Why AriseTHRIVE?
At 7 years old, my mom taught me how to use skincare.
Cleanse, tone, moisturize.
“Did you wash your face?!” I can still hear her voice now.
I HATED it. I already had to brush my teeth and now a skincare routine?
By 12 years old, I was giving skincare advice to my friends.
Again, doctor visit after doctor visits in a desperate search for answers to my laundry list of ailments, I was left feeling gaslit and misdiagnosed.
“I know your mom teaches you about skincare, right? I have this dry patch I keep trying to exfoliate off but it won’t go away.” I told her to stop exfoliating and two weeks later her skin was healed.
From grade school to college, I struggled with eczema, terrible allergies, dry eye, and the occasional cystic acne breakouts. My mom took me to doctor after doctor to figure out how to give me relief – but nothing really worked or was sustainable.
In my mid-20s, I decided to dip my toe into a skincare coaching certification program and found that I loved it, so I dove in. Learning about holistic skincare led me down the path of holistic full-body wellness, touching on nutrition and how that is linked to the health of our skin. My health briefly improved as I applied what I was learning.
However, in my late 20’s, my health took a nose dive. I suddenly had all the health issues I had growing up, but they returned with a vengeance.
A round of antibiotics and antidepressants later, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I was lucky to find an allergist who was thorough and willing to explain the connection between allergies, intolerances, and mental health. When my newly discovered food intolerances left little for me to eat as a vegetarian, I turned to eating chicken for the first time in 13 years.
3 days later, I was feeling like new again. My skin started to heal itself, my different aches and pains started to subside, my muscles started to return, and my mental health started to stabilize. I’m entirely convinced that avoiding the food that was poison to my body and reintroducing animal protein to my diet saved my life.
By this time I had visited two dermatologists which both ended in disappointment. I also visited an esthetician who was ready to sell me a treatment that could have left my melanated skin even more scarred.
That was the tipping point.
I couldn’t ignore the missing pieces in healthcare, dermatology, and traditional esthetics.
Our healthcare system treats the individual pieces of a human, but our bodies do not function in silos. My skin was trying to tell me that my needs had changed, and whatever it was demanded my attention, but it was just speaking a language that I misunderstood.
Physically feeling the difference and seeing the changes in my skin sparked my curiosity to research for myself. My research only confirmed what I already knew from my own experience: the lack of education for skin of color, the white-centered solutions in skincare, and the neglect to include our internal health in that conversation.
This is AriseTHRIVE.
We teach holistic skincare and coach people to connect the dots between their inner and outer wellness–and to self-advocate throughout their journey. You deserve to THRIVE.
Little did I know when I was 7 that my idealist worldview would later force me to lean in and open up this conversation. Why don’t we already look at the body as a whole? When it comes to skincare, why do we ignore the signs it's giving us? Why don’t we do the work to learn the inner and outer body connection and the different needs of different skin tones?
These questions can feel overwhelming and too big of an issue to tackle all at once, so I decided I didn’t need an answer to actually do something about it.
