How on Earth Did a Facial Turn Into All of This?

A messy, honest reflection on finding myself, shedding expectations, and the story behind Skin & Soul.

Hello, Beautiful Souls!

Blog #2.

This one is going to have a slightly different tone.

My first blog was very let's contemplate eclipses, snakes, shadows, and the nature of growth.

This one is more...

How the hell did a facial turn into all of this?

If you've known me, supported me, or followed along through pre-Lula Mae, Lula Mae, and post-Lula Mae Dani, you probably know pieces of this story.

But that's the thing about people—we only ever know pieces.

We see the business. The marriage. The career. The smiling picture online. The new beginning.

We fill in the blanks and assume we understand the story.

Meanwhile, the person living it may still be trying to understand it herself.

I know I was.

Before Lula Mae

Pre-Lula Mae Dani was deeply insecure.

I struggled with acne and bullying for much of my life. I often felt misunderstood, with this deep desire underneath everything to simply be chosen for who I was.

Years before I enrolled in aesthetics school, I started getting my eyebrows waxed by an aesthetician and asking questions.

I didn't completely understand what this career was yet, but something kept pulling at me.

Maybe I could understand my own skin better.

Maybe what I had experienced could help someone else feel more comfortable in theirs.

Eventually, I listened.

I went to school and turned something I thought might be a part-time job into a career.

Because, naturally, life immediately ignored the plan I had made for myself.

Then Came Lula Mae

My first marriage ended, and aesthetics suddenly needed to support me.

I went back to school for my instructor license. I taught aesthetics. And somehow, eventually, I found myself opening Lula Mae Aesthetic Boutique.

The vision was always bigger than skincare.

I wanted women to have a place to build careers and support themselves. I wanted clients to walk through the door, exhale, receive a service, and feel comfortable being themselves.

If you read the old Lula Mae reviews, I know we accomplished that.

What I didn't understand was what creating it would cost me.

I'm not ready to tell that entire story yet.

But I can tell you this:

Lula Mae made me.
Validated me.
Broke parts of me.
Enlightened me.
And introduced me to parts of myself I had spent years suppressing.

I had this enormous desire to help people.

In many ways, I did.

In other ways, I can look back now and recognize that I wasn't equipped yet to help in all the ways I wanted to.

First, I needed to learn how to help myself.

Minor inconvenience:

I had absolutely no idea how to do that.

When My Soul Got Loud

By this point, I had remarried.

Within the first year of that marriage, my husband lost his job. Then a worldwide pandemic shut down the business I had spent almost three years building.

I was trying to keep a business afloat, a marriage together, a household functioning, and everyone around me okay.

There wasn't much room left in my own psyche for me.

Eventually, my soul got tired of being put on hold.

And she got loud.

There was a period when my inner world became so intense that I genuinely wondered if I was approaching some kind of psychological breaking point.

I'm incredibly grateful that instead of continuing to bulldoze through it, I started listening.

I had already begun studying Vedic astrology, but I became increasingly drawn to it—not because I wanted astrology to tell me what would happen, but because it gave me another language for understanding myself.

Then came dream analysis.

Jungian psychology.

Therapy.

Books.

Podcasts.

Questions.

So. Many. Questions.

I became fascinated by the complicated lines between spiritual breakthrough and psychological distress, intuition and fear, addiction and attachment, coping and healing.

And somewhere in there, someone I trusted recommended a book called Addict America.

That book changed the questions I was asking.

What Are We Using to Escape Ourselves?

I started thinking about addiction differently.

Instead of only asking, What substance is someone using? I became interested in a much more uncomfortable question:

What are we using to escape ourselves?

Suddenly I wasn't just looking at drugs or alcohol.

I was looking at work.

Achievement.

Validation.

Relationships.

Being needed.

Control.

Busyness.

Even the constant desire to fix and improve ourselves.

You can be praised for working yourself into the ground.

You can call over-functioning “being helpful.”

You can call perfectionism “high standards.”

You can even turn healing into another thing you're trying to be good at.

Rude.

I became less interested in asking, What's wrong with me?

And more interested in asking:

What is this doing for me?
What is it protecting me from?
What happens if I actually listen?

No single book, therapy session, dream, or astrology placement explained my life.

Together, though, they helped me see it differently.

I wasn't becoming some shiny new version of myself.

I was aggressively coming home to myself.

And Coming Home Changed Things

The first thing that had to go was Lula Mae.

I had outgrown her.

Not because she was bad.

Not because she was a mistake.

She simply wasn't mine to inhabit anymore.

Eventually, my second marriage ended too.

I'm not ready to tell that entire story either.

What I will say is that my second ex-husband and I failed each other while doing the best we knew how to do at the time.

That's devastating.

And painfully human.

Walking away from my business and my marriage—two enormous pieces of the identity I had built—was one of the most painful and empowering things I've ever done.

I'm still working through parts of that pain.

This isn't the part where I tell you I healed everything, discovered my purpose, bought a linen wardrobe, and now wake up at 5 a.m. to meditate.

Absolutely not.

I'm still figuring shit out.

So... Skin & Soul

Somewhere in all of this, I realized something.

I still love aesthetics.

I still believe deeply in skincare, touch, ritual, rest, and caring for our physical bodies.

But what I want to offer people goes beyond skin.

I'm now back in school working toward the credentials required for substance use disorder counseling.

On paper, an aesthetician becoming a substance use disorder counselor might look like a pretty aggressive career pivot.

To me, increasingly, it doesn't.

Because the worlds keep colliding:

Skin and identity.
Addiction and attachment.
Recovery and relationships.
Ritual and spirituality.
Self-care and self-awareness.
Outside in and inside out.

That's Skin & Soul.

I'm especially interested in supporting women navigating recovery and major life changes, as well as women trying to support a spouse, friend, or family member through recovery.

I respect traditional clinical approaches and want to understand them deeply.

I also have questions.

What if we supported the whole person?

What if recovery could hold accountability and compassion?

Science and spirituality?

Clinical support and ritual?

What if caring for the outside and tending to the inside weren't treated like completely separate worlds?

I don't know exactly what all of this becomes yet.

And for once, I'm trying not to force myself to know.

And Apparently My Inner Work Needed a Mascot

Which brings me to Shedna.

Yes. I named a snake Shedna.

Stay with me. 😂

Recently, I used ChatGPT for a creative exercise: essentially taking this part of myself that sheds, questions, grows, has boundaries, and is learning to trust herself—and giving her a personality.

Somehow, Shedna emerged.

Her motto?

She sheds skin, not standards.

It's funny.

But underneath the joke is something that connects directly back to my first blog.

Shedna isn't some brand-new Dani.

She's the same snake.

Just with a little more room to move.

Maybe that's what Skin & Soul is becoming too.

Not me abandoning everything I've done before to become someone completely different.

It's me integrating it.

The aesthetician.

The instructor.

The business owner.

The student.

The spiritual seeker.

The woman who has screwed things up.

The woman who has survived things.

The woman who is still learning.

All of her gets to come with me.

So, Bear With Me

Skin & Soul is being born while I'm living it.

You're probably going to watch me experiment.

I'll change my mind.

I'll learn something that challenges something I believed six months earlier.

I'll make mistakes.

I'm human.

But I feel a calling.

I see a vision.

And the last time I felt something like this...

Lula Mae was born.

The last day I walked out of Lula Mae, I made her a promise.

I promised to honor everything she taught me by continuing to become a better person, a more aligned soul, and allowing myself to be messy while I did it.

This is me keeping that promise.

If something in this journey resonates with you, there are ways to support Skin & Soul that have nothing to do with booking a facial or buying skincare.

Read the blog. Follow along. Join my newsletter. Share something that makes you think of someone you love.

Grow alongside me.

Because if there is one thing I've learned through all of this, it might be the Dani quote I come back to again and again:

“Awareness isn't half the battle. It is the battle.”

Once we see something, we can't completely unsee it.

That doesn't mean we'll immediately change.

We may repeat the pattern.

We may screw it up spectacularly.

We may apparently need to learn the same lesson seventeen different ways.

But awareness gives us something we didn't have before:

a choice.

A question to sit with:

What have you become aware of in yourself that you can no longer pretend you don't see—and what might you choose differently now that you see it?

Until the next question,
Dani 🧡💚✨