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- Hair & Beauty Rooms - 

It didn’t begin as something subtle. It began with an injury. I had moved some heavy furniture by myself - one of those moments where you think, “I’ll just get this done.” I felt the pull through my lower back almost immediately. I knew I had done something significant to my back. What I didn’t expect was how differently my body would respond - and how long that response would linger.

My skin was oily as a teenager and into my twenties. The kind of oily shine no one wanted back in the days of Bonny Bell Ten-O-Six and Shiseido Breezy Beige. So, I did what we were all taught to do. I stripped it. I dried it out. I fought it with products designed to make it behave, to mattify, to subdue what was believed to be excess.

Sometimes when a woman is overwhelmed, you can see it before she’s said a single thing. Her shoulders rise. Her breath goes shallow. Her chest lifts instead of her belly. And in that moment, the body shifts gear without asking permission - straight out of calm parasympathetic mode and into the jumpy, over-alert sympathetic one.