Whenever I feel anxious, my therapy self-care routine almost always revolves around beauty, a calming experience. skin care routinea mood-enhancing makeup app, etc. It’s ironic, because it’s often the beauty industry that causes my angst (if beauty standards weren’t so unrealistic, I might not need to put on bright makeup).Red lipstick feel safer). This paradox is one of the reasons Stephanie Lee created Self made, a company that focuses equally on the physical and mental aspects of beauty.
Their mission is to reject harmful and outdated beauty norms and instead foster a sense of worth through wellness-minded self-exploration. Ultimately, he says, beauty is about “how we feel, rather than how we look, when we nurture and trust our relationship with ourselves.”
Selfmade launched in 2020 with three multifunctional skin and personal care products: a seruma scruband a oil. Each one represents one of the key pillars of the brand: attachment, resilience and intimacy. “These are basics of understanding self-esteem that I learned in therapy during my own mental health crisis,” says Lee.
“I never had a relationship with mental health until I started in the beauty industry after working in the White House with Michelle Obama,” says Lee. When dealing with his own mental health struggles in 2016, he realized that “the way we talk about ourselves, the way we show ourselves in this world, is how we associate our worth with how much we earn, what title we have.” . , how well the skin suits us.” It was then that started therapy to gain the tools and resources to improve her own emotional well-beingthis is how Selfmade was born.
Selfmade doesn’t just tell us to put on a full coverage foundation or smear our faces in a retinol cream to feel better about ourselves. Lee’s mission was create a line Really had the power to understand and ultimately improve people’s mental health. “We should be using our skin as data points for what’s inside,” she explains. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m so gross, I have a pimple,’ which is how society has conditioned us to think, rephrase that to ‘I have a pimple, let me take care of my skin because it’s the largest organ in my body and I takes care. Maybe this pimple means I need to slow down and manage my stress better.”
The bottom line: We should all be asking ourselves how mental health and emotional well-being affect skin and body function, and not just focus on the outward appearance of our skin.
Everything in Selfmade’s high-quality line is clean and sustainably produced and designed to encourage healing moments of self-care out of the complicated world of aesthetic ideals. “Beauty can be a ritual tool to calm our bodies and practice loving ourselves,” explains Lee. “The time we spend putting something on our faces or touching our skin are valuable opportunities for self-exploration.”
