Bonus EPISODE: Beauty Standards

In this 20-minute episode, I delve into beauty standards through the lens of a Gen X Lesbian. From growing up without much SPF and getting my face fried to the point of blistering to navigating age in midlife. It's about turning back the clock, but also about honoring the beauty of my skin going forward, by eating right, taking vitamins, and, of course, wearing sun protection. I share why SPF is non-negotiable for keeping spots at bay, why laser treatments can be a game changer, and why redefining beauty as confidence and care is more liberating than any trend.

Transcript

quincy-beauty-standards_4_09-13-2025_131239: 0:01

Hello, cocoons. I am so happy that it is almost fall. Usually it's not my favorite time of the year, but for some reason this year I'm feeling really optimistic about the last. Part of the year, and I don't know why, because I feel like the first nine months were basically a shit show, especially here in California with the fires and all the people that we know that lost their homes and the kids that were out of school, including my own for, weeks after just being out of a school for a few weeks for the winter break. But I. Really think that the fall, and it's also my birthday coming up, it's the fall is one of those times of year when you go, okay, this is how many months are left in this year. This is like that final push towards the end, right? What am I gonna do? How am I gonna make it better? How am I gonna change it? So that you get that momentum towards the end of the year that hopefully you can sustain into the following year. And actually it doesn't become a. Chore anymore. It doesn't become a have to, it becomes something that you actually want to do for yourself. So one of those things for me started earlier this year and that was to completely overhaul my skin. And that meant from just washing my face at night, toning it, sometimes putting on moisturizer and things like that to like literally going. Under general anesthesia to have this super, super invasive laser done to my skin on my face. It's called TRL Contour. I'm telling you, it changed my life. It changed my skin, it changed the way I see myself. It changed how much, and if I need to wear makeup, basically, I only wear tinted moisturizer now because even if I want to wear foundation, it looks so cakey and thick on my face because my skin is so much healthier, I don't need it. So when we are talking about our middle schoolers and our even early, early high schoolers wanting to wear so much makeup. I know now what they're talking about because your skin is so much fresher and bouncier and less scarred and blemished when you really get these deep overhauls on your skin. And as a Gen X granddaddy lesbian, or grand pappy lesbian. This mama needed it. Like I had so many sun spots on my face. It wasn't even funny. Like I grew up when there was like max eight sunscreen and my dad is super fair. So him wearing eight sunscreen was basically like going outside and standing there for 10 minutes without sunscreen and going back in the house. I mean, he was constantly sunburned. I did not take after him in that, with the exception of my forehead. My shoulders, my chest, and my lips. For some reason, my lips are always, even to this day, still get sunburned. So incredibly easy. But this is TMI probably when I was little I used to suck my arm, not my thumb, not my fingers. I. Not whatever. I sucked my arm. And so when my bottom lip was growing right as I grew it ca, it like was bigger on the bottom. Like it's a very full bottom lip. It always has been. People literally when they watch me read or when they talk for a long time, they say, oh my God, your lips are just so beautiful. So that is obviously the feature I love the most on myself, but I do not have my lips lasered. I did have the top of my lip blad because, um. Like the, the space in between your nose and the top of your lip, not the top lip, because it had so many lines. And I'm not a smoker, but this is like a hereditary thing in my family. My mom has the same thing. She's also not a smoker, but we get those really deep vertical lines on the lips, which in years previous I had laser put on, not laser filler put in them and things like that. That was a bunch of crap. It just made me look weird and my mouth did weird things. So I don't do anything like that. Anymore. So I had this laser and that absolutely was the part that took the longest to heal was my, the top of my lip. And again, I think it was because it got sunburn the most because around, I think it was probably. 2000 probably. Maybe 2002, three. We were at the beach one day in Encinitas.'cause I used to live in Encinitas and, um, uc, San Diego was there with their, one of their research teams asking for volunteers to do like a UV photo of your skin and skin damage. And how smart were they to, pop up at the beach and do this. So they came over to a bunch of us. There was probably, I don't know, 15 families and or 15 women rather, and all of their kids. And we were all just hanging out on the beach. And they came over and they said, Hey, we're doing this study. We wanna see what people's skin looks like and ask you history about your skincare routine with sunscreen. So at the time I was still like, literally. Bake and not fake and bake, what do you call it? Lay there and just bake the shit outta myself. I would rarely wear sunscreen because I wouldn't get sunburned. Like I just wouldn't. And I think it was from all the years of staying out of the sun, I mean, staying in the sun, that I kind of just didn't get sunburned anymore. So I would just like, you know, wear a hat once in a while. I was never in the shade. Like I honestly didn't care. They took this photo of me and they did the before without whatever filter they used on it, and then they did the after. And when I say I almost puked is not literally. N not even near what probably I could have done, but I felt so sick to my stomach because I saw how much damage I was even at that very moment doing to my skin by not wearing sunscreen, by not wearing a hat, by not bringing a, an umbrella by not sitting in the shade, all of those things. So at that very second. For the rest of my lifetime. From that second on, I will always have a hat, a visor, sunscreen, some sort of shade option because it was so disgusting. It was like this, like an x-ray of your skin and you could see all of this like cellular damage that was on the face and it just was so gross. And at the time, I'm in my thirties, so I'm still rocking like very few wrinkles. You can't see the age spots as much. Then even when I didn't wear makeup, you could, but you couldn't, like they were more like a freckle than an age spot. I walked outta that tent and I walked back to my group, group of friends and I was like, girls. You are not going to believe what I just saw on my face, and I was younger than them by seven to 15 years. I was a very young mom with my first batch of kids. So that was sort of my badge of, of like not honor my badge of like, Hey, I'm younger than you guys. But when I looked at my skin under there, I felt like a hundred years older than they did. So I started wearing sunscreen every day since then, every single day. A hat every time I went in the sun, if I walked, if I hiked, if I went to the pool, it did not matter. I've always, if I go to Disneyland, the all the photos have me in a hat skiing. When I take off my helmet, I have on a hat, like you name it, I have on a hat. Even when I ride my bike, I wear a hat and then my helmet over the hat just to keep my son protected. So even all of that here, we fast forward, you know, 15, 20 years later. And I have all these disgusting like latte age spots on my face that I wanna get rid of. I'm a Gen Xer, I'm a lesbian. Why should I care about these things? Because of my age? Because I don't have to wear makeup because I should wear makeup because I, this makeup, like all of these things. And I was like, I don't care. I want to go in and have something done to my face. So I made an appointment. And I basically said to the esthetician, I said, if you were me and you hadn't worn sunscreen for the first. Third of your life, what would you do to make your skin look better for the rest of the time? And she's like, you know, definitely sunscreen, hats, blah, blah, blah. And I said, definitely, I'm doing those kinds of things. And I said, but what we can we do to it? Like in the office? She said, well, I recommend this laser. It's called TRL Contour. And it was like, okay, tell me more about it. And she said, well, it's really invasive. Some people do it without anesthesia. She said, I'm not sure how they do it, but a lot of people do it with anesthesia. And if you know me, I am pretty. Adventurous girl, but I can also be pretty clumsy. So I have broken my nose a total of five times. None of those in a fight. But sometimes I tease people and tell'em it was all in fist fights or bar fights or whatever. But it wasn't one was a diving board accident, one was a car accident, one was a gymnastics accident, one was I completely just fell on my face. One was I was jumping on my bed when I was four years old and literally. Ruined my face. But aside from that, she said, let's do this laser treatment. And I said, okay, well I want it done under general. And she said, perfect. When we go in to fix your septum, we'll do that surgery. And so the septum repair was a piece of cake. Like literally they took out this big triangle of bone off one side of my my nose, where all the times that I had broken it, it had. The cartilage had re-shifted itself. And when I talk about a car accident that I was in, I was sitting in the back of the car the size of a tiny Toyota hit by an 18 wheeler drunk driver. So that's the kind of car accident we're not talking about like a fender bender. So that was the second major thing that happened to my face. I broke my jaw and everything else, but. When they fixed it. I don't snore at all anymore. My nose is still stepped up'cause it's still healing, but it is definitely like the best thing I've ever done. But while I was under, I asked her to do that contour, that laser contour. When I woke up, I couldn't feel anything obviously. I got home and my face was wrapped and I looked in the mirror and I was like. Oh my God. It is literally Frankenstein. This is a mummy. This is somebody who was, somebody must pour like citric acid on my face and it just like burnt the shit out of it, but it didn't. Really hit me until the next like afternoon, the first 24 hours I had hired a nurse to stay with me at home, which I'm glad I did because not even a person that knew me could have taken care of me the way this woman did. She knew exactly what I needed. It was expensive, but let me tell you, well worth it because she came and she brought in like in the fridge, she had a bowl of. Ice water that she kept adding ice into that had vinegar and some other things in it were, and it had gauze. And so she would bring the gauze to me in the bowl and she would wrap my face in gauze. Then there was ice packs, then there was like, SAV, you had to put on the, your face. And I had to take antibiotics and I had to take pain pills and I had to do this and everything else. And you know, she walked me to the bathroom because you couldn't really see like my eyelids were swollen because, her name is Rachel. Rachel even did my eyelids and I was super close to doing BLE BLE surgery and I don't even need it now because she did such a great job when she did this TRL, but. Anyway, let's go back to the nurse. So the nurse like made sure everything was great. She drove me to my appointment the next day, but the next day when I got there, they started de my face. And if you don't know what de is, that means they're taking off the dead skin cells and skin in order for the fresh skin to come up. So they do that with burn victims. They do that right when you get like a huge. You know, like injury on your arm or your leg or wherever it is, they have to keep cleaning it out. So that one, it heals, but because it doesn't, so it doesn't get infected. So I go into the office and they're taking these long Q-tips, you know, those long ones on, like those wood sticks and they're like. Breeding, like pulling it down my face, like pulling off all this like pussy stuff off of my face and it burns. Like it burns and it stings. And I'm like, oh, this is spicy. And they're like, yeah, well it's typical. Like this is what happens and you know, we want the fresh layers to come out and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, this is great. And so I get home and. The nurse, it's been 24 hours and she's like, okay, I'm gonna go now if you need me. Whatever. So I'm like, okay, it's time for my pain pills. I eat my yogurt, I eat, things that don't have a lot of salt in them because you can't eat things that are salty because it makes you swell even more and retain water and they don't want that. So meeting yogurt, blah, blah, blah. And I take a nap. When I wake up from that nap, I swear all of the anesthesia on my face had worn off. My nose is still completely numb at this point, so I can't feel any pain. In fact, to this day it is still, I would say 30% numb. But I woke up and it felt like some cat. Fucking scratched my face off and then piss in it. It burned so, so bad. You have no idea. Like your chin is burning. Your, my lower jaw line was burning. My under eyes were burning. My lip was burning. Like everything hurt. Everything hurt on my face. And I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, what did I do? What did I do for vanity? Like, why did I do this? Day three? Same thing. Doesn't hurt as bad, but now it's starting to dry, right? So it's seeping, but then it's drying into this like crusty, disgusting look on my face. Day four, a little tiny bit better. Day five, I go back for my post-op. They're like, oh my gosh, it looks so good. I'm like, really? Because one, it hurts to even drive in the car because any sort of light on your face feels like someone turned on the oven and said, oh, let's just stick your head in the oven for a couple of minutes and see, you know, what it feels like. So I'm driving in the car with my hugest straw hat that I can find that has like SPF 50. I have my face. Gently wrapped in a scarf. I can't wear sunglasses because I have a tape and a, what you call it on my nose, like a brace on my nose, and it just, I look like, I don't know. I don't even know what I look like because most people don't post a lot of things about what they look like during recovery, but. Let's fast forward to back to school. So school started again a couple weeks ago. I show up at school and everyone's like, oh my God, you look so fresh. And I'm like, thank you. And I felt fresh, and I know that I look fresh, but I want to keep my skin looking good. I can't wear a lot of makeup on my face anymore. I wear sunscreen constantly. I wear, tinted moisturizers. My favorite is Clay, CLE because it's a pH matching moist moisturizer and sunscreen and it has either 47 or 52 SPF in it, and it is, it's a mineral sunscreen, one, it's good for you, and two, it matches your pH. So the one that I've been using is light medium, because I do have an olive of undertone in my skin and I didn't wanna look yellow and I didn't want to look orange. So this one matches my skin perfectly. But yeah, you can't. Do what you used to do with to your skin. Like literally now I use serums and I don't know, it's not a 12 step process or something for bed, but I'm washing my face, I'm toning my face. I'm putting, uh, glycolic acid on my face. I'm using lactic acid. I'm using retinol. I'm using, peptides. I'm using different moisturizers, like different sorts of things, even face oil. I could never have even have thought of wearing a face oil in my face before I had this done. I can use them now and within probably two hours it's absorbed and it just has like a this beautiful. Glassy look to my face instead of that oily, old dull look on your skin. So it's not for the faint of heart, trust me. But, um, I'm still doing some Botox. We just did some Botox on my neck when I was in there this week because I want to keep up with the lasers to keep my skin from, to regenerate so that it continues to heal in the best way possible. So the lasers that we're doing now are more of like a soft wave therapy laser. Not painful. It does make like a clicking noise and kind of snaps your skin a little bit, but it's not that bad. But it, those take a couple of months to see, just like this big laser treatment. They take months to see the results, but once the results start to kick in, it's 100% worth it. I don't care who you are out there. If you have damage from acne, from sunspots, from injuries to your face, from overp, picking your face from not wearing sunscreen, whatever it is, laser is a very good place to start and then build from there. It's not cheap, let me just say that. It is not cheap, but the money that I'm saving on. Beauty products and on therapy for feeling like a gram pappy, every time I look in the mirror is incredible. Like it is beyond incredible how much better your skin can look. And it's all about health, right? So I'm drinking a ton of water. I take. Like handfuls of vitamins. I'm eating so much fiber, so much protein, so much fresh, fresh fruits and vegetables. And to be absolutely honest, I still love my sugar, but I have been trying so, so hard to stay away from sugar on a regular basis because I know that absolutely contributes to shitty skin. No matter how old you are. No matter how old you are, sugar contributes to very, very poor skin quality. So that's just my PSA about skin, about beauty. I hope you guys had fun with this very short solo episode. I love you a lot. Thank you so much for listening, and I will check back in with you soon. Have a super night everybody.