Kate Hudson Follows This Mantra To Stay Physically & Emotionally Fit

Although you know her from the big screen, starring in fan-favorite movies like Almost Famous and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Kate Hudson also does a lot offscreen. In addition to having co-founded athletic clothing brand, Fabletics and INBLOOM, a wellness brand that creates plant-based supplement powders, she also recently teamed up with Juice Beauty, renowned for its organic beauty products. “I care about my health, yes,” Hudson tells TZR. “But I also just love learning about all the new things and new sciences of what makes our bodies tick.” In fact, this fascination is likely the common ground in which Hudson’s beauty and wellness routines are built upon.

In regards to the former, the actor explain that her journey into learning about “clean beauty” specifically — exploring cosmetic products free of synthetic chemicals, such as parabens, that can do more harm than good — began when she met Juice Beauty’s founder, Karen Behnke. “I met Karen 15 years ago, and she was my first teacher of clean beauty,” says Hudson. “I didn't even understand, at the time, what I was putting on my body for so many years ... through makeup and shampoo and skin care. And she was the one who really showed me, and taught me, what those ingredients were, and showed me what to look for on the back of a product bottle.”

Hudson says this education opened the floodgates for her to want to understand it on a deeper level. “I'm by no means an extremist,” she continues. “I love clean beauty and lean toward it — honestly, because I like it better on my skin and it's better for the environment. To me, I always think, ‘The cleaner, the better.’ By the way, if you hear me shifting, I'm getting into my sauna blanket.”

Sauna blanket?! I joke that I didn’t know we were doing sauna blankets for our call. Hudson laughs and says, “I'm taking this opportunity, while talking to you, to sweat.” (More on this soon.) Ahead, the 43-year-old mother of three talks more about her coveted sauna blanket, as well as all things beauty and wellness.

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OK, back to the sauna blanket for a second…

This is what I do. I'll roll calls and work, and I'll sit in my sauna blanket for 45 minutes.

So this sounds like one of your favorite wellness practices?

When you become somewhat in the public eye, the first thing people ask is, ‘What are your beauty secrets?’ And for me, it’s always like, ‘Oh, beauty secrets?’ You can feel beautiful and feel terrible. I feel at my best when I feel my strongest and my cleanest and my clearest and sharp-minded … When I can walk light, I feel great. And what I mean by that is not physically, I mean that mentally, and walking with a lightness of being is not something that just comes. That's something that we have to work at, and it's hard.

That comes with a practice, a meditation practice. That comes with your exercise, your physical activity. What kind of active lifestyle do you lead? How are you circulating blood in your body? And how are you supplementing? These are things that I'm super passionate about. And the one thing I've always done, because I learned it from my mama [Goldie Hawn] who's the best, is, ‘Sweat it out’ — it's the hot and the cold. I love my cold plunges. And I love my saunas. My mom and I will both say the sauna’s our happy place.

And as we know now [sweating is] one of the great benefits for your wellness, for your health, and regenerating your cells, [reducing] inflammation, and detoxing. I love going into the sauna, but I just got this blanket, and one of the great things is, I can work and do it. When you go into a sauna, you've got to get naked and it's hot. You can't bring your phone in. The sauna blanket is infrared, so it's a little bit different. It works with your body differently than a dry sauna. The one I’m using is HigherDOSE. I feel very grateful they’ve sent this over; they’ve sponsored our podcast [Sibling Reverly, co-hosted with brother, Oliver Hudson]. No matter what your lifestyle is, however you can do better in certain areas or how you balance or whatever the thing is, it's the biggest organ in our body. We need to open it up and sweat it out, and infrared, the studies behind it, are too powerful to ignore.

Do you do the cold plunge every day also?

No, because I have to do the cold plunge at my friend's house, and I can't always go over there; I don't have one in my house yet. So I'll do that, maybe once a week. But I'll do ice. You could do an ice bath in your own bathtub. I'll do that sometimes.

Any other self-care practices?

A cocktail here and there is also a form of self-care to me. This is just my own philosophy, but I believe that people should do what works for them. Like I love food and drink. [They make me] so happy. If we're saying, what are the last great indulgences that we can do? To me, it's food. I'm such a foodie, but you've got to balance it out, like everything else.

And speaking of cocktails, Juice Beauty’s Cocktail Concentrates sound amazing and launched on Mother’s Day. Can you talk about that? The inspiration behind them.

Karen and I wanted to work together and [had created] the mask [Revitalizing Acacia + Rose Powder Mask]. I love the mask, but then she asked, ‘What’s the one thing that you feel like you want, but you don’t have?’ And I said a mask that I can customize. I want something that can clarify my skin and hydrate it at the same time. She says, ‘OK, this is the hardest combination, but let's go for it.’ So we set out to make a hydrating clarifying mask, and we, as far as I'm concerned, killed it. It's so good. And the one thing I love about it, is the ability to customize it so you can use it more intensely. Like if you want a thicker, stronger clarifying mask, you can make it thicker. And then for me, I like using it in the morning, multiple times a week, because it wakes my skin up. I love doing it before makeup. So I make it thin and I put it on for three minutes and it’s just the best.

We wanted to create a great base, but I also love my serums and potions. My skin changes all the time based on weather, environment, and hormones. So Karen says, ‘Let’s do some concentrates that we can put in the mask and that we can use separately.’ So we formulated the mask so that when you’re putting it together, you can use one of our serums/concentrates. What I do is add them to the mask. When I take it off, I actually put the serum on my skin alone. I saw immediate results, which I never get to do in the products that I usually get behind. It's usually talking about active lifestyle and how we can stay with a routine, or when you're supplementing, and those things take some time. Whereas when you start working in beauty, with masks and skin care, and you immediately see results, it's so much fun.

Regarding overall wellness, when you wake up, what's the first thing you do?

The first thing I do is, I drink warm lemon water. Well, the first thing I do is, I try not to look at my phone. I sit there and think about what my day looks like. And then I'm like, ‘I should probably get…’ or ‘I should probably do this…’ And then I'm like, ‘No. Stop.’ And I give myself a good 30 minutes to an hour where I really exercise not looking at my phone. I'll wake up my kids. I drink my lemon water. And then I wait about an hour and have my coffee and we do school drop-off. And that's what my morning looks like.

And my beauty routine's really simple, because I don't wash my face [in the morning]. I just use water — water and hydrate in the morning. And if I'm sitting in front of the camera, I'll do my mask and a little bit more. So I'm just ‘Momming’ it all day and working from home.

Can you talk more about why you just use water?

[When I was in my mid-twenties] I was washing my face and [makeup artist] Gucci Westman was like, ‘Stop washing your face in the morning.’ I was like, ‘Really?’ She goes, ‘Yeah. All you need is a little water. The oils are good, as long as you really clean it the night before.’ And you know what? She's right. The second I started doing that, my skin started having better texture and not breaking out as much. I say this in my book [Pretty Happy: Healthy Ways to Love Your Body], too. People always ask what you use or what you do. And the truth is, what works for me isn't always going to work for everybody. So it's really how your body works or where you live or what you eat.

Going back to other wellness practices or workouts, do you have a number-one favorite?

Oh, my God, I'm such an Aries — I can't do one thing for that long. So my workouts are all over the place. I love Pilates, it’s sort of the base of all of my workouts. I grew up dancing and it was really my body’s foundation of working out. So Pilates really speaks to me. And then I do a lot of functional training around that. I'll do anything. I love to move my body.

When you want to look and feel good, do you have a secret go-to weapon? If so, what is it?

Any kind of liquid bronzer that's a spray. Right now, I use By Terry. It's a spray bronzer. And I just will put that all over my face, and I love it. And I just think that because I try to stay out of the sun, and I'm really trying to be good about that, it just sort of brightens my face, warms it up.

Any parting words for someone who’s unfamiliar with clean beauty?

You're not going to see me telling people [to do it]. I just don't believe in that. I just believe you do what you do and you do what you love, and hopefully people like it. And for me, my mission in anything that I do, and anything that I'm involved in, is, I really care about how we source ingredients, and what it's doing to our environment. I care about that in packaging. The reality is that people will continue to consume, so if we're going to build, I just personally believe in building in a way that's better for the environment. It makes me feel better about the things that I'm doing in my life. And I want to do as much good work as possible, and try to eliminate as much waste as possible.