Licensed esthetician since 2004. Licensed massage therapist from 2002–2008. Founder of The Intentional Aging Method. And someone who had to rebuild her own health before she could truly understand her clients'.
I started in wellness in 2002 as a licensed massage therapist. Those years gave me something that no esthetics training ever could: a felt understanding of the body as a system. The way the nervous system responds to touch. The way stress lives in tissue. The way a person's whole state of being shows up in a treatment room — before a single word is spoken.
In 2004, I added my esthetics license. For years, I practiced the way I was trained — following protocols, treating presenting concerns, doing what worked for most people. I was good at it. But I was also, quietly, not well.
My own health began to unravel in ways that took years to understand. An autoimmune diagnosis. Poor health that affected everything — my energy, my skin, my ability to show up fully in my work and my life. I went looking for answers and found them not in a single treatment or a single specialist, but in the intersection of things: gut health, nervous system regulation, sleep, inflammation, and the way all of it shows up on the surface of the skin.
What I learned through that process changed how I practice. I stopped seeing skin as a separate system to be managed and started seeing it as a reflection — of internal health, of stress load, of how well or how poorly the body is being supported. That shift is the foundation of everything I do now.
The Intentional Aging Method is the framework that grew out of that experience. It is built on three pillars: nervous system health and mindset, internal health and inflammation, and strategic skin treatments. The order matters. The integration matters. And the individualization matters most of all.
This is not a protocol. It is a philosophy — one that takes the whole person into account before it ever picks up a tool or recommends a product.
I am currently expanding into certified health and wellness coaching — a natural evolution of the work I have been doing informally with clients for years. The long-term vision is a full mind-body-skin methodology: one that bridges clinical esthetics with the kind of whole-body support that most people are not getting anywhere.
The Skin Retreat remains a solo, appointment-only practice. That is intentional. The work I do requires time, attention, and genuine relationship. I am not interested in volume. I am interested in outcomes.
If you are reading this and something in it resonates — whether you are a client, a fellow esthetician, or someone who is simply tired of surface-level answers — I would be glad to hear from you.