Why nursing school, twenty years in

Twenty years ago I started in aesthetics because I loved skin. I loved learning it, watching it change, helping someone look in the mirror and smile. That part never got old. It still hasn't.

But over the years, loving skin quietly stopped being enough. I wanted the whole picture, not just what a treatment does, but why it does it. I wanted to understand the body underneath the treatment, not only the surface it shows up on, because the connection between the two is more significant than most people give credit for.

That's the short version of why I went back to school. Here's the longer, truer one. The whole picture.

For a long time, I regretted the order I did this in. I wished I'd gone to nursing school first and built an aesthetics career on top of it, the way so many people in this industry do. For years, I thought I'd done it backwards.

I don't feel that way anymore.

I've been in this industry since the very beginning. I've operated lasers that don't even exist anymore. I've watched modalities come, go, and come back around under a new name. I know skin. Not just what it looks like, but what it does, what it needs, what it loves, what it hates, how it renews, how it repairs, how it bounces back and how it doesn't. That kind of read on skin doesn't come from a textbook. It comes from doing this, on real faces, for over twenty years. That's not a small piece of the whole picture. It might be the piece that matters most.

What nursing school gave me was everything underneath that. I already understood tissue interaction from the outside in. Now I understand it from the inside out: the fat pads that actually give a face its shape, the muscles behind every expression line, the structure holding the skin up in the first place. I can go from the muscle all the way up to the epidermis now and treat every layer along the way, instead of just the one on top.

That's the whole picture I've always craved. Not clinical knowledge instead of experience, and not experience instead of clinical knowledge both, together, the way it should be. Nursing school wasn't the foundation. It was the icing. 

What's next

I'm not leaving aesthetics. I'm bringing nursing into it. More clinical depth in how I evaluate skin, more education I can hand to clients instead of just a service, and a level of care that goes further under the surface than it ever could before.

I'm grateful. To my husband, who picked up more than his share without keeping score. To my kids, for being patient with a tired mom and proud of her anyway. To my clients, who stuck with me through a season where I was stretched thin and never once made me feel bad for it. And to myself, for not talking myself out of something hard just because I was already twenty years into a career I loved.

Following this dream asked a lot of me and my village. It gave me back a version of my work I'm even more proud of. And now I'm genuinely excited to see where I get to take treat. from here.

More soon.

-Christina