Top 3 ways to practice skin love
Skin love is definitely a practice and not a destination.
Skincare Gratitude in 2020
Over the last several months, I have to admit it’s been a struggle to know what to share on my blog. I really needed (and still need) to take the time to truly reflect on what it is I want to put out into the world because it’s been such an unstable time for many of us. But the reality is that my biggest inspiration over the last 5 years of blogging has been my clients, which I’m not seeing a lot of at the moment. So when I go to write, I start to journal and it becomes a litany of complaints that starts to feel like just a big dose of verbal diarrhea. And the last thing most of you need to read about is about my uncertainty when you are still very much in your own.
To all the estheticians I was before...
2019 marks the 13th year of my career as an esthetician. I don’t know how it happened but somehow my entire adulthood has been dedicated to serving people with some fresh skin. I don’t have any possible way to break down the number of people that I’ve seen but upwards of 20,000 people is my estimate based on some fast math. Many of these clients I saw once, many I kept as forever clients, and then there’s every circumstance in between in which I managed to get to know, help, and connect with someone even for just a short time together. I think about each day I’ve been able to have doing this job since my days back in beauty school. The consistency of it is that I wake up and know that at some point in the day, I get to expand my knowledge by learning something new about someone new and keeping in my heart that my responsibility is to just make them feel worthy and comfortable with exactly who they are. I discovered early on that there are little and big ways to accomplish this and my success rate is only equal to how worthy and comfortable I feel with myself as well. There are versions of the esthetician that I am now that I’ve always had in me but with a little time, and a lot of experience, all the estheticians I was before are the layers of who I get to be today.
Optimizing your facial
It’s pretty clear at the end of a treatment if someone will benefit from our time together or not. A facial is not just an opportunity to relax or a time to get your skin cleared up, it’s an opportunity for an updated education on your skin’s health by tuning into what your skin is telling us. If we miss out on our chance to listen in, there can be some confusion as to why our skin responds in the way that it does post-treatment. There are a few simple steps that I like to tune into in order to make sure my clients feel supported but the key is if they are ready to participate in what can optimize the facial’s potential. Here are a few key steps towards achieving that very important skin care goal.
How To Cleanse your Skin!
Imagine a morning without coffee, a night without netflix or starting your car without keys. All of these scenarios have missing parts that just don’t make sense. That’s exactly how I feel about a skincare routine with no cleansing. It simply doesn’t work. Cleansing your skin is something that more often than not is done incorrectly. As the first step to your skincare routine it is often skipped over or done way too quickly. In order to have your skincare routine work effectively you must prepare your skin for success. This post is bringing it back to basics to bring you the proper education on how to cleanse your skin.
Infusions for your skin
Reading the skin can be one of the most resourceful parts of my work but the hardest part isn’t actually acquiring the information but rather delivering it. I’ve slowly gotten more comfortable throughout the years with telling my clients that they are depleted. I know how I feel when someone tells me I’m less than full and it can be tricky information to receive. The panic starts to set in that you have to try to turn your whole life around in order to just get back to zero instead of chronically negative. We all don’t want to be operating less than what we optimally would need or want to but we also might not have the best time to refuel. That’s when herbal infusions come into the big picture of health-hacking. Today I want to discuss a few of my favorite infusion recipes for different skin conditions.
Understanding the importance of neck care
This past weekend I was so honored to take a class taught the brilliant Cecily Braden and Angela Peck. If you don’t know who these ladies are, they are some of the most esteemed leaders in the holistic esthetician education world. They host supportive, expanding workshops on everything from Gua Sha, lessons in traditional Chinese medicine, lymphatic drainage technique, Thai herbal poultice face massage, and everything in between. The class was so elevating and I was honored to surround myself with so many holistic estheticians who were looking to bring more intuitive modalities to their practices. Along with deepening my education on Gua Sha, there was a resounding theme that I felt I needed to share in this week’s blog. Most people think that skin care is just based on what our faces need. What about our neck? A lot of our neck health can be an indicator or the root of skin imbalance manifestation. Today I want to talk about the importance of neck care and how it will benefit your skin.
The secret to eye care
As usual, I get inspired to write about each subject on the blog from my experiences with clients. Over the weekend there were a few common themes, one of which I spoke about in an instagram live and the other I’m writing about today. Many of you may have noticed that I’m not big on recommending eye products. It’s not because I don’t believe in them because some eye products are fantastic. It’s more so that the work goes a little deeper than just an expensive skincare product. The eye area can correlate to so many different aspects of your health. Whether it stems from a reproductive, detoxification, endocrine, or simply genetic issue, the care can be tricky to uncover if you're not tapped in. With so many great products out there formulated for just the eye area, it's important to understand that it takes just as much of the inner work to obtain the benefits of the product. Let me break down common eye area issues and what to do to help support them.
Chronically tired skin
I’ve not shied away from sharing my health history with all of you on this platform so it’s no surprise that at some point I would write about adrenal fatigue. I first discovered this epidemic when I met a functional medicine doctor at The Detox Market when I worked there. She offered to evaluate my health patterns so we started with a cortisol test. I genuinely never thought about how being chronically tired wasn’t something that everyone dealt with in their life. I just assumed that all of us need a nap at 12, and 3, and 5, and then can’t stay out past 10 pm. When she called me to go over my results of this test, I was shocked at how uneducated I was towards this vital part of our health.
Subconscious Skin Sabotage
When I think about the problems that come up with skin conditions, the worst one I think of has nothing to do with the skin itself. Our emotional wellness is oftentimes compromised when we are dealing with a physical manifestation of an internal imbalance on our skin. This could lead us to eventually believing in the worst about ourselves which is we may not be deserving the skin we want. There is an epidemic of people who experience the psychological effects of having a problematic skin condition that they often have a hard time seeing past imbalance even when it’s resolved. Regardless of when you have had a skin issue, it can come back not only physically but also the emotional effects can too throughout different times in your life. So what do we do when we happen to be one of those people? How can we shift into believing we deserve great skin and actually achieve it? It all starts with the right mindset and the proper tools to help you heal from the experience of having an imbalanced skin condition. Today I want to talk about how to balance this so you are not left subconsciously sabotaging your skin.
Taking accountability
Maybe it's because I am 30, maybe it's the start of a new year, or maybe it's an unknown universal shift but I have recently felt empowered to own up to a lot of my mistakes and start taking some accountability. I am the type of person who can admit when I'm wrong but often time it comes after a fit of defensiveness and a little bit of self-victimizing. Lately, I have recalled a couple of instances in which I needed to take accountability and didn't have the emotional intelligence to do so. It's difficult to look back and think "I should have done this better" but having grown up in this field I have to give myself a little credit for doing my best and learning along the way. As much as I can't help but cringe at some of my reactions in the past, I want to share a few of them with you. Hopefully, this can help shed some light on where we can oftentimes fall short as people, but recognize that there is always room to grow and get better.
Skin Solutions for the body
I have to admit that when I do a facial I mostly do consider what’s going directly on the face. But as you can imagine, since skin covers the whole body it isn’t the only place in which we can experience imbalance. The skin is a communicator of what is going on internally so it can be difficult to determine why we all of a sudden could be experiencing a rash or breakout in an odd place. Skin conditions that aren't on the face can be just as damaging to our self-esteem. With these weather shifts and increase in the holiday celebrating there are a few pesky skin conditions that most of us struggle with but never talk about. Today I want to talk about how to support your whole body for best body skin practices.
My everyday skin hacks
Great skin comes from a few different factors. Good genes are ideal, a healthy lifestyle is always a plus, and some results-driven products can usually turn most conditions around. However, there are a few things that I do daily that can really take your skin from great to GRAND almost immediately. I like to call these my skin hacks, mostly because they are free and simple. Today I'm going to walk you through the few that I do pretty much every day and make the biggest difference in my skin's success.
Why you're not taking advice...
At the risk of starting this post like I’m about to go on a rant, I just want to preface that there is some education squeezed in here so keep reading to get to the good stuff. I can’t help but get a little annoyed when a client tells me that they were given advice by someone else when it goes one of two ways. Either the advice is something I’ve been trying to drill in my client’s heads but they seem to only hear it from someone else. Or it’s completely conflicting with my advice but they take it instead! Maybe it’s the youngest child syndrome but I do have a really hard time with people not listening to me. If you take the time to come to see me, spend time telling me everything about your skin and health, and then decide that my advice isn’t for you - that’s one thing. However, I find that the issue lies more with people who are seeking a very specific result are not only completely shutting my advice off but look to me to blame when things aren’t getting better. This may seem harsh, but you can understand my frustration. 95% of my clientele are very compliant and benefit greatly from my feedback because it’s personally tailored to them. So why do the 5% not take the advice? I can’t answer with certainty but my impression (and personal experience with being a client myself) tells me that there is a huge block that needs to come down first.