When Body, Business, and Being Evolve as One
The first installment in "The Biology of Building" series
Seven years ago, I put my hands on someone's face and felt something the textbooks never mentioned. Their skin told a story that went beyond ingredient lists and treatment protocols.
It whispered of protection states and regeneration cycles, of cells caught in patterns of resistance no product could penetrate.
Let me jump to the end of the story for a moment, just to give you context. What I've discovered through 8 years of research and 10 years of working on clients is a crucial insight that changes everything:
anti-aging products can only be effective when the skin is in a state of regeneration.
Simply put, ANTI-AGING = REGENERATION. There is no alternative path.
When your expensive serum or treatment suddenly stops working or never delivers results in the first place, the product itself may not be the issue at all. The real culprit? Your skin has switched to protection state—a mode that fundamentally alters cellular behavior.
In this state, energy reserves diminish, cellular receptivity plummets, and the skin becomes resistant to molecular signals requesting change.
Most tellingly, the cell retracts its receptors—imagine softball gloves that normally extend from the cell surface, waiting to catch the molecular "ball" thrown by your expensive serums. In protection state, these gloves are pulled inside the cell, leaving those premium active ingredients with nowhere to land, no matter how potent or well-formulated they might be.
The industry explains this switch by offering the ever-elusive "Everyone's skin is different" explanation.
But as my product recommendations "spent" my client's hard-earned money, I couldn't feel ok about telling them they may or may not work, and if they don't, it's because "everyone's skin is different."
My pharmaceutical strategy background demanded better answers, and thus I went searching for them. What I didn't realize then was that finding those answers would require more than scientific research. It would demand a complete transformation of my business, my scientific understanding, and most unexpectedly, myself.
Three Threads, One Tapestry
Some journeys happen in layers. My path with Proof Positive Skin Care has unfolded like one of my Montana paintings—starting with skeleton, adding muscle, developing flesh, and finally, if I'm patient enough, discovering the soul spark.
Layer one: Scientific evolution. From observation to measurement.
Layer two: Business evolution. From opposition to integration.
Layer three: Personal evolution. From reaction to creation.
Each layer informing the others, creating a tapestry I couldn't have imagined at the beginning.
The Protection State of Being Against
When I launched my first version of virtual skincare in 2020, my messaging had edges sharp enough to cut.
I was against the beauty industry. Against conventional approaches. Against the superficial promises of eternal youth.
But this wasn't simple reactivity—it was fierce protection. I'd watched countless clients come to me wounded by industry messaging. They felt inadequate, irrelevant, terrified of aging. Some had taken extreme measures just to feel "good enough." I understood that pain intimately. I'd lived it.
My positioning perfectly reflected the binary protection state—but not just for me. Like skin cells that have flipped their biological switch to defense mode, I was fully in a protective stance.
I saw myself as a shield between my clients and an industry that profited from their insecurities. I wanted to be their protector, their resource, their mediator.
"Let me take it from the industry," I thought, "and I'll insulate you from the detrimental effects to your self-concept and relationship with your skin."
Perhaps in healing them, I could also heal the parts of myself that had been damaged by those same messages.
During COVID, my business was banned from e-commerce platforms for "pseudo science" claims.
At the time, it felt like persecution. Now I recognize it as the universe's way of saying, "There's a higher perspective available."
The Long Winter of Transformation
This past winter, isolated in my Montana guesthouse, I began the exciting yet arduous process of rebuilding the online business. Each morning I'd wake with a new perspective on my messaging. Each version slightly less reactive than the day before.
At first I was completely against the industry, then against 'bimbos selling skincare in Sephora,' then against medical esthetics. It was all charged with this energy of fighting against something rather than creating for someone.
Every day during this grueling process of message refinement, I was being called to a higher perspective. Not to abandon my protective instinct for clients, but to transform how that protection manifested.
I haven't left my house for months except for essentials.
I lost track of days and time and even a sense of who I was.
Through those existential moments of challenge and discovery, two people became my lifelines: Sarah and David back in Columbus, Ohio listened—really listened—as I wrestled with these transformations.
The hardest part wasn't just refining messaging—it was confronting the uncomfortable truth behind my judgments. I had to face how I'd been defining myself against others in the industry, particularly women who chose different approaches to beauty than I had.
I realized I'd been afraid that if I didn't position against them, my natural skin with its (perfect) "imperfections" would somehow make me less credible as a skincare strategist.
The irony wasn't lost on me—I was caught in the very trap of damaged self-concept that I wanted to protect my clients from.
The support of Sarah and David carried me through this grueling process of unraveling every sharp edge I encountered in my messaging, day after day, week after week.
Until finally, in February, something broke through—not a complete resolution, but a shift from protection to the beginning stages of regeneration in my own consciousness.
Some gifts can't be repaid, only acknowledged with profound gratitude. I was becoming like the skin I studied—moving slowly, painfully from protection to regeneration state.
When Science Mirrors Consciousness
What I didn't initially recognize was how perfectly my personal journey mirrored the protection-regeneration framework I was developing for skin.
When skin cells switch to protection state, they become defensive, reactive, and resistant to influence—there's a fundamental posture of opposition. Sound familiar?
When the cellular switch flips to regeneration state, something entirely different happens: integration becomes possible. The cell's defenses change completely, receptivity activates, and growth occurs not through opposition but through incorporation.
These aren't gradual shifts but complete state changes—binary switches that transform cellular behavior.
As my perspective evolved beyond opposition, so did my scientific understanding. I moved from conceptual frameworks to measurable parameters. From subjective observations to quantifiable metrics.
From believing I was right to focusing on what was true.
The Framework That Changed Everything
During those isolated months, I developed what had been missing: a mathematical algorithm that helps identify which binary state—protection or regeneration—the skin cells are in, and measures the specific trigger patterns on a spectrum. While the state itself is binary like a light switch, the triggers that flip this switch can be observed along a continuum, giving us valuable insights into skin behavior that were previously inaccessible.
This wasn't born from ideology but from measurement. The framework revealed six triggers that govern cellular receptivity, each with quantifiable impacts on the cell's state-switching mechanisms. By measuring these triggers systematically, we can predict when and how cells will shift from protection to regeneration state with remarkable precision. This isn't about natural versus synthetic, holistic versus conventional.
It's about measurable biology and the quantifiable factors that determine when an intervention will trigger that vital state-shift from protection to regeneration.
Business as Biological Entity
The business emerging from this three-layer evolution isn't built on opposition. It doesn't make the industry wrong—it offers a measurement framework that explains why different approaches work for different people at different times. It doesn't reject conventional or natural approaches—it explains precisely when each is most effective.
It doesn't position against medical esthetics or traditional beauty—it provides the missing measurement layer that explains outcomes across all modalities.
Like the skin moving from protection to regeneration, this business has evolved from reaction to creation.
The Cost of Becoming
This evolution came at significant personal cost. As my funds dwindled with yet another month passed without launch, I battled those primal Maslow's hierarchy fears. And those fears only pushed me deeper into protection state, further stunting my work's progression.
Some weeks I retreated back into protection state, back into divisive language and positioning. The isolation was both necessary and punishing. But like the painting process I described in my Montana musings—you can't rush from skeleton to soul spark. Each phase demands its due.
Beyond Protection, Beyond Opposition
What I've discovered through this journey is that true protection doesn't come from opposition. It comes from understanding. From measurement. From clarity.
The most powerful way I can protect my clients isn't by fighting against an industry—it's by giving them the measurement tools to navigate that industry with confidence.
It's not by telling them what's wrong—it's by showing them precisely what's happening in their skin at the cellular level. It's not by making others wrong—it's by making everyone more effective through precise biological understanding.
Here, Now, Ready
Spring is here, and I am ready to emerge. I'm a different person than before my "hibernation" and the business is, too. I'm so proud of what emerged through this process—something that honors what I've always known intuitively about the skin, now validated through scientific measurement.
In the coming days, you'll witness the launch of the Proof Positive Skin Score™—an algorithm that brings measurement to what was previously subjective in skincare. This isn't a claim to understand skin in its totality—the skin's intelligence far exceeds our current comprehension.
Rather, it's a carefully developed map based on scientifically validated truths, confirmed through my real-world observations with clients over ten years.
It identifies the six key factors that influence which state the skin is in, giving us a meaningful way to personalize product regimens without the wasteful trial and error that has dominated skincare.
Once launched, what you'll see is a business that embodies the very transformation it facilitates for clients. A move from protection to regeneration state. From opposition to integration. From reaction to creation.
The framework, like this journey, doesn't invalidate what came before—it explains it. It measures it. It makes it useful. That's the true revolution. Not fighting against, but understanding why. Not rejection, but integration. Not ideology, but measurement.
I invite you to experience this measurement revolution firsthand.
We don't claim to know everything about skin—an organ with intelligence so sophisticated it breathes and digests for us—but we've mapped scientifically validated patterns that matter for effective skincare.
This approach, confirmed through ten years of client work, has helped people achieve that universally recognized natural radiance—the kind that has strangers stopping them on the street. Not the beauty associated with trends, but the deep, biological recognition of vital health that resonates with something fundamental in all of us.
The skin speaks a language few have learned to hear. My deepest passion lies in understanding, honoring, and giving voice to its remarkable intelligence. Second only to this is liberating my fellow humans from beliefs that diminish their inherent worth.
After all, how could something as exquisite as our skin—this masterpiece of biological engineering—clothe itself around anything less than magnificent?
I commit to continuing my own journey of refinement, so that Proof Positive Skin Care might flow through a vessel worthy of both missions: honoring the skin's wisdom and reflecting back to each person the wonder their skin already knows them to be.
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