About Me

The Story of My Sensitive Skin Care

Welcome, and thank you for visiting! I am like you, someone with sensitive skin.   Since childhood I have suffered from hives, allergies, and all manner of mysterious skin rashes.

My Sensitive Skin Care was inspired and created from my own personal experience, and also my shock at realizing the amount of chemical irritants that I was absorbing from even natural and hypoallergenic skin care products.

I manage this site with a small team of dedicated helpers, and we understand sensitive skin from our own personal experience!

I am not a doctor or a health care practitioner, but I have a lifetime of experience in learning how to listen to my own body and how to help others to do the same.

The purpose of our site is to empower you to find your own unique solutions to your sensitive skin care.

About This Site - What You Need to Know

My Sensitive Skin Care is an independent information website that was inspired by my own personal experiences with sensitive skin.

The information I share here is what I have learned along the way from my own research and experience, and is in no way intended to substitute for the services of your own doctor or health care professional.

My Sensitive Skin Care is not a skin care products company. We do not manufacture or ship skin care products.

We do recommend skin care product brands that we use ourselves, that we think may be helpful for you and your sensitive skin.

From time to time we provide product reviews of skin care products that meet our standards.

Our site is supported by advertising and affiliate partnerships.

My Story

I grew up on the east coast of the U.S., and my Mom's family lived near the ocean. As kids they spent all day at the beach, every day. This was way back in the days before we knew about the harmful effects that too much sun can have on your skin.

Later on in life my Mom and all of her brothers and sisters developed skin cancer. Because of this my Mom always taught us to take good care of our skin.

Unfortunately I didn't always take her good advice!

A Good Foundation

I grew up on hamburger and the standard American diet, which in those days was not very healthy, but my Mom and Dad always had plenty of vegetables and fruits for us to eat even though money was tight.

I am so glad for this, as it became a habit that has stayed with me all of my life. I believe that eating lots of veggies is one of the reasons why people are always shocked when I tell them how old I am!

A Revelation

When I was a teenager I developed the usual acne outbreaks, and a pretty significant case of teenage angst. One day while visiting my favorite Aunt and Uncle, I discovered a pile of Prevention magazines which looked interesting.

Aunti Jeanne let me take a bunch of them home with me, and I read them voraciously and was absolutely fascinated with what I learned.

Those magazines really changed my life, and taught me how the food we eat affects our bodies and our health. At the tender age of 14 I did a total makeover of my eating habits.

I never paid much attention to food before this, but I learned to read labels and what shocked at what I learned.

Thankfully, we had a health food store at the mall where we lived. I would ride my bicycle up the hill with my trusty backpack, braving even the worse weather, to browse the aisles and stock up on all kinds of new foods like wheat germ, whole wheat flour, and mung beans for sprouting.

In those days there were no healthy convenience foods, and so I learned to bake my own bread, make my own granola, and grow sprouts in a jar.

Seeing and Feeling Positive Changes

Our high school cafeteria was a very nerve wracking place with hundreds of teenagers all talking at once so you couldn't hear yourself think. I really disliked both the cafeteria and the school lunches, so I ended up bringing my own healthy lunches to school.

I noticed that eating healthy made me feel better both emotionally and physically. Withing a few months I lost some weight, and even better, my teenage acne completely cleared up! I felt a little more confident and a little less miserable.

Learning About Health and Healing

Around this time, my Dad and I saw a judo demonstration at the high school. I was enthralled with what I saw! I just knew I had to study judo.

This eventually became a family affair, and my Dad and my brothers joined the dojo too. Judo also made me feel healthier and more confident, and my acne was now a distant memory. I made it to brown belt before I stopped training to focus on my college studies.

In college I was thrilled to be learning so many new things. With my acne gone, I didn't pay much attention to my skin care. I was too busy studying!

In addition to my college courses I studied kung fu and aikido, and I developed an interest in holistic healing.

I learned therapeutic massage, acupressure, Body-Mind Centering, herbal healing, nutritional healing, spiritual healing, and various forms of energy healing as well.

I worked my way through a very expensive ivy league graduate school by offering therapeutic massage to my fellow stressed out graduate students!

That was wonderful work, and it helped me to relax too.

Stress and my Skin

As I got older my life and my work became a lot more demanding. I spent my 30's working very intensely and moving a lot. I traveled and lived for a time in Brazil.

In my 40's my life went through so many abrupt, intense and difficult changes all at once that there were quite a few years where skin care and health were the last things on my mind!

Then, as things began to calm down just a little in my early 50's, I was able to take a deep breath and devote a little more time and attention to my health again.

By this time I had started to notice wrinkles and age spots on my skin ... yikes!! They appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

Where did the time go? I decided it was time to educate myself and take better care of my skin.

Allergies and Sensitivities

I've always had mild allergies like hay fever, which had gotten better as I got older, but around this time I began to notice all kinds of new allergic reactions were developing.

I always had sensitive skin, but suddenly I found that even those nice, holistic, non-toxic, natural skin care products from the health food store began causing breakouts and inflammation on my face!

I also noticed that I was getting headaches from drinking my favorite herbal teas. I just love yerba mate tea and green tea, but suddenly my body just didn't seem to like them anymore.

I also was developing headaches from eating spicy foods and from taking medicinal herbs, like my echinacea for cold season. Finally, even taking vitamin C gave me a headache!

The Final Straw

On top of all this, I ended up with another really unusual allergy. I've been happily married for almost 20 years now, and suddenly I got this awful rash right under my wedding ring.

I thought it would go way, but it kept getting worse, and spread to my palm and to the other finger. I even tried replacing the ring, but that seemed to make it even worse!

Now I've heard all kinds of jokes about developing allergies to your wedding ring, but honestly, I adore my husband and this definitely was not a sign of trouble in our relationship. :-)

Instead, I discovered that I had developed an allergy to nickel, one of the metals used in gold jewelry. Ugh!

New Learning

Now all of these very unusual experiences led me to do some research, to educate myself, to talk with a naturopathic doctor, and to try and find out as much as I could to help my body and my skin to be more comfortable.

Much of what I have learned and continue to learn in my journey is contained here in this website.

I am so grateful to the folks at SBI for teaching me how how share what I know on the internet.

I hope that what I have discovered can be of support to you in your journey with sensitive skin!

With love and blessings,

P.S. If you would like to stay in touch, please take a moment to join my mailing list, which will share with you my latest news, including the updated version of my eBook.

My book shares with you exactly how I cleared up my teenage acne, and where I learned what exactly those mysterious ingredients in our skincare products REALLY do!