Susan West Kurz, now president of Dr. Hauschka Skin Care Inc., offers readers a month-long, 12-step regimen to restore health and beauty based on Hauschka's belief that restoring life energies provides optimum health.

"In a culture that idealizes youthful looks and encourages elaborate makeovers or even surgery to achieve them, the idea of natural beauty is often all but ignored," says the author, "But true beauty is within reach for women of any age, without submitting to needles or knives. The secret is nurturing beauty from the inside as well as on the surface, caring for both body and soul in a way that will naturally result in the smooth skin and radiant glow of good health whether one is eighteen or eighty."

Awakening Beauty shows readers how to structure their lives and choose healing strategies according to their own natural rhythms. Her plan consists of foods, herbs, essential oils, exercise, meditation and beauty products that readers can use to combat stress, environmental pollution and the effects of aging. Awakening Beauty the Dr. Hauschka Way outlines a series of achievable lifestyle changes that can dramatically improve appearance in a single month.

First and foremost, Kurz describes how using organically grown and mindfully harvested products can have a positive impact on the body and skin. While simple dietary changes begin to repair and renew the body, the complementary use of meditation, massage, and exercise enhances good health inside and out.

Kurz’s holistic approach is founded on an understanding of the body’s own natural rhythms, using them to direct the way each of us receives and responds to subtle cravings for nutrition and care. By recognizing exactly how skin behaves and how it responds to other parts of the body, we can use specific practices to improve the way we care for our skin and improve our overall health.

Awakening Beauty provides menus and recipes and describes proper skin-care methods and solutions for rosacea, acne and other conditions. West Kurz actively promotes the Dr. Hauschka line, but also includes instructions for simple at-home treatments using oatmeal, almond butter, apple cider vinegar, herbs and other inexpensive items.

While her practical, creative suggestions are rejuvenating, readers will find most refreshing Hauschka's vision of respect and love, first for the self and then for others and the planet.

About Dr. Hauschka Skincare

Based on products developed in the 1960s by Austrian chemist Rudolf Hauschka and aesthetician Elisabeth Sigmund, the Dr. Hauschka skin-care line has been used by Hollywood makeup artists to care for the complexions of such trendsetters as Cate Blanchette, Jennifer Aniston and Madonna. The line incorporates plant ingredients extracted by a method that Hauschka claimed retained their most vital life energies.

A-list celebrities, professional makeup artists, and Hollywood stylists have long embraced Dr. Hauschka’s botanical products, attracted by their extraordinary results and the company’s thirty-five-year commitment to purity, therapy, and luxury. Now the same extraordinary results are available to the rest of us through a rejuvenating prescription for healing.