The Downward Beauty Value Spiral-the energy behind anti-aging.

I may look like I have it all from the outside, but I have struggled with self-esteem and a feeling of low value my whole life.

I couldn't enjoy the beauty of my twenties and thirties because I couldn't see and feel it for myself unless it was reflected back to me, by other people on the outside.

By the time I hit my forties, I was holding on to my youth for dear life and was deeply fearful of the decay and degeneration each year would bring me.

After all, I was told and sold the lie that women depreciate with age.

I was on a Downward Beauty Value Spiral–a term I coined to describe how most women have a sense that they are decaying and losing value with every passing year.

I was not only experiencing this personally, but also faced it every day in my work as an acclaimed beauty expert.

I began to recognize that I was helping my clients judge and control the aging process through my "anti-aging" treatment and products. 

Then, I started feeling enormous pain and confusion about the career I had chosen that was supposed to be about "beauty."

My clients and I would laugh about "fighting the good fight," but the fear and resistance we felt about our aging skin became the elephant in the facial room.

The Downward Beauty Value Spiral didn’t just have physical consequences; it became a ripple effect in every area of my life.

I was:

• buying products and clothing, I didn’t need
• engaged in low-value activities and relationships
• always short on time, especially where it concerned self-care
• looking for quick-fix beauty treatments that would freeze and capture me back to a past state
• not nourishing myself with the foods and ideas my body and being craved
• spending money and time unconsciously

Most of all, I was running on empty and desperately trying to fill that void. 

The devastating effects of the Downward Beauty Value Spiral can show up as an empty well across all facets of our lives and can be incredibly painful if we don’t recognize it and reverse it in its tracks.

I was deep in the descent when I discovered the one thing that would change it all for me.

The thing that would reverse the spiral, fill me up and allow me to experience overflow in all areas of my life.

Are you ready?

Drumroll, please! 🥁

The discovery that changed everything for me is– it’s the VERY act of resisting and fearing age, that places us on the downward beauty value spiral, allowing all our enoughness to run out, and disabling us from appreciating in value each and every year.

There isn’t a morning routine, supplement, exercise regimen, cold plunge, fasting program, serum, moisturizer, or mask that can fill you up with radiance and well-th, if you are doing these things to resist and arrest the changes that come with age.

On the other hand, as the noted psychologist, Carl Rogers said, "THE CURIOUS PARADOX IS THAT WHEN I ACCEPT MYSELF JUST AS I AM, THEN I CHANGE."

So then, this is our work (ahem, play); to love ourselves exactly as we are in this very present moment, and to start practicing a different way to do beauty.

Minus the fear, projection, rejection, separation, limitation, conclusion, or computation, about what is or isn't possible with regenerating vitality.

When we practice this, we become filled to the brim with our own enoughness and light that we can experience the joy and beauty that comes with each stage of our lives.

From this place of overflowing enoughness, skincare products, regimens, routines, and rituals can have a remarkable effect and impact on our psychology and physiology. 

The act of touching yourself, while looking in the mirror, and feeding the living fabric of your being becomes an act of reverence and love, not judgment and control.

This kind of Beauty can calm inflammation, lengthen your telomeres, improve your self-image and restore your radiance and glow, all without freezing, injecting, cutting, or controlling.

It is the road less traveled, in the world of beauty, but when you reverse the spiral with The Bright Rites, you widen the path for every woman that has gone before you, and every girl that’s coming behind.

Love, Amy

P.S. The image above is my 10 year, before and after reversing my beauty spiral.