How Shampoo and Conditioner affects our skin health.

A simple, but very real, story about skin and hair products....

I want to start by saying that I’m tired. I mean REALLY tired. I work incredibly hard, like most people, but my job requires me to be ‘on’ at all moments. And when I’m ‘on’ with a client, I am genuinely truly there—all in—completely connected to the human in front of me. If you’re a client you’ll understand. I have no clock in my room and I do what I do because it needs to be done. I keep enough space between every client so that I can run over. But it means I am “ON”. I love my job, but being ‘on’ every day all day is tiring. At the end of every evening, I mentally collapse. It’s pretty pathetic actually. Maybe it’s age. So, today I write this substack very groggily. My hope is that it makes sense. I am doing another voice over so that I can give little side tidbits that I didn’t write here. As always, it’s under-produced, but I like giving “voice” to my words and I like giving little sidebars. This means the audio has some extra’s that aren’t written here. I actually started this piece many times and just couldn’t create a real coherent thought. It also doesn’t help that mould levels in London are very high today and this always brings me great fatigue. My hope is that this all makes sense. If it doesn’t, feel free to ask questions in the comments.

This is a story about how haircare can wreak havoc on the skin….one that most people just don’t think about. I’ve always said that my germ freakiness is what makes me good at my job. Maybe it’s also that I’ve walk in those ‘angry skin’ shoes before. Not for a few months either…it was about five hellish, self-loathing and head-lowering years. I hated having acne, and because it came on in my late 20’s (BTW a very normal time for women to go through a hormonal shift AND suddenly get acne, rosacea, etc.), I truly didn’t understand it. That’s something you get when you’re in your teens, not your 20’s and 30’s. It encompassed most of my waking thoughts…knowing that my face was covered in mounds that would sometimes itch, sometimes throb and often spread like wildfire. But this is a story for another day. Today, I want to write about what I see so often in the treatment room…something that is the easiest fix and that 99% of my acneic clients NEVER consider….until I state it very plainly. And then…well then there’s the AHA moment. The eyes open wide, ‘why the hell didn’t I think of this’ moment. Because it’s really JUST SO OBVIOUS.