Episode 4 - The Art and Science of Beauty

In this episode, we welcome Mandy Lauderdale of Hey Butterfly Studio in Atlanta. With over 20 years of experience, Mandy shares her knowledge on the changes our skin goes through over time, and what we can do about it, whether from a professional or at home. We learned a lot from Mandy and we know you will too. Thanks for tuning in!

Transcript

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Hello, welcome to the podcast. Today, we are so excited to have my esthetician and my friend, Mandy Lauderdale with Hay Butterfly Studio in Atlanta. Say hi, Mandy. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Uh, Mandy is, is amazing. I can't even begin to tell you what a miracle worker that she is. And she's an amazing human on top of that. So we thought that she would be a perfect person to have on this podcast. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for joining. You and I have not met before, so I thought I would be asking some of the questions since you and Delaney probably have known each other for quite some time. So great to meet you and thanks for joining us on the show. Where, help me understand, so what's your background and how'd you get started into, in this area and more importantly, kind of the science of beauty? I started as a Mac makeup artist. There's some irony here, by the way. Because being a MAC makeup artist, sorry, MAC cosmetics, caused skin problems with people. That's not why I got into skin. But when I was, I'm forty-seven, I got into, I started working for MAC when I was twenty. And over time I just became obsessed with the skin. I'm from a family full of doctors, from just cardiologists to chiropractors to general surgeons to hospice nurses. pharmacist and everyone thought I would go into dermatology because I was fascinated with the skin. I'm the one that always wanted to pop people's pimples on their faces and backs. You're a good friend to have in the teenage years. I am. I drove all my boyfriends crazy. So I... When I went to college, went to Elon College, and when I got there, I realized that what dermatologists did, because I would have gone pre-med, what they did was they just, a lot of them was diagnosing and prescribing. I'm like, wait, I wanted to do procedures on the skin. And so I realized later on that an aesthetics license is a trade license, and it was a lot less school, which is a little strange that nurses and PAs and MDs have to get more of a degree. But estheticians, especially medical estheticians, you start with just a year of school. That's crazy. That is not enough. So estheticians have more on the job training. So usually you come out of school after about in Georgia, it's about a year. It's a little bit longer, a little less Florida. It's like, I don't know, you just hiccup and you have a license. It's crazy. Sorry, Florida. But in Georgia, you just go for about a year and then it's more on the job training of how you get going. Anyways, back to answer your question from a big medical family. But I just didn't want to go the MD route. And I really want to do more procedures on the skin, but not in the plastic surgery route. I actually wanted to do like your microlinear peels, your lasers and things like that, that also treated aging, the root of aging, which is loss of collagen and elastin and hyaluronic acid. And so I wanted to and I was always fascinated with and what's really neat about our industry. It's medical. And so it's changing. We're discovering things all the time. I know we'll get into the menopause conversation because it's a hot topic right now, as it should be. It should have been a hot topic always. But I love my industry even more now because I'm treating so many women who are going through menopause. So I know it's around a little bit, but I have been doing this now for, gosh, twenty two years, been in medical aesthetics for fourteen, fifteen years and absolutely love it. And still learning things every day, especially recently, because I'm experiencing perimenopause and perimenopause my third year experiencing things. So I've become fascinated with just other things that we can do. This is to me, this is not an industry of. aesthetics as an industry of just overall health and helping people look in the mirror and feel good about themselves. Because when you feel good about themselves, you're just better out in the world. This is not just about beauty. This is about health. This is the biggest organ on in your skin. So that is important. I don't just help people look pretty. help people feel better about themselves right and and so you know it's interesting all the all the things you you said about medical family and then wanting to actually work with the skin right versus the prescription or the removal or changing someone's features through plastic surgery um let's talk a little bit you brought up a few things I'm going to save some of the questions to the end on recommendations based upon certifications and where you are today in your practice and maybe where people should go for what um with so many things that are out there but let's talk about the influences because you brought that up and and you put it in a way that I hadn't really thought about it before of it is the biggest organ in your body it is, skin does so much, right? And it's one of those that's kind of, we take it for granted, perhaps. And so- let's talk about things. So what are the things that from a nature nurture perspective, I usually am a psych major. So I like talking about the nurture component of things and then, you know, to the, to the wellness and to the fitness. So how do these things influence as a person ages? And then are there any differences based upon ethnicity? I love this question, too. I was just answering this question the other day, not about anesthetics. I was talking about people who are adopted. And I'm fascinated with people who meet their biological people. And they're like, oh my gosh. And they see their cheekbones or their blue eyes, or they see that the way that they laugh or some quirk that they have and the way that they skip around. And then you have other things from the people who, their parents who brought them into their family about things that they were influenced by them. I think this is fascinating. But I like how you're talking about nature versus nurture in this industry specifically. So I can take two, let's just say women, because we're not going to exclude men, of course, but most of my patients are women. You can take two people who take you two who are the same age. I can do the same exact procedure. Let's just say a microneedling treatment, a peel, a laser treatment, some IPL, a little plasma on both of you. And you guys can have, even if you have the same lifestyle, drastically different results, just depending on ethnicity, depending on stress. You have the cortisol hormone that comes from stress, which breaks down collagen. And then you have, when it comes to sun, when it comes to, you don't know, maybe if you have a autoimmune deficiency, anyone who has autoimmune, that is such an important question in my industry to ask people and just to consider. Because if one of you has an autoimmune, let's say you guys were sisters, but one of you has an autoimmune, your body is busy all the time taking care of that autoimmune. So it's not going to be able to heal those injuries and have as good of results as the other person because you only have so many growth factors in your body. So let's just take microneedling. Microneedling is the number one most requested medical aesthetic service in the world. If I gave that to both you guys and you're the same age, you have about the same diet. if one of you has an autoimmune, it's just gonna be different. If one of you has four kids and are super stressed, it's just gonna be different. Now you just don't know if one starts to get into perimenopause, which you start losing three to five percent of collagen a year instead of one percent a year, your results are gonna be different. And it's just, that is the hardest part of my job is that consultation and that handholding and be like, well, my friend eats McDonald's every day and I'm a cross-fitting raw vegan. Why are her results better? Let's talk about stress. Let's talk about autoimmune. So all those things factor into it. Let's talk about, do you wear sunscreen? Do you touch your skin to the bare earth? Are you getting that earth energy? It is That's why this is also overwhelming for people when they first come to a consultation. I always allow an hour for consultation. I give so much information. I'm going to give you guys so much information. And it's a lot to digest. And it's just starting with simple little things when you get into it of understanding. I can give you a biology lesson all day long of how. one microneedling treatment, always go back to microneedling, most people have heard of it and it's just easy, is putting one year collagen back in your collagen bank. Well, that's great for maintenance over a year, but if you're in perimenopause, you're gonna need three to five for maintenance over a year. And that's confusing. So for me, sometimes I've had a woman come to me before who, gosh, she was in her seventies. I had done three radio frequency microneedling treatments on her. She waited three to six months. We saw zero, zero results. That's never happened. Usually you see something. I looked at her before and after pictures and I went and tested my machine later. I'm like, Is something wrong with the machine? Nope. It was just fine. She actually went and got a blood test, and she was so low in vitamin C that they actually put her on an IV drip in the office. They're like, how are you alive? And she just realized she also realized she had something going on with the microbiome in her stomach and a few other things, something with her thyroid. Her body could not allot the growth factors to heal these crazy injuries that I created because it was just busy trying to keep her alive. And so I thought that was fascinating. Again, skin being the biggest organ in the body, it can show us other things going on. It's just before I knew that my dad had pancreatic cancer, he started turning yellow. He was getting jaundiced, like, what is happening? That was the skin showing, hey, something is really wrong here. So anyways, I jump around a lot. So skin, I mean, the way that I would summarize part of it is that skin is kind of a reflection of what's going on inside. A hundred percent. Clean liver, I tell everybody all day, clean liver, clean skin. Don't come to me after having a bottle of wine and then having a triple shot of espresso. Those things are great. That's kind of how some of us might survive the early years of being parents or marriage. But all of those things, all of those things matter. When I create injuries in the skin, I care so much about what people are eating at home. Them getting enough protein, them taking a vitamin C supplement because vitamin C builds collagen and elastin. And that is so important. What my job is so easy. I could teach anybody how to do it. What I do is just so fast and easy. And people go home. I'm like, when I, when I send someone out the door, I'm like, it's like I was sending like your baby with the babies that you've never met. You're just like, take care of it. Bye. Tell my story. Yeah. Just keep doing what I told you to do. Yes, please. And then when they call me later, I give one or two things. If I hear from a patient, they're either super happy with the results. Or not. Or not. And I don't really hear about in the middle, which is fine. Yeah. So there's a few things in there I wanted to kind of just dive a little bit more for listeners, right? Because these are some of the basics. Sun exposure. yes eighty percent of aging is from the sun and that is uh it's been I had come people come to me a lot with a lot of um hyperpigmentation on the left side uh sometimes a little little less volume that they I will never tell people if I can see less volume because it'll give people that complex um but I can just tell if there's more and they that that patient won't know that I may be doing a little bit extra on that left side to help them out, but it, eighty percent of aging. And it's so people who come to me and they just, they don't want to have a lot of downtime because they're out and about. And I'm like, do you wear sunscreen? That's usually one of the first questions I ever ask if I wear sunscreen. If they say no, I'm like, bye. Because this is a total waste of money. Try to build up the, I'm a tissue builder. to try to build up those things but they're going they're going to go outside and garden without a hat on and sunscreen exercise but we can figure out how you can have the best of all the worlds or just just accept that you're just you're getting some good vitamin d you're going to break down some collagen elastin from that sun and call it a day and just and maybe measure it yourself yeah you have to wear sunscreen for me but I just don't want to wait that's just the ethical way to go about it like don't don't invest in those things But I have the same thing with smoking. I have this one woman who came to me for an insane plasma fibroblast treatment where I removed her face, like Nick Cage face off, removed her face. And I was like, your results are going to be like a third of someone else's. And she's like, yeah, but you know what? She's not going to. And I really admired how honest she was about it. She's like, I'm not going to quit smoking. It makes me so happy. I'm like, good for you. I just want you to know you might have complications in your healing and you might get an infection and you're just not going to have the same results. If you want to stop smoking or stop drinking a fifth of whiskey a day because it makes you happy, good for you. Yeah, right. There'll be consequences both internally and externally. Maybe you just have poor expectations. Right, right. Talk to me about water. Okay, so water, you need to be drinking. Or hydration. Yeah, I mean, super important. We all know this. You should be drinking, take your body weight, cut it in half. So if you weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, you need seventy five ounces of water a day. And some people just like, okay, it's easier, I find, to measure water. As I sit here with you, I'm sitting here holding my water. I know that I need four of these a day. And so I have one in the morning, one at night. I know I need two during the day. That's just the easiest way to do it when people can measure it, when you can visually see that it's measured. I think that makes people feel better. And some people just need to do a bunch in the morning and a bunch at night. Waking up and having lemon water first thing in the morning. Waking up and having coffee or anything that's diuretic is... I'm the coffee person. So do not ever wake up and just make coffee in the morning. Okay, I'm being shamed. It's fine. Think about this. So remember we just said clean liver, clean skin. Your liver and kidneys have been starving all night and are so dehydrated. You're going to wake up and put something through your body that's dehydrating. And then you're like, why does my skin look like shit? That's why your skin looks like shit. That's why you can pinch the front of your neck and it sticks. You're just dehydrated. So when people, oh, by the way, when people come to me, a lot of people come to me for around the eyes and the neck. And if I pinch it, I'm like, this isn't just loss of collagen and elastin. You're dehydrated. And they're sitting there drinking their Starbucks triple latte garbage full of sugar. So shaming right now as I drink one. You're saying just drink water first, and then if I drink it really fast, then I can have my coffee just... Yes. While your coffee's brewing, while your tea's steeping, drink just a cup of water, eight ounces of water, a little bit of lemon. I can do that. Okay. And same with when you go to bed. Let's say you're going to have a beer, or you're having wine at night, or you're having even tea. I don't ever have any of that. Wonderful. Then just... but the water should be the first thing in um before you get the last thing okay always um let's talk about food I understand you're a vegan as well I am okay um so let's talk about the impact of food for the broader, because I think we all have, I'm kind of a fluid is what I would call myself and how I eat, right? I mainly go for how my body feels and I know what my body doesn't like. And so I don't eat a lot of meat. I don't eat a lot of fried foods. I just, it doesn't sit well with me as I age. I don't like to eat a lot of sugar. Good. So for the general, but I don't omit and I don't like the word diet. So that's, that's why I want to talk about food. Um, what are the basics, whether you're vegan, vegetarian, omnivore carnivore, raw diet, whatever it might be. I heard you say vitamins. I heard you say certain things that the body truly needs that can be derived regardless of how you eat. What would be say maybe the top three or five? Great question. So I was recently talking to a nutritionist, nutritionist is a broad term, a nutritionist that I respect, who talks about everything, who will do blood tests to see what you're deficient in. So many people would be like, oh, like, I love the antioxidant astaxanthin. Astaxanthin has something like, what is it, five to ten thousand times the amount of antioxidants that vitamin C has. Doesn't mean you still don't need vitamin C. But vitamin C is a tissue builder. Whenever I used to work for two plastic surgeons who towards the end of my time with them finally started telling people, you need to take vitamin C before you have plastic surgery and just to build up your immune system. But also it's a tissue builder. Funny thing about vitamin C. So when I tell people about vitamin C and you need other vitamins that all work together, I love people just take like a basic multivitamin. But when you take your immunity vitamins, because those build tissue. It also keeps you healthy. So there's a reason I'm telling you both of those things at the same time. Let's say Delaney comes to me and she gets some sort of laser treatment. If I tell her to take vitamin C, not only does it help keep her healthy, it helps build tissue. The reason why I want to keep her healthy while building tissue is that if she gets COVID, if she gets the flu, guess who the results slow down? That. So they work together. So it's just protecting her investment for what she just spent with me, keeps her better, and everybody's happy. Protein, when it comes to protein. So trainers will tell you a different percentage of this. I think it's you take your body weight as times ........................ . So it's the same with we're tissue building. So when people when people have the collagen conversation, the oh, can I should I take collagen in order to build collagen? Would you drink a protein shake to build a muscle without actually tearing that muscle first? No, but it will maintain having enough protein maintains all the muscle and tissue that you already have. And so you need to give your skin the building blocks that it has. The protein and the vitamin are so important, but also the antioxidants too. When it comes to anything that's inflammatory, guess what? Melasma is caused by inflammation. Everyone thinks it's just like caused by hormones, by the sun, by heat, all of that's true, but those things cause inflammation and that's when people get melasma. I developed melasma, you're not gonna be able to see it on camera really, um it's rare to get it on your forearms that was one of my I didn't realize this at the time that was one of my first indications that I was in perimenopause because of my body was getting more inflamed um so that's yeah I would say yeah antioxidants those three protein yep so so you touch what how would the general audience understand what melasma is or looks like what's fascinating to me still to this day after how long I've been doing this that Melanin pigment comes from melanocytes. We all have about the same number of melanocytes. The three of us all being, you know, very pale skin to somebody, you know, from Nigeria, black as night, black hair, black eyes, black skin, all have the same amount. Some people just produce more. So what's neat about melasma, and I'm sure everyone's cringing, like, what do you mean what's neat? I hate it. It's caused by hormones, of course, heat and stress and things like that, too. But it's not just caused from the sun. So little sunspots that you have that you start developing when you're a child. No one's born with freckles. It is all caused by the sun. But melasma can rear its ugly head before or after having a baby. During perimenopause, sometimes when you're in full menopause, that it's just, it flares up and it is so hard to treat. So there are so many different machines that can break up that pigment and especially like things called Moxie. And, but I find that those machines, sorry, Moxie, to be a total waste of money. Melasma is best maintained at home. I try to talk people out of even things like a BBL, IPL, unless you're a bride or you're an actress and you have a special event coming up. Pigment is best maintained at home from things like that have hydroquinone in them or things from like your retinol, your tretinoin, your niacinamide, things that just can subdue it. Also, have you guys seen those little, they're everywhere on social media. And I hate even saying it because my phone's going to hear it and it's going to send me, it's going to target more ads at me. Those, it's a kojic acid and turmeric pads. Have you all seen these? They're orange. And I'm so sorry that your phones are probably hearing this right now. You're about to find out about it. I think it's actually really brilliant. I've ordered some because I'm curious if these actually work. But it makes sense to me because especially for turmeric, you apply turmeric topically and it's anti-inflammatory. I just want to see if it's real because theoretically it does make sense to apply those things topically. topically but yeah those are like because you pay thousands of dollars for lasers that can treat melasma but it's just going to come right back it's always going to come right back and not just from sun from just stress you have a parent die a pet die you get sick it's just gonna and it just those that in particular drives me insane yeah yeah um the biggest thing I see right now is collagen right um I heard you say a couple things start from the outside or start from the inside what would you say about collagen you're doing treatments to create more collagen or to have the body naturally produce more collagen what would you say about collagen supplements whether in powder form or what have you do it don't do it if you want to make you will you will lose less collagen If you're taking a collagen supplement, by the way, collagen is just a form of protein. So if you're getting enough protein, do you need to take collagen? Not necessarily. But for me personally, so I know you can't probably see on this camera, I microneedled three days ago. So for me, I actually take, I have something called Allogorgeous. I love it. It's a vegan collagen supplement. Yeah, I think you take it too. That's what I use too. And I put it for me, it's just peace of mind that I'm getting a little extra in my, I just always like also the vegan supplements when it comes to, this is not a advertisement for veganism at all. I tell people when they ask me about vegan supplements, I'm like, I always start the conversation too with why are you taking it? Oh, I just want to build collagen. And I go back to what I said before. I'm like, are you just going to drink a protein shake and expect to have a six pack without going to the gym and doing the work? Like, no, like it doesn't work that way. But will you lose less if you take some? Sure. But when it comes to what I do in my industry and just like medical aesthetics, that injuring the skin, it doesn't you don't have to go to a med spa to injure your skin. There's other ways to do it. But I'll tell you about that in a minute. But injuring your skin is like taking injuring. And by the way, all of us look at each other's epidermis. You have to injure the dermis, the top of the dermis called the papillary dermis. You have to injure that. in order to stimulate your body to create collagen or elastin just depends on the injury so collagen supplements after you've had that after you've had those treatments yes again protects your investment just like you're not going to go to the gym and or enter a fitness competition no trainer is going to train you if they don't if they're they're not positive that you are having eating the appropriate things to feed the injuries that you cost right okay my industry is identical Okay. I like how you correlate the two because we talk about fitness often. Let's talk about where to start at home. You've been dropping it in and I know that, you know, I think it was maybe two sessions ago, Delaney and I, we went and had certain treatments done on our face and we don't want our audience to think that, oh, hey, okay, you've got to go to a spa or you've got to go to medical office to get this done. What are the things that someone can do at home? whether it's time or because of finance or because of whatever reasons, they just, they can't go. Oh, you don't ever have to come to see me to get the same results. Delaney's like, wait, what? Well, you just lost a customer there, Mandy. I know. Well, it's why I really just, we mentioned gatekeeping earlier that I, I think before we got started the video, that my industry gate keeps so much. If there's advancements in technology, any kind of technology, our cell phones, our computers, there's advancements in medical aesthetics when it comes to devices, even devices that get FDA cleared. Oh, I had this man who brought his daughter here and I'm forgetting what it's called, but it is an FDA cleared laser hair removal. It's not a laser, sorry. I think it uses radio frequency. You can't do lasers at home. But it uses radio frequency for hair removal. It does work. You have to do it a lot more often because it's not going to just be as powerful as you have to do it ten times there, maybe five times with me. But yes, it works. And yes, you can do it at home. That's the thing, though. Compliance. People buy these machines that are never going to be as strong because you can hurt yourself and you're never going to be able to buy a laser at home. Well, maybe you will be one day. But it's just because people can hurt themselves. So there's laser hair removal. There are IPL. There are it's just like tretinoin retina. You got to do prescription for tretinoin. That is one of the best things you can use at home. But you don't have to walk into a dermatologist's office to do it. There are companies like Muesli that will prescribe it for you. And you can just help yourself at home. To do the over-the-counter products, you're going to have stuff that you can get from just CVS that is a small percentage of retinol. Just go for the tretinoin. You can get it. Literally, anybody can go online and get it. Go on Instagram, look up Muesli, and go and have a virtual conversation and you'll be able to get some. Tretinoin, that would be the biggest change you could ever make in your skin from a topical product is using your retinol tretinoin. But suck it up. Use a stronger one. Go through the process of flaking for three months if you're going to see a bigger change when you do something like that. Also sunscreen, you're using a mineral sunscreen over a broad spectrum sunscreen. There's a reason why the mineral sunscreens are a little more expensive. There should be a sign at every place where you can buy a sunscreen that explains the difference between mineral and broad. Mineral reflects the sun rays and they have to put on the back of those bottles that you have to apply it every two hours. You're because they're reflecting the sun's rays. As long as you're not swimming it off, sweating it off, you're fine. Blood spectrums, that molecule fills up and will turn off after about two hours in direct sunlight. And that's why you have to reapply them. But yeah, the sunscreen and the retinol. When it comes to, do you want to talk about devices you can do at home? Yeah, that'd be great. Tightening the muscle. If you want to do face yoga, it does work. You have to do it all the time. If you want to use something like a new face device, those do work, but you have to use them all the time. I tell people not to keep them in a drawer. Keep them out, especially if you watch an hour of Netflix every night. Keep it out where you can see it, similar to like flossing your teeth. People are more likely to floss if the floss is beside you. Right. So you want to be using it all the time because you're tight. I tighten this in anyone in my industry. We tighten the skin. We build collagen elastin. You've got muscle and fat underneath there, too. There's other things you can do. The fascia blasters. I talk about these ad nauseum. They work, but you have to use them. You are the magic. You actually there's no motor. It just sits in your hand. Those, by the way, that girl, Ashley Black, who invented those. That girl's a genius. She has done her due diligence of having it studied, having white papers behind it. For those who don't know what a fascia blaster is, Ashley Black, and Ashley, I'm sorry if you listen to this and I get this wrong, she started out developing this to help some scar tissue that she had, and she worked on athletes and whatnot. And she noticed that it was when she would use these devices on people's bodies that it was stretching the fascia bands that causes cellulite. And she developed this book or wrote this book called The Cellulite Myth. It's not fat, it's fascia. Oh, I love that so much. I used to do cool sculpting at the plastic surgery practice that I was at. And it was the lowest amount of revenue they ever had when I did the cool sculpting because I would just close the door and I would talk to patients. I'd be like, hey, is it the volume, the excess volume that bothers you? Or is it the dimpling in your skin? I would never call it cellulite. Or is it the dimple? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the texture. I'm like, oh, I got a device for you. It's going to cost you ninety bucks and see you later instead of nine grand. And they hated me. So you're not doing that anymore. No. And the thing here's the thing. Those kind of devices that you want a little spot treat. That's fine. Not not shaming anything like that. But those devices work, which you realize, too, is that pressure with those. And there are white papers on this. I'm so glad she did this because it was just her telling people, and she's not in the medical field, that if you press hard enough, especially for like extra volume that you have in your cementum, right? There's always this triangle of extra volume right here. You have things like CoolSculpting. You can do Lipo. You can do Kybella. Kybella is an injectable that breaks apart, it's like bile, I don't know if you hear, FDA cleared to break apart that fat. Or you can just buy a face fascia blaster. It's like seventy bucks. I swear I'm not advertising for them. And you can actually, if you use enough pressure, you can rupture those fat cells. It's amazing. You have to be really careful on your forehead because you can use those fascia blasters to soften out fine lines that are caused by your muscles a thousand times a day. All these are devices that work at home. However, you have to use them. And so when people come to me all the time, and Delaney and I have had this conversation so many times about people coming to me because they said they don't want Botox. And I'm like, hold on. It doesn't necessarily work that way because your muscles are creating those elevens, the glabella, the forehead row, the crow's feet. And so you can't expect to spend money with me to fix all that, but not do something about the muscles. So if you're not going to do Botox or Dysport or whatever, or Xeomin or whatever, then you need to be doing something every day to combat and to erase what you caused all day by using your muscle. I work on so many teachers. Where I'm sitting right now, I'm in my clinic right now. My kid's school is two blocks this way. There's another school here. I treat so many teachers that don't want to get... any kind of neurotoxin because they want to still have full movement of their face. I have a very famous actress coming here today to get some treatments done. I had to have that conversation with her too. I'm like, if you don't want Botox because you don't want to look frozen on camera, then I'm like, you have got to start wearing silicone patches to bed. using something. There's a product by PCA called Excellinia that is like topical Botox, has some peptides in it that soften the wrinkles a little bit. You can work for all this, but that's the thing. You have to work for it. But that's the trade-off, right? You can save thousands of dollars that you would have spent with me, that you would have spent with a nurse, a PA, an MD on injectables. You can do this at home. I promise you. It's just take some elbow grease. You just have to. So it... It sounds a lot like fitness in the same way of you've got to put in, you got to put the hours in, whether it's at a gym or walking or running or, you know, whatever it might be. It's the same thing with your face. You can either take the, you know, an easier kind of faster way, but then still the results, you got to keep up with it, right? And starting someplace or... You have to hold yourself accountable. You have to have discipline, right? I mean, same exact thing. You have to have discipline. Yes. Yeah. Yes, with the discipline, I think one of the things that I'm always cautious about or we're cautious about is discipline. Discipline is one thing, but believe me, there's times that I'm just not disciplined and I'm going to get over it and then I'm going to hop back on and go back to my past. So it's not like the three of us are saying we live super boring lives that we don't put things into our body that maybe we regret. Right. The next day or a couple of hours later, life happens, stuff happens. Or you go to bed without washing the makeup off your face or, you know, whatever. It happens. How dare you? I know. But there are other things too. Can I mention one more device? Oh, yeah. I had two girls recently and I'm like, just will you please bring it here? So these two best friends, they each bought a, I'll just say it's the doctor pen. It's a microneedling pen. And you can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it lots of places. And so I had so many people buying it. I decided to buy one. Super cheap. And I looked at the needles and they were surgical steel. And I thought, wow. this is awesome that people can get their hands other providers but I can't believe that people buy microneedling pens that and they're using on themselves and I'm like why teach them how like bring them in like there's there's plenty of business to go around the microneedling doing that though right I mean isn't there some sort of concern on how deep you'll go or are these devices yeah that that would be my I just want to teach people how to properly use it because they're going to do it anyways So I'd rather teach them now. I'd rather teach them, hey, you can only get five percent lidocaine, which is not going to feel that great. But here's the thing. Even if you're just doing superficial microneedling, let me back up. I have people that come to me for microneedling or I'll recommend it. They're like, oh, I've had it before. I didn't have great results. Did you get it from a spa? esthetician or did you get it from like medical provider they're like spa I'm like okay they can't go that deep it's just gonna be more superficial results however you're still gonna see results when it comes to fine line product penetration and whatnot people are gonna do it anyways I want people also people are gonna have better results with me if they're still treating themselves at home I can just do some of the heavy lifting let me teach you how to properly use that device to not hurt yourself let me teach you how to properly cleanse your skin so you don't get an infection And so, but as long as you're disposing that tip and you're not using it as other people, I love that if you're using at home devices, I have this one woman that comes to me that gets a TCA peel from, a thirty percent TCA peel off eBay. Her skin looks amazing. It is really risky to do that to yourself, but you know what? It's your skin. Don't let me or anyone else tell you what you can't do. You want to experiment with something? Try it on your arm. Yeah. Do it. Careful of the consequences. So in the last minutes that we have, you've talked about a lot of treatments in and out of the office. What age? I've heard you when you're sharing stories of older, younger, what would be your parting words of wisdom as an expert in this place of when do you start? Is it ever too late to start? What would you recommend? If you want, so we start losing one percent of college in a year starting at age twenty five. So if you have anyone over it, if you're, don't come to me before you're twenty-five, unless it's, unless you're having some like hormonal things, you're having some acne, we can take care of that. Or just peels, the light stuff. Because by the way, things like peels don't build collagen and elastin. I don't care what people tell you. They don't. They don't go deep enough to do it. It's a refresher. Especially if you've got a young bride. Sure, I'll do a few things on you, but you just don't need, you don't waste your money. So coming, starting at age twenty five to an older, doing just one, even one treatment a year just to make up for what you lost. You don't really start losing a lot of elastin. So most of my clientele is forty and above because starting in your forties, you start losing elastin, just quick biology lesson. Ninety percent of the collagen, sorry, the protein in your skin is collagen. That's the stuffing in a mattress. About ten percent is elastin. That's the coil in a mattress. Ten percent. That coil doesn't take up a lot of room in a mattress. But boy, does it have an important job. That's when people start saying, oh my gosh, my cheeks are falling. I'm just, my jawline is not as tight. They're always in their forties. You don't hear people say that in their twenties and thirties. So you start doing those treatments early. Fantastic. You come to me when you're sixty, seventy years old. I'm going to pull out some, I'm going to be super aggressive on you. And because I can't get you back to how your skin was in your twenties. But no, it's never too late to do it. So people came to me, let's say they're in perimenopause when you start losing three to five percent of collagen a year. That's wild. in the first five to ten years, you lost almost thirty percent in that short amount of time. It's not fair, but it is what it is. Oh, by the way, sorry, I should mention this. Unless you are on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and you're not losing estrogen at a rapid rate because you need estrogen to build collagen. If you're on that and you're in perimenopause, I will just be like, you just need one to two a year. But if you're not going to do any of that and that's people's own choice, I'm about to get on it, then you do need three to five treatments a year to maintain what you're losing. And so when people come, so I had someone the other day that this was such a good conversation I had with this woman. She said, well, my insurance doesn't cover any BHRT that I'm like, hold on. Then you're going to spend a lot more money with me. You can have less treatments with me to improve your skin. If you can get your estrogen and your progesterone and your testosterone and check, you're not going to need as many treatments with me because you're not going to be losing everything at such a rapid rate. And like a light bulb, even when I said it to her, I'm like a light bulb went off for myself too. I'm like, ah, It's true, but you don't have some people are against that. And that's, that's fine. I just like to, I'm just a vessel of information. So to answer your question a little, a little more short, um, it is never too late to do it. It's just, if you start senior fifties, sixties, seventies, I'm just going to let you know about the things you need to be doing at home and things you need to be eating. Cause this is just, it's not just one and done treatment. And so some people think because they pay for something because these treatments aren't cheap. You pay for something that they're going to have this big facelift. No, it's just a lot of handholding. That's the misconception. Well, you've given so much advice. We're going to share this as well, obviously, in the podcast, but in Instagram, just because I've been taking notes. I learned a lot. Very good. Hopefully, and I think I'm, you know, I've done treatments on my face and take care of my face at home. But I was like, oh, okay, good to know. I know. I mean, I pay to go to treatments just so I can hear her talk about this stuff. Oh, thank you. Exactly. It's so great. Can I tell you one thing? had if I had to choose one thing because you just gave a lot of information I've been accused of that a lot so I want to tell you no no no in a great way yes so oh and oh I know um but I mentioned the tretinoin and sunscreen things like that if you had to have a tool one tool that would like health and soften fine lines and whatnot I would do silicone patches there's tons on the market from your wrinkle shminkle to your frownies, to your, there's so many different ones. When you sleep in those, that it really does, it helps your muscle not to be as strong. Your muscle thinks something's pressing hard on it when something's just laying on it. Those actually make a really big difference. The results don't last long, but if you're using them all the time, you'd be surprised. Putting one on your neck, it also traps that epidermal, trans-epidermal water loss that you have during the night. It traps it. So if you ever just want to overnight give yourself a bit of a facelift, those silicone patches are a godsend. I look forward to doing that and seeing what my husband and children say. It's something she got me hooked on them. She got me hooked on them. My dogs look at me like I'm an alien when I wear it. Cause mine is blue. Okay. good work it's so now mandy you've challenged me I've got a couple challenges for myself that's one of the things I'm going to try good to carry on well thank you so much for your time this has been awesome I have loved this conversation um I've learned a ton and I'm excited of just trying to apply some of these things at home Yeah. I'm so glad. And I hope that more providers don't gatekeep and let people know that all the things that you can do at home for a fraction of the cost of coming to us. We're never going to go out of business as people are still not going to do those things and come to us for the heavy lifting. And if you want to pay my mortgage. I'll let you. But I would also like to tell you, you can do it at home to get really the exact same results. Yeah. Awesome. Well, we're going to be sharing your information with the audience as well, too. Just making sure. And thank you for your time again. I appreciate it. I do want to add that Mandy is always educating on her Instagram. Yes. So share your Instagram with us, please. Hey, butterfly studio dot com. I call it Hey Butterfly because people when they. commit to coming to see me or even just listening and taking some advice that I'll see them a year later and there's their skins transform like, Hey, butterflies. That's my call. Love it. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks you guys. Thank you. And we will see you guys next time. Bye. Bye.