Skin Queen

No, you don’t need to give up gluten, dairy, or sugar for clear skin.

Don’t believe me? Then you might need to see the transformations in my highlights.

I’m not talking about clearing up the skin for a week or two, I’m talking about YEARS of clear skin.

That’s what we achieve here. Over and over again.

Sometimes we think we only have two options…

But if you look a bit harder, you can find another one.

Consider these red flags:

🚩”heal your skin from within”
🚩”acne-healing foods”
🚩”eliminate gluten, dairy, sugar, etc. if you want clear skin”
🚩”acne is diabetes of the skin”
🚩”your skin is a detox organ”
🚩”your liver is sluggish that’s why you’re breaking out”
🚩”try this 30 day cleanse”
🚩”you need this gut-healing protocol”
🚩”follow the medical medium”

My audience has already tried all of the above and we know that
a. it doesn’t work
b. it’s nonsense
c. it’s not fun

Hope you know that you can enjoy clear skin AND have an amazing relationship with food. ❤️

Hate skincare misinformation? Follow for evidence-based skincare tips 🤓

Love & Logic,
Olena

PS. Eat healthfully, just don’t expect it to translate into clear skin. This expectation is just a sure fire way to become afraid of food, lose your period, and become a conspiracy theorist. 🙈

PS. New here? Join 28 Days of Clear Skin to start improving your skin today! 🔗👆

Labels are very one-sided.

And they hurt your skin.

They make it seem like your skin *just is the way it is*, and that YOU can’t do anything about it.

“Oh it’s just sensitive. Stubborn. Acne-prone.”

Ok, but WHY is it that way?

Labels conveniently ignore the context in which your skin lives.

Your skin lives with YOU…

It deals with your labels, your expectations, your buying behavior, your experiments, your habits…
These compound over time.

It may end up sensitized, compromised, inflamed, and hurting.
But it doesn’t start out that way!

True sensitive skin is rare.

I’ve worked with thousands of clients on their skin transformations, and most of them describe their skin as sensitive, yet I’ve only found one client with actual sensitive skin. 

Last month, I worked on a case where a skincare mistake landed my client in the emergency room. Later, she developed a bacterial infection and, over time, an allergy to some skin-supportive ingredients.😫

Most people forget that skin is an organ—an immune organ.

And most people think they know how to describe it, talk about it, take care of it…

But miss the biggest BLIND SPOT.

You! 🫵

Your involvement in your skin condition is your blind spot. 

If it looks like a before pic, there’s A LOT more to learn about skin health, skincare, and how the two combine.📝

No, it’s not a deeper issue.

👋The real issue is that we all pretend to understand an organ that we didn’t study.

🤑And this ignorance gets taken advantage of by marketers, happy to sell us a bunch of useless OR downright damaging skin sh*t…

💩or worse: the idea that you’re powerless over your skin health. 

🫠your product choices may *seem* supportive according to their marketing, but if your skin looks like a before pic, you have to recognize that you’re putting your skin in a context it doesn’t like.

The good news: you can change the context.🥳

And what you’ll need for that is:

❤️know-how
❤️well-formulated products
❤️consistency
❤️patience
❤️and dropping the acne identity (which

🛑 Stop pointing out that you got a pimple.

Even to YOURSELF.

Nobody noticed, and nobody cares.

The problem is that YOU noticed, and you CARED.

You’ve trained yourself to notice and to care.
You’ve trained yourself to lean over the sink in the bathroom and scan for flaws, for even the slightest sign of change.

This is because you’re scrolling airbrushed influencers without pores or texture, so you think that when your normal human skin does something normal like…

Get a pimple?

Then you have acne, the full-blown skin condition.

❌WRONG❌

One pimple is one data point.

You can’t draw conclusions from it.
You can only lie to yourself.

What if it’s not acne, what if it’s an ingrown hair?
Would you know the difference?

So don’t jump to the worst conclusion (learn about cognitive distortions: jumping to conclusions, labeling, catastrophizing, magnification, black and white thinking).

Let’s normalize not caring about an occasional pimple or bump on our skin.🙏

And let’s STOP blaming ONE pimple on food, hormones, or genes.

Because it’s irrational.

Take 2 steps back from the mirror and REASON with yourself.

💕healthy skin breaks out once in a while
💕skin is a living organ that changes and responds to changing circumstances, with millions of things happening on and in it all at once
💕it will change, it will adapt, it will look meh on some days, and it will bounce back
💕a pimple will heal (if you don’t interfere!), it always heals!
💕we don’t expect any other organ to freeze and not move and stay the same forever, so it’s unfair to expect it from skin (and if we’re honest, mainly the FACIAL skin)
💕do your best to be consistent with supportive skincare habits and products that respect your individual skin’s needs
💕live your life

Sometimes an insecurity is totally irrational. Reasoning with yourself helps you see that.

You wouldn’t point out a bump on your arm, because you probably wouldn’t even notice it.

That’s the level of confidence we need to maintain when faced with a pimple. ✨

Love & Logic,
O

PS. Need help with acne? Visit my webiste to learn how

Your clear skin comes from doing your skincare routine 2x a day.

If you’ve tried everything for clear skin, maybe struggled with your skin for a few years now, well, doing your skincare routine twice a day may seem TOO EASY.

🥺You’re used to buying and trying A LOT of stuff.
😳You’re used to changing up your skincare routine.
💩You think there’s something wrong with you inside.
🫣You’re used to 27 chefs in the kitchen…
🫠Frankenstein-ing together skincare tips
🤔Thinking about your skin every chance you get…

Simplicity may seem new and uncomfortable.

Like, how can it be, that skincare alone will help me get my skin to look its very best?

But it’s not skincare alone.

You’re supporting and protecting your skin with your routine 2x a day, but it’s YOUR SKIN that’s doing the heavy-lifting.

It’s literally rebuilding, calming down, clearing up. 
It’s a lot of work.

And this work takes time.

You didn’t create the skin problem over night, so you have to allow your skin the time to heal.

I ask all my clients to be consistent for at least 12-24 months (though ideally, 5-10 years).

And what do I hear like clockwork?

🗓️Around the 3 month mark, as the skin is healing beautifully, most clients ask me, “What else can we do? What else can I add? What else can I try?”

These are marketing questions.

When what you’re doing is ACTUALLY working, the right thing to do is to keep going, NOT change WHAT IS WORKING.

Your skin health is complex, and you want the best for yourself…

But you have to remember: the goal is years of clear skin.

The goal is not to be a OBSESSED with buying new sh*t all the time.

And if you’re honest with yourself, you know that skin obsession brought you to your current results. 

right?😇

Love & Logic,
O

PS. To learn the ins and outs of skincare so you stop falling for marketing, apply for the Skin Queen program!👌

PPS. New here? Join 28 Days of Clear Skin to start your transformation—results are in my highlights! 👀👆📸

I got myself into quite the pickle…👀

I scour book reviews and keep adding to my read next list, and then I buy the books on my list…

Over the last year or so, I’ve been buying more books than I’ve been reading…

Buying books AND reading them is one of my fave past times (along with knitting).

But if I’m reading, I’m not knitting, and if I’m knitting I’m not reading. So one takes a backseat…

Last night I finished Pulitzer Prize winning novel Trust by Hernan Diaz.

It was a challenging read until about the 2/4 in where I didn’t understand wtf was going on.

I almost gave up but the Pulitzer Prize kept me going and the second half of the book made sense of the beginning and introduced some new complex characters and made me love the whole thing.

The best/worst part of finishing a book (or a knitting project) is the space between the last book and the next book.

So here is my incomplete stack of unread books.
(There are a few more on my bookshelf and next to my bed).

Please drop your recs/reviews/opinions below to help me decide which one I should read next. 👇👇👇

I’d also love to hear what you’re currently reading!

Love & Logic,
O

PS. This is a skin transformation account — you can see hundreds of transformations in my highlights and join in with 28 Days of Clear Skin to start transforming your skin ✨👆🔗