There is a moment in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie when Gloria, played by America Ferrera, gives voice to something women know all too well: the exhaustion of trying to meet expectations that seem impossible to satisfy. She ends by saying she is tired of watching women “tie herself into knots so that people will like us.”
That line stayed with me because I recognize something very similar in the way women have been taught to relate to their skin.
After decades of working closely with skin, I have watched the skincare industry increasingly teach women to see skin as something to fix, correct, and control — something to work against rather than with. Aging became something to resist. Changes in the skin became problems to solve. And somewhere along the way, many women became disconnected from their own intuitive sense of what was best for them and their skin.
I began asking myself how we got here.
That question led me to examine the cultural and scientific history of anti-aging, but from a vantage point that is very personal to me: nearly five decades of working directly with skin.
For many years, I worked alongside plastic surgeons, providing restorative skin therapy before and after medical procedures. Over time, I began noticing patterns that increasingly concerned me. The pursuit of anti-aging was no longer simply changing the appearance of skin. I was seeing changes in the skin itself — and, just as importantly, changes in the relationship women were developing with their skin.
What I was observing didn't fit comfortably within the way I had been taught to think about skincare. And eventually, I found myself asking a much larger question:
Have we fundamentally misunderstood the biology of skin?
And if our understanding is incomplete, then perhaps some of the products and treatments we've built on that understanding deserve to be reconsidered as well.
That question became the foundation of my podcast, Skin Logic.
The series is not about telling women what products to use or giving them another routine to follow. It is an exploration of how we came to believe that skin requires continual correction — and what decades of observing skin have taught me about the consequences of that belief.
It also asks us to consider something I think has been missing from the anti-aging conversation: What if caring for skin begins not with correcting it, but with understanding it?
Because beneath all of the promises surrounding anti-aging, I think most women want something much simpler. We want to feel good. We want to be comfortable in our skin. And we want our skin to reflect health — without feeling that we have to continually fight with it to get there.
That is why the moment in Barbie resonated with me.
Women have been tying themselves into knots in so many ways. Perhaps the way we've been taught to care for our skin is one of them.
Skin Logic is my way of beginning to untangle that knot.
I'm curious about your experience. Has the way you think about your own skin changed over the years? Are there things you once believed about skincare or aging that you now find yourself questioning? I'd love to hear what you're noticing.
