I started biohacking decades ago. Sugar, caffeine, and relentless sleep deprivation were required to juggle day care, schools, chauffeuring to extracurricular activities, and running a home as a divorced mom while working tons of unpaid overtime in corporate purgatory to pay for it all. I credit biohacking for making it humanly possible. 

Then the aging started to set in. In many corporate environments, especially back in the day, if you’re old, you’re irrelevant, and that goes triple if you’re female. Your image, how you present, that 30 seconds drives how you’re perceived, and that matters if you it is important that you be taken seriously. Not looking old meant medical aesthetics, and I got my first laser series in 2004. 

Over the next 20 years or so, as the longevity science pipeline came to life, I went from being a medical aesthetics customer into medical aesthetics management, and then on to becoming licensed practitioner with my own regenerative aesthetics practice. Skin health, which reflects internal health, is increasingly recognized as an integral pillar of longevity. Today’s regenerative aesthetics technology can help people reclaim and maintain skin health, and the practice provides me with opportunities to share what’s current in longevity science, often small things that can add up to a big difference in someone’s quality of life.

My personal healthspan mission, having a healthspan that is as close to my lifespan as possible, keeps me current in longevity science. Not only is the field is mushrooming, there’s a big bulge in the pipeline. In pursuit of my own healthspan, I consume a LOT of longevity and health science content to gain knowledge. Knowledge is power. It’s power that’s needed to make responsible personalized decisions about how to optimize your health. It’s power that’s needed to practice defensive medicine when navigating the profiteering Medical Industrial  Complex. The Science Spotlight contains some of the pieces that I’ve found most helpful in my journey to the best health and quality of life possible. My hope is that you’ll find something useful that helps you on your own journey.

The SKIN WISE book wasn’t part of the original plan. In fact, it leapfrogged two other books I was already working on.

In my regenerative aesthetics practice, I find myself giving the same talks every day, explaining how skin actually functions and how different skincare ingredients interact with its layers. At a conference, someone told me, “I wish I had what you just explained in a book.” That sparked the idea. Writing down what I already knew and said out loud seemed like it would be quick and easy.

Of course, it wasn’t. What began as a simple reference turned into months of work as the vision sharpened: how to make thousands of ingredients understandable, organized, and useful. It became the classic story: “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”

SKIN WISE: A No-Nonsense Guide to Skincare Ingredients is the result. This book is designed to make the fundamentals of skin and skincare ingredients easy to understand, and to make it effortless to look up the ingredients you care about most. Its mission is simple: to empower people to make smarter, more confident skincare choices so they can enjoy their best skin ever.