Natural Stone "Gua Sha"
We’ve repackaged our gua sha into an exclusive box to better reflect our love and cultural ties to our Chinese Canadian heritage. We’ve commissioned a local Chinese Canadian artist, Axi Xie, to create a beautiful, modern interpretation of a Shan Shui painting (A traditional Chinese landscape painting usually depicting nature). Each box will explain the function of gua sha, contain instructions to properly care for and maintain your natural stone tool, a simple guide on how to use the gua sha on the face, and a protective canvas pouch to store your tool—making it an ideal gift! 10% of the proceeds per box will go to a charity that we strongly believe in. This year we decided to support our local Asian/AAPI communities and we’ve decided on the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation. We’re inspired by their mission in finding the balance between preserving tradition and building a sustainable future for Vancouver’s Chinatown.
My grandmother had these stone tools on her dresser, and I used to play with them as a child. She taught me how to use the stones to lightly massage my temples and to scrape my skin. "Feel that gritty feeling of sand underneath your skin?" She used to say as she moved the stone slab up and down on my back. "Those bits of sand are the toxins in your skin. If you are diligent with the gua sha then the sand will become smoothed out and the toxins are scraped away and drained from the body". Later in life, I abhorred the full body scraping treatment, but the gentle facial massage was a welcome ritual in my skincare routine.
The name gua sha — pronounced gwahshah — comes from the Chinese word for scraping. According to traditional Chinese medicine, chi is energy that flows through the body, and it must be balanced and flowing freely to ensure health and wellbeing. Chi can sometimes become blocked, causing pain or tension in the muscles and joints; thus, gua sha aims to improve circulation to move this blocked energy to relieve aches, stiffness and to increase blood flow and stimulate the lymphatic system. Using our natural stone or crystal gua sha on the face will help with circulation, lymphatic drainage and skin contouring. It is recommended to use the gua sha with facial oils or moisturizer so that overall absorption of the skincare products into the face and neck is improved. Our natural stone gua sha tools are imported directly from China and come in the colours jade, rose quartz and purple amethyst. Some of them are even reshaped here in Vancouver by our in-house team.
Please note: our gua sha stones are hand carved and made of natural stone so slight colour differences, small flaws and fissures are considered to be natural imperfections that add character and intention to each piece. Each piece will be unique and vary in veins and colour, making it a special addition to your collection of beauty tools. The stone is fragile, so please be careful not to drop it on a hard surface as it may shatter!
For mindful use:
The gua sha are perfect accompaniments for the Active Herbal Elixir,
Make sure to use a light and gentle touch while holding the gua sha tool,
Use the different curves of the gua sha for different areas of your face: wide flat edge for the forehead, small curve for the eye sockets and nose, round curve for the cheeks and jaw,
Always glide the tool gently up and out, starting from the areas at the top of your face to the bottom, around three strokes per area,
Never tug roughly at your skin,
Be careful as the delicate stone can slip from your hands and is prone to chipping or breaking when dropped.
Align your “chi”:
Jade - This beautiful green stone is cool to the touch which makes it a perfect massaging tool to smooth over your skin. Please note that this is natural stone but not actual jade as jade is a semi-precious gem that is very expensive. The cooling helps with complexion brightening, puffiness reduction, lymphatic drainage, and blood circulation. When blood is properly circulated, oxygen is carried to revitalize skin cells. Products used with the tool will also become better absorbed into the skin tissue.
Rose Quartz - Long venerated as the stone of love and heart, rose quartz has inherent minerals such as silicium, magnesium, iron, sodium and oxygen—nutrients that skin can benefit from when rolling. Ideal for sensitive or reactive skin, this stone pulls inflammation and and restores calm to the mind and body.
Purple Amethyst - Uniquely beautiful, and sparkling with a glassy purple luster, this stone is known to be helpful in obstructing negative energies from one's surroundings. Some believe amethyst's calming presence produces soothing dreams by enhancing consciousness and meditation. These healing properties are connected to your headspace; try using this stone on your skin to massage your face and body while soothing your mind of any worries, stress, or tension.
Info about our natural stones:
We get our gua sha supplied from a small factory that specializes in natural stone leftover from bigger projects, so every batch is a bit different in terms of the type of stone! For the "jade" stone that we carry, since our stones are ethically sourced, so far we have gotten a mix of aventurine, and nephrite (not jewelry-grade jade, which can be very expensive) for the green colour that I have in the listing. I always assure that my stones are natural and real stones but I cannot guarantee that is will always be jadeite/nephrite (what constitutes as real jade).
I know sometimes it is confusing, but most jade rollers and gua sha under $30 are not real jade because it is considered to be very precious and there isn't enough to go around. And mining jade is actually not very ethical. The mining conditions are brutal, and jadeite (the more expensive jade) is pretty much exclusively mined in Myanmar now where the people are going through a very tumultuous time. Most of the jade rollers/jade gua sha you see on the market now are made of: serpentine, Xiuyan jade, new jade, Australian jade, Malaysian jade, or mountain jade are all real stone, but they are also not "real jade". It actually isn't necessary for a beauty tool to be made of real jade, and for massage and lymphatic drainage, real stone works just as well!