Stressed Skin

[Intro] Hey, everyone. Welcome to Facially Conscious. I'm Trina Renea, a medically-trained Master Esthetician here in Los Angeles, and I'm sitting with my rockstar co-host, Rebecca Gadberry, our resident skincare scientist and regulatory and marketing expert. and Julie Falls, our educated consumer who is here to represent you. 

We are here to help you navigate the sometimes confusing and competitive world of skin care. Our mission is to provide you with insider knowledge on everything from product ingredients to medical procedures, lasers, fillers, and ever-changing trends.

With our expert interviews with chemists, doctors, laser reps and estheticians, you'll be equipped to make informative decisions before investing in potentially expensive treatments. 

It's the Wild West out there, so let's make it easier for you one episode at a time. 

Are you ready to discover the latest and greatest skincare secrets? Tune in and let us be your go-to girls for all things facially conscious. Let's dive in.

01:37 Trina Renea: Hello, hello, and welcome back to Facially Conscious. How are you, Rebecca? 

01:41 Rebecca Gadberry: Oh, I am okay. I'm a little stressed today. 

01:46 Trina Renea: You’re stressed? Well, how interesting. We have a podcast episode all about that. 

01:52 Rebecca Gadberry: I'll be able to demonstrate it for everybody through my voice, of course. You won't be able to see how stress is showing up on my skin, but we'll talk about how that happens and what stress looks like, especially now that the holidays are coming up. I think so many of us are stressed out. We always are, but this year may be a little bit more stressful for different reasons than in the past year. 

02:17 Trina Renea: Yeah. We're in 2025. It is September. We are headed into the holidays and we have a crazy world out there. We're all managing. 

02:30 Rebecca Gadberry: I know, but we're here to help you manage through the stress of the holidays and even into next year, because I don't think this stress stuff is going to go away. 

02:40 Trina Renea: Well, how can we tackle the stress that happens to our skin? Because when you get stressed, it comes out on your face and nobody likes that. 

02:53 Rebecca Gadberry: No. I think one of the most telling signs that your skin is as under stressed as your brain is or your emotions are, is when you've used a product for months or years and suddenly it's either not working or you're turning red or you're stinging with it. That's a real telltale sign that your skin is responding to stress. We call it emo-stressed skin, emotionally stressed skin. 

And there are hormones, cortisol, norepinephrine, even oxytocin, but that's a good one, and we'll talk about why that's good in a little while. And they show up in your skin by damaging your skin barrier or causing blood flow into the skin so your skin turns red a lot more than it usually does. Even it may never turn red and it turns red when you're under stress. 

You can get puffiness from the cortisol and the norepinephrine creating, again, more blood flow but, in this case, you're getting plasma seeping out into your tissues. You get that puffy look that people are calling “cortisol face”. But cortisol face is more for people with adrenal gland diseases, like Addison's. 

I think one of the things that we tend to think about is cortisol face, especially if we're on TikTok or Instagram, there's a lot of talk about cortisol face right now. But cortisol face for the average person is just a puffiness and a redness and more reactivity with your daily products or your environment. So we'll talk a little bit about cortisol face today, but it's not really a thing for most people. I mean, real cortisol face, which is the disease-related one. 

04:57 Trina Renea: Right. When I give facials and people are stressed, I often see them definitely with more sensitivity to things they were never sensitive to before that I'm putting on them. They're breaking out, some acne, redness. Even I have had a few clients who, when they stress, they get big cysts on their face from the stress, which is horrible. 

Well, let's break it down. How does stress in the brain translate into changes on the skin? 

05:32 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, it's called the hypothalamus-pituitary axis, the HPA axis. It is the connection between the parts of your brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary. Pituitary is your head gland, so to speak, in your body. It's in the head, as a matter of fact, but it's also the major gland that runs the rest of your hormonal system or your endocrine system.

Sorry, that was a big word. It kind of slipped my mind there for a second. 

06:07 Trina Renea: You have a lot of big words in your mind. 

06:10 Rebecca Gadberry: I do, and it's so hard to access them sometimes. I could hear people out there laughing because it happens to everybody, especially as we get older, or when we're under stress. It's harder to remember words as well. 

Anyway, cortisol and norepinephrine are two of the hormones that are released, like I was talking about, with the HPA axis. This is what is activated when we're under stress. It can cause that circulation to increase, or in some cases people decrease in inflammation. They get cold. Like in the holidays, during the holidays, some people get more cold than other people do, even though it's a cold time of year, because your circulation is being rerouted from your skin to your internal organs when you're under stress. So you may blanch, you may turn white as opposed to turning red. But then when the blood comes back in, you turn bright red again. That's one of the signs. 

But we also have a breakdown in collagen and we get a damaged barrier. I know we've talked about that in other episodes, but that's when your skin becomes really dry or tight feeling. You get flaking cells. It's also what can lead to the sensitivity with products, because the barrier has holes in it now due to some of the stress components going on. 

So your mind and your skin definitely talk to each other. They talk to each other all the time, even when you're not under stress. 

07:57 Trina Renea: Yeah. Often, when I see clients like this, I'm like, “You need to go do some meditation, get a massage, like try and get your stress down.” But some of these effects seem to linger even after the stressful period ends. What's happening there? Why does it do that?

08:18 Rebecca Gadberry: We've just found out in the last year or two that the keratinocytes that are the cells that make up your top layer of skin and then your fibroblasts that make up your dermis or your supporting layer of skin, this is where wrinkles and lines and sagging occurs, they actually make their own cortisol and norepinephrine. So when they make those, it can go on for days or weeks or months or years after a stressful event. It depends upon you and the health of your body as well, and whether you keep going back into a stress response. 

So we get the hormones not only from our adrenal glands and we pick it up in the skin through blood circulation, but the cells in the skin make these hormones themselves. This is what prolongs stress. So you can have a stressful event, for instance let's say you're going to a Christmas party and you forgot a gift. Now, you're scattering and this is a stressful event. I don't know why that came to mind. Maybe it's because it has happened to me before. So this time of year we're giving gifts to each other and we forget to give something to somebody. That stress, again, can show up in our face in the ways that we just described.

But the stress can continue or come back more easily, more frequently because these hormones are being made by your skin cells as well, so there's a lot more to it. I think that it would be interesting to talk about it more deeply at another time, but right now, I think we're mostly concerned with helping people get through the holidays with as little stress showing up on their skin. 

I think one of the things that you recommend, or not one of them, but the things that you're recommending: meditation, taking time for yourself to take care of your skin, these things are really important. We tend to think of them as pampering. 

I know when I'm under stress, the last thing I want to do is pamper myself. I feel guilty. And when we think of skin care, we can think of it as pampering and not essential. When we think of going to see an esthetician, we think of it as, “Oh, they're going to pamper and relax me. It's not essential to my own wellness and state of mind.”

But we're finding out that it is. It's because, well, with the esthetician, when you go to an esthetician and they do a massage on you, they're actually increasing another hormone that I just mentioned a few minutes ago called oxytocin. Oxytocin, we call the tend-and-befriend hormone or the love hormone. It comes up when we're taking care of other people. 

So the esthetician, by the way, is also getting an oxytocin rush, if you will, of this hormone in their body as well. 

11:34 Trina Renea: [inaudible] 

11:36 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, I know. It's one reason why we become addicted to helping people with their skin is because it helps us feel better as well. We also get it from hugging for longer than 20 seconds. We get it from cuddling. We get it from petting our animals. 

Interestingly enough, our animals get oxytocin too, which is why they like to be petted by us. 

12:03 Trina Renea: My dog and cat love to lay on me all night long.

12:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, that's the oxytocin. It's also part of being the pack, and the heat of your body is also probably transferring from you to them so it helps them keep warm. 

But when we stimulate oxytocin in the body, the oxytocin counteracts the effects of the cortisol and the norepinephrine. It helps to bring down their influence so that the barrier can repair, so that collagen and elastin can go back to being made in a healthy way, so that the wrinkles and the lines and the sagging are counteracted, or even that process is stopped or interrupted. It's a really good thing to stimulate oxytocin. 

And because the body doesn't know whether somebody else is touching us or we're touching us, hugging yourself or putting your hand open-handed over your heart for about half a minute, 30 seconds, stimulates oxytocin as well. It also helps to calm your heart rate down. This can help quite a bit as far as your skin is concerned. Who would have guessed? 

13:22 Trina Renea: That's amazing. So, like included, or I should say, as well as pampering, what ingredients can actually help stressed skin recover? 

13:38 Rebecca Gadberry: It's interesting because there are some new ingredients, and I'm going to give you the names of them. They'll be in our blog. Look for them there because they're kind of tricky to spell and I don't want to spend the rest of the podcast spelling. But you want to use things that help to block the cortisol in the skin. 

There's one that's really effective. It's called Helichrysum italicum. It's an extract from a plant that grows I think in the Mediterranean. When you apply it to the surface of the skin, it lowers cortisol by 76% in 30 minutes.

14:23 Trina Renea: Wow! Is this a new thing or something that's been used over time?

14:28 Rebecca Gadberry: I use it when I formulate. I've been using it for several years now. It's probably in some products, especially for stressed skin. It's in acne products. It's in products for rosacea because it helps to decrease redness, and does so very quickly. 

There's another one, and this one I know I'm going to mess it up. It's from a seed from the Tephrosia-Purpurea plant. It targets cortisol that is produced by the skin cells.

So the two of them together would be fabulous, but you're probably not going to find them in a product together because that's like too much magic to happen at this point. 

15:14 Trina Renea: Rebecca, make it.

15:17 Rebecca Gadberry: Make it? Make it, darling, make it. But it helps to break up the local stress. So between the two of them, you’re counteracting cortisol in the body and you’re counteracting cortisol from the cell. 

We also have noticed that your reservoir of antioxidants to fight the aging free radicals in your body goes down severely when you're under stress because your body is busy producing counteractive stress hormones as well as other proteins that will help you get through the stress. You want to look for stable antioxidants and products, your traditional vitamin E, vitamin A, that ingredient that I love called astaxanthin, which is what you see in shellfish. It's what causes shellfish to turn red or orange or salmon. And it's in there naturally. 

Now, we don't get it, in the industry, we don't get it from animals. We get it from algae. Again, that's going to be in the blog, in our blog. I was going to say the show notes, but it's not in the show notes.

There's also ingredients that kind of act in a very broad way on stress. One of those is called beta-glucans. It's from things like mushrooms and oats and baker's yeast. The most effective one that I found is baker's yeast. And what it does is it helps to get the immune system back in order, because when we're under stress, the immune system goes flu-y, of course, which is why we're easier targets for colds and the flu. We don't feel well a lot of times. 

17:13 Trina Renea: Another thing that happens with stress. 

17:16 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, yet another thing that happens with stress. So we want to see some antioxidants in there. We want to see some ingredients that help to restore the microbiome. 

Now, I can give you different ingredients that do that, but you're going to see that more on the package as a claim. It would be like “microbiome balance” or a probiotic or a prebiotic.

17:46 Trina Renea: Why are prebiotics and postbiotics and barrier rebuilders essential? What is that for the microbiome support that you're talking about?

17:56 Rebecca Gadberry: For the microbiome support, they support the environment that a healthy microbiome will grow in. Ingredients like inulin, which is from a bunch of different types of plants, or they're called fructo-oligosaccharides. Again, look at the blog. And these feed beneficial bacteria. 

You may have seen lactobacillus or bifida in products. These help to balance out the healthy bacteria or microbes on the skin. It's because these microbes help the barrier of the skin, help the immune system of the skin, help to counteract acne on the skin. They're really essential. And when they get out of balance when we're under stress, we want to bring them back into balance as soon as possible. 

Then, of course, you’ve got your barrier rebuilders because the cortisol is damaging the barrier. So these barrier rebuilders are ceramides and your omega acids or your omega oils, your squalane or phytosterols or cholesterol. They're in there to help rebuild the barrier in a very healthy way. 

Niacinamide also does that, by the way. It's one of those ingredients that I just think is so fantastic for several reasons. Niacinamide, you've got to use a pure form. If you use a form that has niacin in it, you're going to have a reaction to it, or you're more likely to. Not everybody does, but some portion of people will have a reaction. You wind up walking away thinking, “I can't use niacinamide.” That's because the product that you used did not have the pure form. So you want to check with the company to see if it has a pure form. In other words, no niacin. 

But the other reasons that I like it is it is one of the true multifunctional ingredients. It works on the barrier to repair the barrier. It helps to lighten the skin. It helps to get the immune system back in line. It's a remarkable ingredient. 

And it's cheap, so you could put it in at a higher percentage. I've seen it as high as 10% and it's doing quite a lot. You don't really need to use it at 10%, by the way. If you want skin lightening, it's 5%. If you want barrier repair, it's 2%. What that means to you is you want to see it in the upper third of the ingredient list. 

20:37 Trina Renea: I notice a lot of products with niacinamide in it now. It's just kind of becoming a staple. 

20:45 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. That's because I think it's a wonder drug, or a wonder ingredient. It's not a drug. We're not saying anything about it being a drug. It's not a drug. 

And then there's one that I think everybody has come to take for granted. My mother and myself were some of the very first people in the United States to use this ingredient in skincare back in the early ‘70s. It's called aloe vera. 

21:13 Trina Renea: I was going to say that. I should have said it first.

21:18 Rebecca Gadberry: We've always known that aloe was a pretty miraculous ingredient or plant. You just want to use the gel. You don't want to use the outer part of the leaf. But it's an amazing ingredient. We're finding out why now. Because it offers the chemistry, the molecules that the skin needs to make the barrier, both from the lipid standpoint but also from hydration. It helps to hydrate and repair the barrier at the same time. It helps to calm down inflamed nerves. 

And what we haven't talked about yet is the nerve endings for your body end at your skin. So if you are going through a lot of emotional nervous stress, those nerve endings are going to be releasing chemicals or molecules that will cause histamine to be released, cause that redness in another way, causing rashes and a number of other issues. 

22:24 Trina Renea: I would lay in a bath of warm aloe. 

22:30 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, I think it would be kind of cost-prohibitive, actually.

22:37 Trina Renea: I'm so luxurious. 

22:39 Rebecca Gadberry: One of the reasons why oat baths work so well is because they've got the beta-glucans in them. It's not only helping to moisturize the skin and soften the skin, but it's helping to calm the skin down at a neurogenic level as well as at a hormonal level. 

Also, aloe helps to get rid of some problematic microbes and build up the beneficial ones. So it works on a number of different levels. 

It's an amazing ingredient. You want to see it in the first one or two ingredients on the list. Or you can just go to the store and get aloe gel for the skin, not for the body. You don't want to drink it. You want to put this on the skin because it is processed differently. If you use the one for the body, you can wind up with rashes or irritation. It doesn't work in the same way. 

23:41 Trina Renea: Are you talking about when they say aloe for sunburns?

23:45 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. Aloe for sunburns. 

23:47 Trina Renea: Okay. 

23:49 Rebecca Gadberry: Okay. It's in a lot of products now too. 

23:54 Trina Renea: I have a cleanser, actually, where the second ingredient is aloe and it's so soothing. People love it. 

24:01 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, yeah. It doesn't offer all those benefits I was just talking about, but it is nice to have it in a cleanser. It really is. 

24:10 Trina Renea: So what do you recommend estheticians, how they should adjust their protocols for stressed clients?

24:18 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, because the skin is probably reactive at this point, you want to really strip down your facials. You want to strip down your treatments. And you want to keep everything oriented towards calming the skin and repairing the barrier. This is very important. 

You also want to just work with the bare minimum of your products. A cleanser, a really gentle cleanser. This is not the time to be stripping oil off the skin or doing a lot of, what would you call it? A lot of... 

24:57 Trina Renea: Exfoliation. 

24:57 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, exfoliation…

24:57 Trina Renea: Massage?

24:58 Rebecca Gadberry: Also brisk massage. What do we call that? 

25:05 Trina Renea: Tapotement, or what's it called? 

25:07 Rebecca Gadberry: Tapotement. Most people listening to this will not know what that means. It simply means a very brisk massage, something that gets your…

25:21 Trina Renea: Blood flow.

25:22 Rebecca Gadberry: Blood flow going. We don't want to be getting the blood flow going here. We want something that has a longer contact on the skin, let's say two or three seconds at least, if not longer. 

And we're trained to do this in school, but don't lift your hands when you're doing a massage, especially on stressed skin. Because when you lift your hand, when you break contact then you come back to the person's skin, it jogs them in just a little way and that you get a cortisol spike with that. We want to get rid of cortisol spikes. 

So you want to keep the products to a minimum. You want to use multifunctional products. Let's say you're doing a cleanser, you have a cleanser, but maybe do a massage with the cleanser so you don't need a separate product to do the massage. You do cleansing and massage at the same time. 

You want to use multi-targeted serums and moisture barrier repair moisturizers. 

26:27 Trina Renea: Use a calming mask. 

26:29 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, a calming mask.

26:30 Trina Renea: Arm massage and shoulders. 

26:32 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. And if you know anything about vagus massage, the vagal nerve massage, you want to be massaging in that area. Again, we'll have it in the notes on the blog on how to do that. You can also do that to yourself. 

26:46 Trina Renea: Can you tell people where the vagus nerve is? 

26:51 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. The vagus nerve is what we call the queen of the nerves. It extends from, it kind of spreads out like fingertips from the hand, but it spreads out over the cheeks. It centralizes behind your jaw. It goes down your neck and then it goes to your lungs, your stomach, and all the way down your torso. It's the longest nerve of the body. It's called the Queen of Calm, is what we call it. 

It's the longest nerve in the body. When you are super stressed, you're in one mode with the vagus nerve. And when you take yourself out of stress, you're in the relaxation mode. So you go from the stress mode to the relaxation mode, and you can do that in a matter of seconds with the right vagus nerve massage. 

You can also change your breathing. I just learned this technique a few days ago and it works really well. You know how dogs when they lay down, they breathe, and then right on top of that breath they breathe again before they exhale. Have you ever seen them do that? 

28:03 Trina Renea: I'm going to have to pay attention to that next time I watch my dog. 

28:07 Rebecca Gadberry: I never noticed it before either, until somebody who is explaining this to me told me that. Now, my dog does it every single time. I never noticed it. 

28:17 Trina Renea: That is so funny. So what do they do? They breathe and then they breathe again before they exhale?

28:21 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. I'm going to do it for you. Hopefully, you can hear it. I'll do it as noisily as I can. So, breathing in (inhales), and breathe in again (inhales). Now, breathe out (exhales). And you do all of that through the nose because the nose breath activates the vagus nerve and then the extra breath helps to relax you. You know, when I did that, I could feel the relaxation hormone spreading.

28:50 Trina Renea: I'm going to do that today. I just did it and it kind of felt good.

28:54 Rebecca Gadberry: Let's do it together. Let's do it together. 

28:56 Trina Renea: Okay. Ready? 

28:57 Rebecca Gadberry: Everybody, through the nose. Again. One more. Release through the nose. How does that feel? 

29:10 Trina Renea: I mean, instantly relaxed.

29:14 Rebecca Gadberry: Isn't that crazy? 

29:15 Trina Renea: Almost like laughing gas. 

29:17 Rebecca Gadberry: I know. Laughing gas. I haven't thought of that in years. 

29:22 Trina Renea: I just had a tooth pulled so I had laughing gas. And that's what it made me think of, it's that feeling.

29:30 Rebecca Gadberry: That's so funny. 

29:32 Trina Renea: That's the only reason I know that. 

29:37 Rebecca Gadberry: I think also massage. When we do long extended movements and we maintain contact with the skin, that releases the oxytocin. That is a wonderful gift to stressed clients, and that shows up in the skin.

I guess the bottom line here that I want to I want to stress, ha-ha, is that I know things get tough around this time of year, especially financially. You're overcommitted timewise, you've got to buy things that you may not have a budget to buy, and the last thing you want to do is go get a professional facial to pamper yourself. But that isn’t what we're talking about here. We're talking about going and getting a treatment to help calm you down. 

A lot of people fall asleep during treatments and we call that relaxation. It's actually the effect of the oxytocin that is coming into your body. 

30:42 Trina Renea: I find that the more stressed my clients are, the more they sleep. They lay down on my table, they say, “I've been waiting for this all month,” because, to them, it is a thing that they need. It's not just a facial. It's that I calm them. I relax them. I make them better to go back to their life. 

And they always leave going like, “Oh, my God, thank you so much.” It's more than just a facial. A facial, you look great when you leave as well but it's not just about treating yourself for luxury. It's a wellness thing.

31:21 Rebecca Gadberry: Absolutely. I think we can feel really guilty or eliminate it from our life if we think of it as a luxury, but it is wellness. It's helping you to maintain yourself so you can go back to your life, so to speak, and get through it. If anything, you really need to budget that for yourself. 

But let's go back to what you can do at home. You can do the breath that we just taught you. You can put your hand over your heart, open palm over your heart and do that breath. It becomes an even deeper experience for yourself. 

You want to use products but very minimally. So you want to use a gentle cleanser, that multi-tasking or multi-targeted serum, the barrier repair moisturizer. And use a mineral-based sunscreen. Don't use something else that might cause you to break out or get a rash. 

Try to keep everything as low fragrance or no fragrance as possible. But if you react positively to fragrances, then the fragrance in that product when you're putting it on can help to calm you through what's called the limbic region of your brain. 

The limbic region is where a lot of, well, that's the emotional center of your brain. If you get tied in limbically-wise with your brain to the smell of something, it can calm you down right away. 

I remember when I first learned this, it was back in 1987 and I was writing articles about aromatherapy. People kept saying, “Oh, it's the energy of the plant.” 

Having a chemistry background, I thought, “Well, I don't know about that.” So I went out and I researched all the chemicals in the aromatherapy family. And it's all the chemicals and how they react with your body, your skin, and your brain. 

We're not going to talk about aromatherapy right now, but there's one aromatherapy oil called clary sage and it's especially good for when you're having cramps during your period. I used to put a few drops in a bath and get in. We had a jacuzzi bathtub. So within like 10 seconds, I was relaxed. My body got so queued in to relaxing with the clary sage, with smelling the clary sage, I could smell the clary sage and my cramps would be relieved and I'd relax. It was pretty crazy. 

So it's called anchoring yourself. You anchor yourself to this scent. And it doesn't really matter whether it's clary sage. I did it with a banana when I was taking Anatomy and Physiology in college. We were told that bananas helped with memory. So we would all eat a banana while we were studying. 

I remember going back and taking the final exam and we all had it. Well, most of us had brought a banana. Opened up that banana, the smell of the banana I linked right into the answers on the test and I got an A.

34:33 Trina Renea: It's like sense memory, right? It's like a trigger. 

34:38 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, it's so crazy. 

So tie yourself, give yourself an anchor scent to relax as well. It could be whatever you want. It could be a cologne, it could be a banana, it could be an essential oil, whatever. 

I think we also do that with our mates. When we come home and they hold us or we hold them, the smell of them, even though it's like underneath our radar, helps to calm our body. And the oxytocin that is released when we do the hug also helps to calm our body. So by the smell of our mates, it releases oxytocin and it helps to calm our body. 

35:23 Trina Renea: So give your husband or your wife more hugs. 

35:25 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, or your kids or your doggy or your kitty or your guinea pig. It all helps. 

35:33 Trina Renea: Or your bird. 

35:34 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, your bird. Not your fish, though. Don't hug your fish. It doesn't work out as well, especially for the fish. 

And then when you put your products on, make it a ritual. Apply your moisturizers or your serum with long, slow, deliberate strokes. Take pleasure in the texture of the product. Notice the texture of the product. When you wash your face, notice the texture. If it's foaming, the texture of the foam. 

Use cold cloths to wipe the cleanser from your face. And what I do is I take a cold cloth. It's not ice cold. It's cold from the tap. I just hold it on my face. Believe it or not, that releases oxytocin as well. 

36:29 Trina Renea: From the coldness?

36:30 Rebecca Gadberry: From the coldness. That's one of the things behind these cold baths or these cold plunges, these icy plunges that are getting to be so popular, is it helps to release the oxytocin as well. 

We want to focus on everything that releases oxytocin. And remember, when you go to a party and you're having fun, you're releasing oxytocin as well. 

36:52 Trina Renea: So party harder. 

36:54 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah.

36:57 Trina Renea: Is that what you meant? 

36:59 Rebecca Gadberry: I don't think so, sweetheart, but we could talk about that later. There's a lot of things that we can do. 

37:09 Trina Renea: Thank you for giving us a practical science-based roadmap, from spotting stressed skin to treating it effectively.

37:18 Rebecca Gadberry: And to partying hardy. Let’s party hardy.

37:20 Trina Renea: Partying and hugging people more.

37:23 Rebecca Gadberry: That’s right. Think about what we do on New Year’s. We hug and we get the oxytocin going as we're going into the new year, so I think that's great. 

37:36 Trina Renea: Yeah. And then I just want to remind esthetician, stressed skin isn't a flaw. It's a signal that your client needs more care, so don't judge them. Be helpful and be kind with your words. Be the person that they want to come to and feel better. Don't belittle them.

37:59 Rebecca Gadberry: You know, you bring up something interesting. This happened to me years ago. I was teaching a class for new estheticians. This was like in the ‘80s. Somebody said, “Well, whenever a client comes to me and their skin hasn't improved, I know they're not using the skincare, so I yell at them.”

And everybody in the room went, “Oh, no. You don't want to get yelled at. You don't want to yell at your clients.”

And with stressed skin, they may be using the products but the products aren't working right now. You need something more— You don't need your traditional sensitive skin products. You don't need the traditional facial to calm down sensitive skin. We're dealing with something a lot more ingrained and molecular at a cellular level. That's where you need to go. 

38:53 Trina Renea: Right. Yes. The fastest way to lose a client is to make them feel bad. 

39:00 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah. But, hopefully, nobody does that anymore. That was back in the ‘80s and it was with a new esthetician. We want to appreciate everybody.

I think that's it. I'm going to go back to my stressful day, but now I feel a little bit better with that breathing. 

39:20 Trina Renea: Do some breathing and don't be stressed. Enjoy your day, every second of it. 

39:25 Rebecca Gadberry: Moment. 

39:25 Trina Renea: Moment. 

39:28 Rebecca Gadberry: Everybody, have a really good day and we will talk to you later. 

39:32 Trina Renea: All right. Have a good one. Bye, Rebecca. I'll see you soon.

39:36 Rebecca Gadberry: Bye. 

39:38 Trina Renea: Bye. 

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