Did you know that International Self-Care Day is an actual thing — and it’s coming up soon, on July 24? If that’s a snort of derision we heard over the Interwebs from all the moms out there, well, Busy Philipps feels you. But hear her (and us!) out: The Girls5Eva and Freaks and Geeks actress knows how hard self-care is for moms, which is why her latest partnership is designed to help make it a bit more realistic for those of us who already feel stretched to the limit without adding another to-do to the list — even a fun one.
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Philipps teamed up with Oui by Yoplait and essie nail polish to encourage all of us to prioritize self-care (even for a day!) and enjoy a little treat. The result is the OuiFresh sweepstakes, which offers folks the chance to win one of 1,000 OuiFresh kits, featuring six essie nail polishes and Oui yogurt flavors, packaged in a chic, reusable lunch tote. (You can enter for a chance to win a kit on Oui’s Instagram from now through July 22 at 3 p.m. ET — just swipe up or click on the link in the bio and enter the #OuiFreshYourselfSweeps for a chance to get one of the cute kits delivered on July 23!)
Philipps spoke to SheKnows about the partnership and her own approach to self-care — for herself as well as her kids, Birdie, 12, and Cricket, 8 — coming at what we all desperately hope is the tail-end of a pandemic year.
“Self-care is a very loaded word, and a lot of times people feel like it gets co-opted just for beauty treatments or whatever,” she says. “But the truth is, at its core, what it’s about is finding the moments that you can take for yourself where you’re giving something to yourself, because as women — as parents — we give so much of ourselves all the time to others.
“What I’ve always tried to remember in my life is, don’t talk about yourself in a way that, like, you wouldn’t talk about your best friend,” she continues. “You can’t treat yourself in a way that you wouldn’t treat your child. You have to take care of yourself because that’s going to make you better at all of the other things. And I know it gets really hard and it feels like that in and of itself becomes a job.”
For many moms, that kind of self-kindness is at once the easiest and hardest self-care tip ever: It’s free, takes just seconds… and yet it can feel like a Herculean task. Philipps gets it — which is why she’s also admittedly a fan of that other kind of self-care, too — the traditional beauty kind.
“I love painting my nails and I love having my nails done — it’s like one of my favorite things,” she says.
In fact, it’s a self-care tip she remembers her own mom making time for. And having had self-care modeled for her, she’s making sure she models it for her own daughters. Right now, in the Philipps household, that mostly means helping her girls identify how they’re feeling, and where those feelings and emotions are coming from.
“Here’s the thing,” she says. “Self-care can be a beauty treatment. It can be locking the door in your bathroom for 10 minutes, painting your nails. It can be taking a Oui by Yoplait yogurt and sitting down and eating it for five minutes. You know, I also put in some of my own tips and tricks in the OuiFresh kit. I love meditation; I found it later in life and there’s a lot of ways that you can do meditation that’s not sitting in a dark room for 45 minutes. Even just taking five minutes for yourself can be a form of self-care, but really what’s important is that it just allows you a chance to check in with yourself and identify your own needs.
“I really get sad when I hear from women [that] self-care is just too hard and it feels like it’s just become a way to sell us more stuff. And I’m like, yes, but also…all things can be true, guys, we’ve got to be able to hold all the things. And the fact is it’s an incredibly valuable thing. And we have to learn it because my generation — we were just never taught that it was something that was valuable.”
Philipps is intent on changing that for herself and for her kids — and helping the rest of us change it for ourselves and our kids — one day, five minutes, a yogurt, or a manicure at a time.
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