My Cruelty-Free Beauty & Wellness Reset for the New Year

Happy New Year - Welcome 2026!

Celebrating both the plantes safe journey around the sun and ours as well is definitely a cause for celebration. Unlike the sun, we get 2 new year's days - January 1st and our birthday... unless you were born on January 1st. Funny enough, I am strangely suppositious about both dates, welcoming the new year with a specific color, a clean home, a freshly polished body, a refreshed mind, and being in the company of my loved ones.

2025 was a year of silent self-reflection, questioning my purpose, reconnection, new discoveries, learning, and preparing. By silent, I mean that it was a private journey that was not meant to be shared with the general public aka social media. So, if you feel like you need to take a break and step away from the camera for a while, just do it.

For 2026, there are several adventures planned. For starters, I'm trying out a new skincare brand called Dime Beauty. This cruelty-free and vegan brand have skincare for several skin concerns and also have fragrances (which I'll be sampling as well). After stepping away from Monat Beauty in August 2024, I also completely abandoned my skin care. Instead of rushing into using another skincare brand, I took my time to discover other cruelty-free and vegan brands. Thankfully, there are many to choose from. Why did I choose to start with Dime Beauty? Because I also wanted to try their fragrances.

Fragrances have become my most recent mission - cruelty-free fragrances that is. It started with Black Friday sales during November 2024 with the brand Clean Beauty Collective. November 29th, 2024, I purchased two of their discovery sets. If you can't commit to a full-size perfume bottle, buying the sample sets is definitely the way to go. Once I received them, I tried one new fragrance a day and slowly started to discover my scent style. After really enjoying multiple scents, I really fell in love with Sparkling Sugar. Then moving through 2025, I discovered more cruelty-free fragrances and now have a long list of perfumes to try. I am very excited to share my scentful finds with you in the coming months.

As for my 2026 beauty and wellness routine, I am temporarily forgoing a toxic and massively aging substance- alcohol. This journey actually started early November (2 months ago) and will continue until November of this year. Giving up alcohol for a year was a sudden and unplanned decision. Though I never abused alcohol, I did enjoy a glass of wine or two regularly at the end of my workday with dinner. But two glasses of wine daily are physically harmful, especially for your liver. So, for multiple reasons, I decided to stop alcohol consumption for year. Is this something you would consider?

Another massive change to my wellness this year is the decision to go hormone free; meaning I am ditching the pill. Birth control has been a blessing and a curse. Ever since I started using birth control pills in 2019, my severe menstrual cramps practically vanished which was the biggest blessing of all. The downside is that my hormones have been completely affected causing weight gain, hyperpigmentation, and more. After having a medical chat with my doctor, it was decided that moving forward with a Copper IUD will be beneficial to improve the negative side effects of the pill. However, this also means that my vicious menstrual cramps will return. Admittedly, I am not psychologically ready to regain those monthly pains again, but I am excited to share with you the cruelty-free alternatives to pain medication I'll be trying such as O Positiv FLO PMS, Apothekary Every Phase, Elix Healing Cycle Balance, and Pixie Cup Pulse.

Now that my hormones are (hopefully) returning to an unaltered state, exercise and dieting is back on the agenda. With hormonal birth control, I felt as if I was swimming against the current. No matter how much I exercised and dieted, my physique and weight remained unchanged. Discouraged and frustrated, I gave up all together. In addition to that, my left knee was also a deterrent most of 2025 as I couldn't bend my knee at all. Then in mid-October, my doctor injected my knee with steroids and gave me a physical therapy plan. Thankfully, my knee is 98% recovered and normal activities such as walking is no longer painful. So, I am thrilled to start my workout routine and new diet immediately. Using apps like FAY, Asana Rebel, and Yoga Burn are going to help guide me through my workouts and diet plan.

Taking care of your body is always a priority, but so is taking care of your mind, your emotions, and your soul; all the things that don't come up on an x-ray. One of my goals for this year is to practice more self-love. Unfortunately, I am my cruelest critique. In order for me to be kind to myself, I need to stop comparing my body to that of my twenty-year-old self, I need to accept myself and my uniqueness, I need to learn to forgive myself for past mistakes, and I need to remember that life dreams and goals don't have a due date or an expiration date. Listening to powerful messages from powerful women on social media, interviews or Podcasts have started to help me with my self-love journey. Daily journaling will also become part of my evening routines. But my most elevating change for this year is praying regularly. Communicating to the Almighty daily is high on my priorities. Joining a private Bible Study group in 2025 helped me reconnect my relationship with the Creator. This is a young and intimate relationship that will mostly remain private. However, I will be incorporating some of my favorite Bible verses that are also relevant to A Modern Ladybug brand to some of my posts.

The start of a new year is always very exciting. I hope that some of my shared goals for this year will inspire you to do the same or at least pursue a positive change in your life. Wishing you luck this year! Let me know what some of your 2026 goals are in the comments.

XoXo,

Ody

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