A Deeper Understanding of the Skin

I came to esthetics through a lifelong fascination with the human body and, perhaps more than anything, a curiosity about what allows us to feel well within it.

I grew up in a family of medical professionals, where anatomy, physiology and caring for people were part of the landscape of my childhood. I had the opportunity to accompany my family on humanitarian healthcare missions to Guatemala and spend time in the operating room, witnessing the extraordinary complexity of the body up close.

At nineteen, while working in a family-owned vitamin and supplement store in Arizona, that curiosity took another form. I became fascinated by nutrition and cellular biology and by the idea that what happens inside the body eventually makes its way to the surface.

Then I lost my godfather to pancreatic cancer. His death brought me back to a question that had been quietly following me for much of my life: How can I be of service to people?

The answer arrived somewhat unexpectedly, as an intuitive pull toward skincare. I returned home to the Bay Area and began studying esthetics. From the beginning, I was captivated by the physiology of skin - how it is nourished, how it repairs itself and how intimately its health reflects the conditions around and beneath it. But I also felt a tension in what I was learning. We spoke about skin as a living, intelligent organ, then often treated its symptoms as though they existed only at the surface.

Answering what was missing became the journey I would take for the next two decades. I worked in luxury skincare, medical esthetics and private practice, and spent six years teaching and mentoring estheticians. Still, I kept encountering the same question: What does healthy facial tissue actually require?

My studies moved beneath the surface into lymphatic drainage, fascia and connective-tissue manipulation, advanced buccal and intraoral work, gua sha, facial reflexology, craniosacral therapy, facial bone balance, visceral and manual therapy, structural anatomy, somatic work and osteopathic principles. I sought teachers from Eastern and Western traditions in pursuit of a more complete understanding of the human face.

Over time, the answers began to reveal themselves beneath my hands. The face is not separate from the body. It is a living landscape of dermis, fascial layers, muscle, bone, blood, lymph, nerves, breath, expression and experience. Each layer is in conversation with the next.

My treatments changed. I became less interested in imposing surface change and more interested in listening to what the tissue was asking for. I listened to where movement had been lost, where fluid wasn't moving freely, where tension was being held and where the system might simply need more space.

This is where my work lives today: at the intersection of skincare, anatomy, physiology and skilled therapeutic touch. I think of my practice as an ongoing study of what makes facial tissue healthy, what changes it over a lifetime and what skilled hands can meaningfully influence.

After nearly two decades, I am less interested in asking, “How do we fix the face?” and much more interested in asking, “What does this living landscape need in order to thrive?” Because I don't believe the face is a collection of flaws to chase or problems to solve. I believe it is alive, adaptive, expressive and inseparable from the person it belongs to. And when we co-create the conditions for health, beauty has a way of emerging on its own.