 This is how my melasma actually started, and then I messed up my face by getting lasers and different sort of aggressive treatments, and then it became bigger. Treatment that you used to try to fix it made it worse. 100%. That is my worst nightmare. Well, what I like to say happens is like imagine an iceberg. What you're seeing, like this little smattering of pigmentation is like the tip of the iceberg, but beneath the skin, beneath the epidermis, there's way bigger patches. What's the short answer? Is it something that can be fixed and go away? So, no. This video is sponsored by Squarespace, an amazing one-stop shop for entrepreneurs and creatives to get out what's in their brain out into the world in a beautiful, customizable, optimized, diverse way. So whether you need a website, you have a mailing list, you have an online store, you have a members-only community, Squarespace is an amazing tool that we have been using for the past five years of our business. We actually have to buy a domain through them for shared entertainment, so we change our emails, remind me. And if you are in the same boat and you're buying a domain or a website right now, you can get 10% off your purchase with Squarespace when you go to squarespace.com.shanbudi. You can also get two weeks free, no credit cards required to play around, see if you like it. And if you like what you've made, go to squarespace.com.shanbudi, get the 10% off. Yeah, go get it. A reading from my Instagram. Instagram user says, damn, I need a mustache like hers. Shambudram posts back. Babe, it's called Melasma. Get pregnant twice, devote your body's best resources to growing the babies for a combined 20 months. And this mustache, as well as a few other marks in brown patches can be yours too. Now here's the caption. Aging is funny. Once you get used to looking like you, you get new badges, bumps, and in my cases, brown spots along the way. Now I've been trying to find the balance between being protective of my feelings, proactive about what really bugs me, all the while challenging myself to not take any of this shit too seriously. So I made that post and then a few things happened. One, I got lots of positive and supportive comments and some people who dragged the user. Two, I got other comments which were conflicting. Ones from people and experts who said, I can help you fix that. And the word fix is challenging because sometimes when we have insecurities, we kind of secretly hope that we're the only ones who see them. That other people will say, girl, what are you talking about? There's nothing there. But the truth is other people have eyes and you can see, yes, I do have some brown shading above my lip and between my forehead and that's just that. The other challenge with people coming forward to help you is now you have to make a decision. Am I going to focus on this and make it something that I put effort towards because that can feel like a slippery slope. If I obsess with fixing this, what else am I gonna wanna try to change or alter on my body rather than just accepting the fact that, yeah, I had two babies and some marks come with that? And the other side of it is acknowledging that if you do try to fix it and it doesn't work, well, now what? It's almost a little cooler sometimes to have a flaw and to flaunt that flaw knowing in the back of your mind that if you wanted to do something about it, you could. But if you try and you know that you can't, well, a different type of acceptance has to come with that. So I had to confront all of those feelings but then the melasma queen slid in my DMs and I knew that I wanted to have a conversation with her and that's what I'm here to do today. Talk about the face and how pregnancy in particular changes our skin in some remarkable and some remarkable ways and then I'll see where I go from there. Maybe I do want to get a treatment or maybe I don't because I'm still breastfeeding or just not ready yet. But I guess this is where we begin our journey. So let's go inside. So I got a facial from the Fixbar, a beautiful space in downtown Toronto that offers personalized skincare with a healing touch. Now I wasn't ready to do anything aggressive to my melasma but I did get a therapeutic cleansing facial with an emphasis on lymphatic drainage. I also left with a day cream, night cream and an exfoliator that removes dead skin without harsh scrubbing, which I learned is very important for women. You can click the info box to learn more and lastly I left with a lot more knowledge about the impacts of pregnancy on skin thanks to my conversation with MC. Hi, my name is Maria Cristina and I am a skin therapist at the Fix Facial Bar here in Toronto. I love treating skin, it's my passion. Can I ask a million dollar question? How do you become the melasma queen? A few years ago I started to notice more and more hyperpigmentation and the telltale sign being it was even on both sides of my face, irregular borders which is telltale signs of melasma and so through my own crazy amount of research to try and find a solution for my own skin, that's how I guess I got the moniker. Why does pregnancy destroy your skin? Now stretch marks I think are obvious, it's because your skin is stretching but then the variation in which stretch marks show up on the skin and the other weird things that happen, what is up with that? So there's so many different things that happen to the skin during pregnancy. There's so many factors at play, number one being hormonal fluctuations. Obviously we are growing a human inside of us and so our hormones are wild and so those hormonal fluctuations can cause a multitude of different things. They can cause anything from like acne, they can cause rosacea and sometimes people think they have acne when it's actually rosacea. It's really inflammatory, so redness, looks like little rash almost, so some women get that. Some women get dermatitis which is like a rash around their mouth. Some people actually, their skin clears up. Women who are on birth control sometimes get that upper lip kind of shadowing just from having been on birth control. So we obviously know hormones play a part, exactly how they play a part is not 100% clear and the other thing is you have an increase of obviously volume because you're gaining weight. So for sure the pressure on the skin, the retention of water causes a lot of bloating and puffiness. Do you think that a lot of the skin issues that result from pregnancy will resolve themself with time? Yes, I do, not melasma though. Not melasma all the time. I have seen women who got pregnancy related melasma and it did resolve and then I've seen women who have it long lasting. The thing is with melasma it's also so finicky. It may become apparent during pregnancy but it could have already been emerging prior to and now it's just kind of rearing its ugly head. What's the short answer? Is it something that can be fixed and go away? So no, it can't be completely eradicated. We can make it look better. We can manage it but we can't get rid of it altogether. I want you to think of when you take allergy medication because you have allergy symptoms like seasonal allergies. When you take your allergy medication, you get relief. When you take or when you use the right cocktail of products it's gonna suppress it, it's gonna look more even, it's gonna look as intense. Is it gonna go away completely? Not likely but as soon as you stop using it it's also gonna come back in spades. Specifically and especially if you're not using a strong SPF and reapplying throughout the day. We gotta give a shout out to the sponsor of this video, Squarespace. Now we have been partnering with Squarespace for a couple of years using them for double that time. Now they have got some new features that I wanna tell you about, Jared. Tell me. The Fluid Engine. The Fluid Engine is a next generation website designed system from Squarespace. It has never been easier for anyone to unlock unbreakable creativity. Drag and drop customizable fluid design. I like that. Let's go. Flexible website templates, we know about that. Custom merch. So it's a place that people have gone to sell their stuff forever. Now you can get custom merch there. Good to know, good to know. Easily sell your custom merch and create a passive income stream that engages your audience and scales your brand. 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All they gotta do is go to squarespace.com slash Shambudi, get 10% off the purchase of the website or domain. Say one more time, babe. Go to squarespace.com slash Shambudi get 10% off of a website or a domain. Alright, so a little bit of congestion happening here in the forehead, couple little blackheads, no big deal. Your skin is beautiful, great firmness because you have obviously youth on your side so lots of great bounce back, meaning you have a lot of great hyaluronic acid happening still in your skin. I do see the markings that you're talking about here. This is how my melasma actually started and then I messed up my face by getting lasers and different sort of aggressive treatments and then it became bigger. So the treatment that you used to try to fix it made it worse? 100%. That is my worst nightmare. Well, what I like to say happens is like imagine an iceberg. What you're seeing, like this little smattering of pigmentation is like the tip of the iceberg but beneath the skin, beneath the epidermis, there's way bigger patches. And sometimes when you have these laser treatments done which are heat and light, remember the two biggest triggers, you can actually unearth more of that iceberg that was sitting beneath the skin. For all the advances we had in skin care, we still have not figured out how to 100% turn off that overproduction of melanin. What's the number one thing that pregnant women come in for help with? Postpartum, postpartum women. Hyperpigmentation. They couldn't use their actives and retinol, particularly retinoids. They couldn't use them during pregnancy because they're not safe. They're like, oh my God, I feel like I've aged 10 years through this pregnancy and also like, let's be real. You are not sleeping properly. You are super dehydrated because you're constantly feeding and nursing. So the skin does take definitely a hit. I genuinely feel like I aged 10 years in the past three years. 100%. You had two babies in three years. Quick. Stretch marks. What can be done about that? So if you have stretch marks that are red, they say that using retinols can help fade the redness. But in terms of repairing the, sort of looks like a tear in the skin, there's really nothing. Laser resurfacing, micro-needling has been showing a little bit of promise. But I've yet to see full eradication. Is that a hard part of your job that a lot of people come in thinking that this will be the final destination of their insecurities, but instead it's just a place to get to know themselves and be more at peace with themselves? I do end up having lots of conversations about that piece of like, this is what skin actually looks like. Trust me, I look at it under the lamp all the time. Your skin is beautiful and normal and healthy. And yes, we will absolutely get you on a regimen that's gonna make your skin look better and you're gonna feel good because your skin's gonna be healthy and luminous. But you also have to, I really do manage it for them. Like it's not gonna look like what you see on Instagram. Those are filters. And I think that's part of what's really distilled to us in the media, what makes us feel acceptable and not acceptable or beautiful and not beautiful. But I feel like slowly the conversation is changing and images are changing, which is promising. I hope for our girls, they don't feel the same pressures. I think one of my greatest daily struggles is to Paris filter or not to Paris filter. Girl, you are literally speaking to me. Recently posted a video where there's like no Paris filter and like, yeah, it's, shit got real. Like you could see my pores. You could see my melasma. And I'm like, ugh, but I'm not gonna shy away from it because I also, I have a daughter who's 12. Your mom's right here. You wanna come lay down? Yeah. Come on, give me a massage. Come lay down. Are you happy now? Are you happy now you're with your mama? Yeah. I'm gonna take my shoes off. Okay, let's take your shoes off. I'm gonna tell you something. Turning 40 was a real, it was like a hard thing to kind of adapt to because when beauty is your currency, which it was for me, like my whole life. I was a bartender, bottle service girl. I was in pageants. Like beauty was like my sort of like foot in the door whenever I do anything. And when you turn 40, generally it changes because our culture is obsessed with like. What'd you get? I'm sorry. Oh yes, thank you. Oh, I'd love a strawberry. You love a strawberry. You're so cute. You know what I mean? I want a strawberry. You want me to have one too? Oh, I'm gonna definitely have one. Thank you so much. I want you to finish your story. Anyhow, you turn 40. I turn 40 and I started like, listen, I feel like I felt confident in how I look, but it was starting being like, oh, when we go to clubs or we go out, the guys are looking not at me anymore. They're looking at, or like when I walked down the street, I'm not turning heads or walking into a restaurant. And that was like, it was hard to get used to. And it was almost like, I had to mourn that part of my identity. Yes. I missed it. And I was like, it was like a, yeah, it was a mourning. It was like a grieving of that. And the understanding that it's transient and how sometimes when you're in it, you don't realize that it's gonna actually fade. Yes. I completely feel what you're saying. Okay, you go, my dear. How do you feel? Oh wow, I feel juicy. That's a good terminal. I hope I look juicy, but I feel juicy. You do look juicy, you look great. Right, right? Do I look beautiful? I want it too much. If you ain't got nothing nice to say. You look good. Yeah, how far? High five with Miss Maria. All right, we have left the fix and we are not fixed. But that's actually pretty good news. So no, I don't have this dramatic before and after where my melasma is gone. And I actually got news from MC that it may never be gone. And furthermore, it might even get worse. But actually that's pretty good news. Everyone else I spoke to before this, made all these promises that it would go away forever. And I've seen a lot of people with melasma and it makes you wonder, well, that's the case. Why do so many people struggle with it? And I think the truth of the matter is, is just like allergies, like MC said, this might be something that you can treat but it might be with you. So I'm learning to fix my perspective and we just tease the conversation around aging and the grieving that comes with that. And I think that this in many ways is kind of a part of that. So lots to process. Let me know in the comment section below how has your skin changed over the years? What are you managing when it comes to your skin? And are you working right now in fixing your face or your perspective? Say bye. Say thank you, MC. Thank you, MC. That was good. You're perfect. Thank you. You're really perfect. Can you, can you, pick us up? Baby, can you go pick us up?