The Interview

The interview I never expected to have

I sold my Clinics believing the career highlights were behind me. It turns out one of them was still in front of me.

I thought that part was over

When I sold my Clinics, I made a quiet peace with something. That the best parts of my working life had already happened. Twenty years of building something, training people, standing in a treatment room doing work I loved, and then it was finished, and what was left was the memories.

Then, through my network, I was invited to sit down and interview Chad Macias.

He does molecules. I do skin.

I did not go in as a customer

I went in as a Cosmetic Dermal Therapist and a wellness educator, with a list of questions, and I came prepared. I have sat across from enough people selling me things to know the difference between being told something and being answered.

Our industry already has a full toolkit. Retinoids, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, collagen stimulation, peptides, antioxidants. So my first question was the obvious one, and the one I would have asked any rep who walked into my Clinic.

• Where does this sit amongst all of that, and is it doing anything the rest are not?
• How does it get where it needs to go? Penetration is the conversation my industry never stops having.
• How does it behave around clinical treatments and surgery, where we deliberately create a controlled wound-healing response and need that signalling to happen?
• What about timing? Timing is what a protocol is built on.
• Who should not use it?
• And what evidence exists today, and what still needs doing? Doctors and surgeons are my toughest audience, and they are not moved by an ingredient story.

What it actually turned into

Two nerds getting completely carried away.

Somewhere in the middle of molecules and skin we found common ground, and I am not sure either of us wanted to stop. It was tremendous fun, and I think that comes across.

The part I keep coming back to

I am humbled to have had that hour. My morning, his evening, and half a world in between.

Not because of who he is, though his credentials are what made my questions worth asking. Because of where it sat. I had put the highlights behind me and filed them under what used to be. And then something like that arrived in front of me instead.

I have written elsewhere on this site that everything we go through, we can let stay trauma or turn into training. This was the other side of that. The season I did not choose is the reason I was in the room at all. I would never have gone looking for a recovery product if my body had not sent me looking.

What I did not expect was what I would notice in my own face. I wrote up my first three months, photographs and all, on my Carnosine page. The conversation is below.

It is the first of several conversations like this. This story is only beginning.

The interview

A note on the introduction. My background is described here as a health and wellness company. What I owned and ran were my own cosmetic clinics.

In full disclosure: I am a LactiGo affiliate, and if you buy through my shop link I am paid a commission on it, at no extra cost to you. Nothing on this page depends on it.