded with small artisanal

0:16:02
(Charley Mayfield)
dairy farms. It was a very regional business and my family's business Mayfield Dairy was the dairy company, the milk company, ice cream company, I would say between Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's grown substantially since then but by the time I was, and y'all may know this, but when you get to be big enough as a dairy farm, you're not milking cows anymore, you're bottling milk. So, you know, at scale you reach a point where

0:16:34
(Charley Mayfield)
you're either gonna milk cows or bottle and sell milk. And by the time I was coming of age, our business, the family's business had grown to the point where we were a milk bottler. High quality, great brand, but we were a milk bottler. So I sort of grew up seeing it, sort of, but we didn't really milk our own cows when I was a kid. We had some goats at the house, at at our homestead and, you know, some chickens. But in terms of

0:17:09
(Charley Mayfield)
well, I think I got completely enamored by farming in 2013, 14. I took a trip to Joel Saddleton's farm in Polly in Stanton, Virginia, Pollyface Farms, and I was just, I was completely taken by their model and how they do things. And that's sort of what got my creative and curious juices flowing for,

0:17:35
(Charley Mayfield)
wow, this is a really amazing way to farm. Something I'd really never been exposed to. Most people weren't, candidly. Joel was featured, he came to prominence. He was a featured character, if you will, in Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma,

0:17:51
(Charley Mayfield)
which is a, everyone should read that book, it's a really fascinating book, but that's how I initially got introduced to him. And yeah, so how did I get to skincare? Well, I mentioned co-authoring the Paleo Cookbooks, right? I went on my own little paleo journey. I saw tremendous results

0:18:10
(Charley Mayfield)
in terms of weight management, energy levels, sleep, you know, just my overall sense of the world improved. And so, part of what came out of that process was, let me share, you know, these recipes that work for me. It's called Paleo Comfort Foods. We took a lot of traditional classic southern recipes and paleo-fied them. If you're not familiar with paleo, it's like no grains, no beans, no dairy, which made me the black sheep of the family. How dare you not consume dairy?

0:18:45
(Charley Mayfield)
And I still consume dairy to this day, but I cut it out for some period of time. And so saw tremendous results, decided, you know what, we need to write some cookbooks and share this. When the sunburn happened,

0:19:00
(Charley Mayfield)
it was, again, remarkable results. I had never been sunburned and not peeled. And so intuitively, you know, think about your skin. You know, your skin is this living organ and you know, you got skin cancers. We got all these various skin ails but think of it like this. Every time my skin peels, my body has to produce more skin, right? Which is just

0:19:26
(Charley Mayfield)
cellular replication, which is aging, it's all these various things and when I didn't peel, that was just an absolute watershed moment for me and I thought wow, this you know, here's this one thing, this sunburn and it worked really well. So I want to share that but also I wonder what else it works on. And you know, I launched the company cause of the sunburn. I can tell you we're still here. This is our fourth year in business.

0:19:51
(Charley Mayfield)
We're still here because give me a list of skin ailments. Like I haven't had razor burn in four years. Uh, my hair's gotten thicker since I started using this product as a hair thing. And then it's all the emails and texts that I get. Eczema, psoriasis, chelitis, rosacea. My poor kids, they're 10 and 12 now, but early on, you've seen,

0:20:15
(Charley Mayfield)
maybe you've seen my big fat Greek wedding movie. They spray the Windex on everything. It didn't matter what happened. My kids got a little lard on their skin. Chigger, poison ivy, mosquito bites, it just didn't matter. Healthy skin is going to be more resistant to itching. It's going to be more resistant to flaking.

0:20:43
(Charley Mayfield)
That's the real reason why it's it's still here today and what motivated me to launch it is again I it worked that's that's number one right it worked and then again I looked around I took that paleo lens and shine it on skincare and here I'm at the time I'm looking at my six or seven year old daughter and I'm like let's let's develop a product that's not full of poisons that disrupt our endocrine

0:21:08
(Charley Mayfield)
system. Most of these compounds are estrogen signaling. We all need estrogen. We just don't need any more of it than we're going to naturally produce. It was a conflation of a number of different motivations. If you really want to bring it back, the pig is such an amazing animal. And so, you know,

0:21:28
(Charley Mayfield)
lard is a waste product by all accounts in the, in the farming apparatus today. So it was like, wow, we can, we can honor this animal by, by making sure that we don't waste anything off the carcass and it works and it works better than anything I'd ever tried and and we can stop poisoning our skin and and it's fun it's fun to

0:21:53
(Charley Mayfield)
launch a business and sort of figure it out as you go and all those fun things.

0:21:57
(Casey Bradley)
You kind of hinted on it but obviously what do you think are some of the biggest issues with modern skin care products? Because there's a lot of brands, and I see this the same in pet nutrition, animal nutrition, human nutrition, celebrity launching stuff. What is your thoughts on some of the biggest issues with modern day skin care?

0:22:20
(Charley Mayfield)
Well, for starters, skin care is a fat-based industry, full stop. You can read all the old Egyptian texts and Queen Cleopatra taking goat's milk baths and anointing people with oil and all that. It's a fat-based industry. Today, walk into any store, zero products on the shelves are using any form of animal fat. Okay, if you're lucky it is a plant-based fat, a shea butter, a coconut

0:22:53
(Charley Mayfield)
oil, something along those lines, but more likely than not it's a seed oil or worse a petroleum derivative. Okay, our biology has zero idea what that stuff is, okay? So it's not gonna absorb as well and it's arguably not good for us. It's comedogenic, it's gonna claw our pores, so they're using the wrong fats. The Food and Cosmetics Act was passed in 1938. So this is the preeminent sort of FDA legislation around cosmetics and skincare and in that legislation

0:23:31
(Charley Mayfield)
the only ingredient in skincare that required Pre-market safety testing were color additives. Now, this is 1938 Okay, and so, you know, where do you get color back then? Well, you've got charcoals and all various things. And it made sense to test that. Here we are in 2024, that act, the Food and Cosmetics Act of 1938 has been updated, I think, three or four times.

0:23:59
(Charley Mayfield)
Cosmetics excluded every single time. Okay, so the the legislation governing safety testing around cosmetics and skin care was written in 1938. Today, I know this is one of the other questions you sent me, like what are the rules and regulations? It's all around claims. So I can't make the claim that my, you got to use the right words not the wrong words. I can't say heals. I can't say treats Nothing medicinal right? It can't it can't be a medical term. And so

0:24:32
(Charley Mayfield)
you know, it's it's Here you go. There are 11 chemicals permitted prohibited from use in skincare by the FDA in the United States of America, 11. By contrast, the European Union has a list of over 1,300, right? And so there's 1,289 chemicals that our governing body allows in skin care that the European Union does not. And then on top of that,

0:25:07
(Charley Mayfield)
similar to sort of medicines and drugs and shots and all that fun stuff, they've outsourced all the testing to the manufacturers now, right? And so, so it's what is it, the fox is guarding the hen house, if you will, when it comes to the efficacy of these products. And there's a, I always is guarding the hen house, if you will, when it comes to the efficacy of these products. And there's a, I always like to make this distinction. There is a very fine line between testing a product to know it helps you

0:25:34
(Charley Mayfield)
versus testing a product to make sure it doesn't hurt you. Those are, those are two completely different approaches to product testing. And so that, that in and of itself is what I can wrap modern-day skincare in is they don't care about the efficacy. Does it work? Does it help? They care about let's just make sure it doesn't harm the you

0:25:57
(Charley Mayfield)
know the user or at least harm them enough to where we can't kick the can down the road and the you know the the problems that they're dealing with are 15, 20 years into using our product cause it's death by a thousand cuts and these chemicals, oh, it's just a little bit, it's just going on your skin. And so there, there is a, there is a similar to the VAERS reporting. I mean, it's called SARS.

0:26:21
(Charley Mayfield)
There's a cosmetics reporting agency that's underneath the FDA where you can report adverse events based on the use of a product. This is how, I think it was talcum powder got, it was a bunch of lawsuits and some class action lawsuits and some settlements a number of years ago. That was all driven by the Sayers,

0:26:44
(Charley Mayfield)
C-A-E-R.S. I think cosmetics and something reporting system. It was all the data that ultimately sort of came from that reporting agency that sort of led to them turning their attention to talcum powder, talc. And so that's the big problem. Well, it's skin care, fat-based, okay?

0:27:09
(Charley Mayfield)
So number one. Number two, naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, okay? This is the biggest farce. We see this in food as well. Like somehow a molecularly different lab-grown, scientifically created vitamin or mineral is somehow on par with a naturally occurring version. It's not even close, right? And again, back

0:27:30
(Charley Mayfield)
to metabolism. So we'll keep it on skin care. Retinol. I'm sure you ladies have heard of retinol. It's a big buzzword in skin care. Retinol is vitamin A, folks. Vitamin A. And so, what would you rather have? Would you rather have the naturally occurring vitamin A that is metabolized and stored by an animal, cow, pig, whatever, or a molecularly different vitamin A that is generated in a lab? And the answer is you want the naturally occurring

0:28:07
(Charley Mayfield)
because your body will recognize, again, on a molecular level, that that's vitamin A and it's going to consume it and use it appropriately.

0:28:17
(Casey Bradley)
No, and I mean, I agree, natural in my mind is better where we can do it, but in nutrition perspectives, we can't get enough natural vitamins at times. Then we have to be creative in how we handle that with animals and people. If someone wants to improve their skin naturally, I think this could go in multiple directions. Where should they start? Obviously, I'm going to go throw away my skin care and look at animal fat based skin

0:28:47
(Casey Bradley)
care.

0:28:48
(Charley Mayfield)
Yeah, I've got great news for you. Okay. Um, where do you start? Stop spending so much money on Starbucks creams. Okay. Not using anything from the store is the middle ground between using my products

0:29:05
(Charley Mayfield)
or products like mine and using theirs. So you know it's steps okay. I would say put that garbage down okay. Get your seven to eight hours of sleep a night okay. Hydrate, make sure you're drinking plenty of water. Get as many nutrition, get as much nutrition from your food as possible. Okay, so give your body the ingredients it needs to make your skin vibrant and healthy. And here's the last one, you'll love this one.

0:29:39
(Charley Mayfield)
Put the cleansers down. Like, stop. I typically save this statement for the end of the night. I probably soap my body three or four times a month. Now I shower every day, okay? But we've gotten very effective at stripping the natural oils off of our bodies.

0:30:04
(Charley Mayfield)
And when we do that, while you're stripping the natural oils, you're also stripping the natural oils off of our bodies. And when we do that, you're, well, you're stripping the natural oils. You're also stripping these, these microscopic organisms, you're, you're hyper cleansing your body. And so it takes an adjustment period. I'm not saying it's, it's, it's easy, but putting the, certainly putting all of the alcohol-based cleansers down, you know, I

0:30:27
(Charley Mayfield)
mean this got obviously super ramped up in the last three or four years and germ theory and all that fun stuff, but my goodness, stop napalming your skin. That's a really good starting point. The, Casey, the people don't understand what a technological revolution running hot water is. It's only about 75 years old in this country. In the 1950s, that was if you were wealthy. Did you have a hot water heater? Okay. Well, what is dirty? I feel dirty, I need to clean off. Well dirty is I've sweat or my glands have you know my glands produce sebum, that's our natural oil and so in an

0:31:11
(Charley Mayfield)
environment where you are oily, feeling oily or sweaty and then that that stickiness binds to all the particulate matter in the air, dust and grime and this that and the other and that sits on your skin. Well think about when you wash your dishes okay, how much cleaning can you get done with warm water and a little scrub pad? A whole lot and so what I again, it's the cheapest way to improve your skin from day one is like put all that stuff down, take a washcloth, get in your warm

0:31:46
(Charley Mayfield)
shower or your bath, and let the warm water do all the work because it's going to bind to that excess oil and it's going to wash it off your body. And so there you go. Cheapest way to have awesome glowing skin right there.

0:32:03
(Chantel P.)
Charles, I love that you spoke about feeding your skin from the inside out and taking that holistic approach. I think that's really important for our listeners to hear that it's not just about what you put on your skin, it's also about what you're feeding your skin and the same way you feed the organs in your body.

0:32:20
(Chantel P.)
So I think that's really a fantastic statement.

0:32:25
(Charley Mayfield)
Well, it's our billboard, right? And so it needs the vitamins, it needs the minerals, it needs animal fat. I mean, if we're being candid here, this is tangential with this nutrition stuff, but we've vilified saturated fat now for 40, 50 years

0:32:44
(Charley Mayfield)
despite knowing that was wrong. We've had people ingesting these highly toxic, highly pro-inflammatory seed oils and all these. Again, I'm not against plant-based fats. Certainly, from a consumption standpoint, olive oil is delicious and coconut oil is great.

0:33:06
(Charley Mayfield)
But if we're talking about what are the ingredients, what are the tools that our body needs to then go around and heal and thrive and glow, it is predominantly from saturated fat from hopefully well-raised, well-cared-for animals?

0:33:26
(Casey Bradley)
One of the good questions, I said healthy skin, but the other thing is we're farmers. We came from farming families. My grandfather had skin cancer. My dad and uncles had some spots removed, but not, you know, anything more benign. I had a spot removed for being benign. What is your thoughts on sunscreen sun exposure and how can we protect it naturally?

0:33:55
(Charley Mayfield)
Yeah, great question. So if you graph out, we're going to graph out three things. Okay. We're going to graph out sunscreen use. We're going to graph out three things. Okay. We're going to graph out sunscreen use. We're going to graph out SPF value. Okay. And we're going to graph out incidence of skin cancer. And so if you can imagine an X and a Y axis, right. And we,

0:34:14
(Charley Mayfield)
let's just say we start in 1950. Okay. Uh, in 1950, very little sunscreen use. Okay. And I, I was born in 1974. So most of my memories are from the early or I would say late seventies, early eighties and eighties. Okay. I can, I can close my eyes right now and I can smell the Panama Jack tanning oil that my, we would cover ourselves in when we went to the beach. Right.

0:34:42
(Charley Mayfield)
And I think I recall, I think the maximum SPF value you could get in any store in America in 1985 was probably 20. Okay. Walk in a store today, you can get 150 SPF. Oh, and by the way, in 1985 they were all tanning oils, right? They were oil based. I'm sure there was some mineral in there, something to sort of block the Sun because it did have an SPF value. But here's my point. We're using now today, we're using more, so back to that graph,

0:35:15
(Charley Mayfield)
right? So you have three lines, three lines, and they're all going the same direction. So we're using sunscreen more. The SPF value on sunscreen is higher now than it's ever been and Yet incidence of skin cancer continue to grow One of those lines should be going down if the other two lines matter Okay, and so to unpacks I think we've all been hoodwinked Okay, we've lost our respect for the sun.

0:35:45
(Charley Mayfield)
Again, rewind the clock 100 years. They were, I mean, we were farming. Most of us were farmers. Most of us were outside working all day, but we were fully clothed, right? You had your big hat on, you had your long sleeves.

0:35:59
(Charley Mayfield)
We respected the sun. You know, it wasn't until the last 30, 40, 50 years that people are hanging out half naked at noon next to a body of water and they've been tricked into thinking that putting this stuff on their skin is somehow protecting them. And to some degree it does, but that's the big one for me. Now there's, I think we're gonna learn a lot more about this in the coming years, but I mentioned

0:36:29
(Charley Mayfield)
these seed oils and sort of industrial fats. Crisco, we'll just take Crisco or canola oil as one. We're ingesting these things at far higher rates than we ever did 60 years ago. Again, Crisco didn't even exist in 1910. And it's been shown that these manufactured industrial oils are actually very highly pro-inflammatory. And so again, back to ingesting the ingredients that allow our bodies and our biology to thrive. I think we've been

0:37:06
(Charley Mayfield)
robbing our skin of the ability to counteract the Sun, deal with the Sun. Okay, because again you lather up in this stuff. Most of the sunscreens today are chemical-based sunscreens as opposed to mineral-based and so you know your skinbased sunscreens as opposed to mineral-based. And so, you know, your, your skin is absorbing those things as opposed to like a zinc oxide, mineral-based product. We're,

0:37:32
(Charley Mayfield)
we're developing a sunscreen product now, but I just, for your listeners and you, I would just take a, take a slightly smarter approach to dealing with the sun. You know, if it's, I take my kids to the beach, we get to the beach early. Here's a factoid for everybody listening.

0:37:52
(Charley Mayfield)
If your shadow is taller than you are, then you cannot get sunburned, okay? So in the winter, it's taller than you are all the time because the sun sort of comes and it's low in the sky. This is why we can't get vitamin D in the winter, it's taller than you are all the time because the sun sort of comes and it's low in the sky. This is why we can't get vitamin D in the winter. But in the summertime, you know, come about 11, 1130, that sun's getting up there. We've got about a four to six hour window in high summer heat where we can get sunburned.

0:38:19
(Charley Mayfield)
Right? But before and after that, enjoy the sunshine, but you're not going to get sunburned because of the angle of the sun coming through our atmosphere. And so, I take my kids to the beach. We get to the beach early. We have a lot of fun. Do I have a sunscreen? Yeah, I've got a sort of test or mineral base that we're playing with, but you know, come about 11, 1130, it's like, all right kids, let's head back to the house. Let's eat some lunch. Let's play a board game, right? And if you want to go back out in the sun, here's a long sleeve shirt, you know,

0:38:54
(Charley Mayfield)
that's light and dries out. You know, you can swim. You don't even feel these things. Here's a hat. if you're you know, if you're on the water, it's right here under the eyes that just gets gets hammered when you're out on open water Because you've got the the Sun reflecting off the water and so we you know, we'll take some precautionary measures but I Hope that answers your question. I I'm not a big fan of sunscreens I'm a way bigger fan of respecting and being just a little bit more awareness about where the sun is in the sky. And do I, do I,

0:39:28
(Charley Mayfield)
am I going to be the geek at the beach wearing a hat at 1230 cause my kids want to go try and play in the surf? Yeah, that's going to be me. But I'm also not poisoning my skin and, and frankly, increasing the lightness that I get skin cancer.

0:39:44
(Casey Bradley)
We definitely take the old farmer approach and we wear long sleeve shirts and hats in that. But very interesting conversation. We could go on and on Charles. I think we could talk. I think this is really fun even for our audience because you've tied in agriculture and the fact that we're in animal agriculture into your product line. And I think that's awesome.

0:40:07
(Casey Bradley)
If people wanted to learn more about your work, your paleo cookbooks, your skincare, how can they find out about you?

0:40:15
(Charley Mayfield)
Sure. The best place to go is our website. Pharaoh dot life. Uh, F A R R O W case case. You needed the spellings. But yeah, that's the best place. The farming, there's some farming roots on there on the About Us page, we sort of get into it there,

0:40:34
(Charley Mayfield)
but that's where you can find us. We're on Instagram at pharo.skincare. We're on X at pharo.skin. You know, trying to get more active at social media is not my jam, but we're trying to get more active and have a better presence there. But those are the best spots to go and you know for your

0:40:54
(Charley Mayfield)
listeners that are interested if they want to try a product, LARD for the win. So LARD, L-A-R-D-F-T-W, LARD for the win is a 20% discount code for any of your listeners that want to try our products. But yeah, that's the best place to find us.

0:41:11
(Casey Bradley)
That's awesome. We'll put that in our show notes with your website and that coupon code and I think I may have to clean up my cupboard. The pork industry too, right?

0:41:23
(Charley Mayfield)
That's right. And again, the first couple of steps to having your skin just look and feel your best are literally free. It's just like put the cleansers down. We've got a soap line and I use it and it's remarkable. We use goat's milk and our smart lard and it's fantastic and I do recommend people's soap every now and then but if you'll just if you feel just back off a little bit and stop just stop stripping

0:41:57
(Charley Mayfield)
all of that wonderful excessively stripping you know that's what a shower or a bath should be is getting the excess off, not all of it. I'm telling you, that's it's it's a hundred percent free. Don't tell anybody you're doing it. They'll think you're gonna smell bad. That's why I and I still wear deodorant and various things, but by and large, just just get out of the way. That's it. That's it. Get out of the way. Your skin wants to thrive. Stop poisoning it, stop stripping it off.

0:42:30
(Charley Mayfield)
You know, feed it, you know. Chantel, back to the nutrition side. Give it the right ingredients to thrive and then just get out of the way. I promise you, go find pictures of your great-grandparents. Their skin looked amazing.

0:42:47
(Charley Mayfield)
And they bathed once a week.

0:42:49
(Casey Bradley)
So. Well, I have to tell a funny story, Charles. I think you'll appreciate this. It was a conversation I had with Arthur. I go, I look so young for my age, my skin or whatever, is fairly more healthy because I do prescribe of not overdoing it.

0:43:03
(Casey Bradley)
But I said, it's all the manure facial washes that I had. You know, I don't deal with the expensive peels and all that, but I've power washed enough pig barns or you know, animals that, um, not necessarily be covered in lard, but the natural facials I get from the mud bass and uh, he just had to laugh and he goes, Oh, that's so nasty.

0:43:24
(Charley Mayfield)
Mom, you're uh, he just had to laugh and he goes, Oh, that's so nasty. Mom, you're a, you're reminding me I was on a podcast a couple of years ago and I guess one of the guys guests in a couple of weeks prior to me going on with some, he like saved his urine and used it for skincare. And of course there's uric acid. There's, there's, there's some, there's some potential benefits to this.

0:43:45
(Charley Mayfield)
And he's like, what do you think about that? And I was like, man, I'm having a hard enough time convincing people to put lard on their skin. I'm gonna stay away from, you know, covering up in my own urine. But, oh man, listen, you wanna talk old wives tales

0:44:03
(Charley Mayfield)
and crazy stories, like just dig into skincare. It's crazy. But uh, yeah, I like to keep it simple and um, and yeah, you look great. So, so yeah,

0:44:15
(Casey Bradley)
well whatever you look better with the large skin care coming up.

0:44:20
(Charley Mayfield)
Well, the, the lard does work in mysterious ways.

0:44:23
(Casey Bradley)
And I love my pigs. So, Charles, really appreciate it. Everybody in the show notes will have the website, the coupon code. And it is very interesting talking about skin care and how agriculture is connected.

0:44:37
(Chantel P.)
And I learned so much. Yeah. Yeah.

0:44:40
(Charley Mayfield)
Most of the good stuff on this planet comes from farming.

0:44:44
(Casey Bradley)
Well, thank you. Well, thank you.

0:44:46
(Charley Mayfield)
Thank you. ♪♪