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Once upon a time, no one got skin cancer – some people also believed that the Earth was flat.

You may think leading off with such a sarcastic remark is inappropriate, but when you need to share something ominous that doesn’t look ominous, painful that doesn’t look painful, and as life threatening as skin cancer is, you open with a shocker.

Patience Is a Virtue, So Skin Cancer Must Be Virtuous (Um, Nope)

When thinking about cancer, most people rarely give it a thought until it touches them or someone they love directly. Before that awareness occurs, skin cancer is invisible, theoretical, and a scare tactic advertisers use to prevent young people from tanning outdoors or in without sunscreen. In 2017, my own bout with basal cell carcinoma (BCC) – the friendliest, or at least most curable form of skin cancer – revealed that not only is sunscreen worth applying but that cancer is patient. Spoiler: What you do today might not be of much consequence now, but it may find you down the road and kick your ass.

Basal cell carcinoma post-surgery 2017 – pretty, huh?

Getting Up Close, Personal, and Too Comfortable

After my BCC surgery, I became a pro at performing my own skin checks and faithfully dropping trow in front of my gorgeous physician’s assistant at my yearly follow-up appointments. After multiple biopsies on most of my toes and other public and private parts (T and A, baby) as well as the associated suture removal procedures (and the 14 days in between where my brain went completely batty), I remained cancer-free … for slightly more than two years.

During a full-body skin check, your dermatologist literally maps every marking on your body from head to toe.

In August 2019, the “snakebite” mole twins we’d “watched” in 2017 and scanned with the MelaFind in 2018 looked distressingly more ominous to Claudia when viewed through her DermLite dermatoscope. “I don’t like this one,” she said, “it’s coming off.”

Pre-biopsy photo – mole is smaller than the tip of a cotton swab, uniformly dark, and flat

Since my PA did a punch biopsy on one mole but left the other behind, I didn’t worry until her office called to schedule an immediate appointment WITHOUT giving me my results over the phone. Spoiler: They will never tell you that you have cancer over the phone.

As I sat waiting in that cold, familiar room the next afternoon with a tri-fold brochure from the information rack in my hand, the words MALIGNANT MELANOMA facing outward, Claudia entered, nodded, and all hell broke loose.

Patient Referral to General Oncology Surgery ***STAT***

After a biopsy, a pathology lab reports the findings back to your doctor. My 5mm punch biopsy report included the words, “Malignant melanoma with extension to the papillary dermis, Clark’s Level II,” “atypical,” and “abundant,” but seeing this sentence was where real became really scary: “cells within the nests have lost cohesion.”

I learned from Claudia and more than a little research that Clark’s staging measures the depth of the melanoma. In my case, the biopsy showed that the cancer had spread vertically beyond the upper layer of the skin (the epidermis) into the papillary dermis (top of the dermis). “Not too bad,” said my brain. “Stage two out of a possible five.”

But here’s something you should know – the Clark staging method, while still commonly utilized by pathology testing facilities is outdated. The American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system is the most current method of staging skin cancer. In people-speak, AJCC considers the “tumor, node, metastasis (TMN) scores and other prognostic factors” when assigning a stage.

City of Hope is the best!

Wide-Awake with K-Pop In the Background

Nine days after meeting with an oncological surgeon at City of Hope, I was scheduled for a wide local excision under local sedation. Most patients prefer general sedation because they’re asleep during the procedure, but I opted to remain awake because I’m stubborn and cheap and didn’t want to hire a private driver or burden a friend with chauffeuring me around since my husband can no longer drive due to MS. FYI: Go with the general! Anesthetizing more than a half inch below the skin’s surface requires a truckload of drug, and it hurt worse than anything I’ve experienced in my entire life.

Why is this bandage so big?

A 45-Minute Procedure Turned Into 90

Once the anesthesia kicked in, the team and I had a delightful conversation about BTS, BLACKPINK, and EXO. This is the only upside to being awake during surgery; they let you pick the music. As my surgeon worked, the scope of the surgery changed slightly, requiring deeper tissue removal, which is why I now have a small depression in the center of my scar. My leg was crazy numb (thankfully), and I had a prescription for hydrocodone (Norco), which I took until the bottle was empty. This f*cker hurt for a solid week!

Even Sandy looks frightened by the aftermath!

Some Dos and Don’ts That You Should Consider

Once you’ve been diagnosed with melanoma, you need frequent follow-up checks. I now see Claudia every 90 days and must do so through October 2022. For the three years after that (October 2025), I’ll still need to have a skin check every six months.

Since the day of the surgery, I’ve had 13 additional biopsies, an extra excision after one biopsy came back pre-melanoma, and all cells were deemed atypical but with clear margins around them. Hearing those two words – “clear margins” – feels (I imagine) like being blessed by the pope.

With every breath I take, I want you to avoid this process. You can do that by:

• Wearing sunscreen every day, even indoors since UVA light penetrates glass
• Avoid tanning beds at all costs
• Start looking really closely at your skin – all of it – and have someone you love check out the hard-to-reach places. (TMI: I never knew I had a mole/freckle near my butt crack, but my husband did. It’s gone now, and he misses it.)
• Stock your skincare emergency kit with healing ingredients to use on your scar after your doctor gives you the green light to do so. I passionately believe that using COSRX Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence, PURITO Centella Green Level Buffet Serum, vitamin C serum, and Eco Your Skin’s Meso Ampoule have left my slightly disfigured calf in far better condition than any OTC or prescription anti-scar product ever would.

The truth today – 14 months post-surgery

Surgical scar plus biopsy scar near the top center and another one lower left

Thanks for wading through the entire story. If you have questions, please leave a comment or follow me on either of my Beautytap profiles. Visit the American Cancer Society’s page to see images of different types of skin cancer, and make a skin check appointment no matter what condition your skin is in. Sometimes, the most benign-looking spot can be deadly.

Okay, ladies. Let’s talk hair color. In our early adult years, we toyed with hot pink streaks here, some highlights there, but most of us stuck with tradition and followed our peers’ direction. In hindsight, we were following in our mothers’ footsteps. “Coloring” your hair meant dyeing, and anything that looked unnatural was off the table. These days, though, color has exploded into a form of self-expression with attitude. Whether soft and subtle or bold and brilliant, there’s no denying that colored hair means thinking (and dyeing) way out of the box.

Be it unicorn hair or an ultra-shiny metallic silver, the world of color has changed…and so has our desire to embrace it! If you’re wondering, “Can I really pull this off?” The answer is a resounding, “Hell yes!” And here’s how.

Do you want your hair to whisper, talk, or shout? FYI, your answer goes here.

Subtle: Streaks and Tips

If you’ve been “whispering” all these years, then going slow is the way to go. You may want to ask for babylights. These ultra-thin highlights add dimension in a subtle way and give your hair a kiss of freshness. Opting for multicolored tips (ends) also gives you a chance to experiment without making a drastic change. If your base shade runs on the darker side, playing with deep blue or purple can create drama and help you transition into a bolder overall shade down the road.

Branching Out: Hidden Color

Hair that “talks” used to mean chunky highlights or obviously colored locks. Today’s tresses talk upon command. In other words (pun intended), you can have bold color and even rainbow hair…underneath! Call it undercolor, hidden color, or underlights, the outcome is the same: the upper layer remains business as usual, while the underneath has a secret party of its own. With this option, the only thing holding you back is your imagination.

Bold AF: Allover Nontraditional Hues

If your hair has “whispered” your whole life and is ready to “shout,” the world of color beckons. Rose gold hues are noncommittal and fade gracefully, while vibrant red/orange and deep blue/green says you’re not afraid to stand out. And if you’re having trouble deciding, follow Guy Tang on Instagram. He’s the color genius behind glow-in-the-dark rainbow hair and the shiny metallic grey and rose that have the Internet buzzing.

P.S. Wanna see how far we’ve come? Check out this vintage commercial from Clairol! Advertisers certainly weren’t shy about telling us why we should dye!

For many of us, beauty, especially makeup, is more than just a passing interest. Mine is deeply rooted in both memory and tradition. From a corner bench, I watched my mother’s daily ritual of primping, captivated by shiny lipstick tubes and fluffy brushes. For me, beauty is a key part of what it means to be female, and never once have I considered it a chore, an obligation, or a means to pretend I am something I am not. It was, and still is, a pleasure I give myself without reservation or apology.

As the years have passed, and my budget has grown, I’ve ventured into the land of high end cosmetics, if only to see if there really is a difference. But that quest comes with a price tag. A steep one at that, so I look for bargains just like everyone else. But growing up in Southern California has made me hyper-aware of one distasteful aspect of the beauty industry: counterfeiting. And with a thriving outdoor market culture, finding bogus beauty doesn’t take a lot of effort or investigative skill…and, hence, the allure of “buying in” instead of “buying smart.”

A Thriving Business – Counterfeit makeup is big business. Consider The Estée Lauder Companies, which own Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Estée Lauder, La Mer, M.A.C., and Tom Ford Beauty among others. In 2016, “governments made more than 1,500 seizures of fake Estée Lauder products, totaling more than 2.8 million items, most of them M.A.C. makeup.” And the financial loss isn’t the only factor. With easy access to review sites, consumers can post reviews, both glowing and scathing, and those negative reviews (often the result of getting duped) substantially damage a brand’s reputation. But what about the consumer with the bogus product? How bad can knock-offs really be?

Serious Big-Time Bad Ingredients – Look on eBay, and you’ll find popular brand name makeup (M.A.C., Kylie Cosmetics, Too Faced, Anastasia Beverly Hills, etc.) for pennies on the dollar. We’d all like to think that these sellers have an in with someone in the industry and are selflessly working to clear inventory while giving us all a great deal. Well…the old adage is true: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” And since we’re talking about our faces (which inevitably absorb anything we put on them), ingredients matter. According to an FBI report, “Phony cosmetics often contain things such as arsenic, beryllium, and cadmium (all known carcinogens) along with high levels of aluminum and dangerous levels of bacteria. Some of these products have caused conditions like acne, psoriasis, rashes, and eye infections.” No one should sacrifice their personal well-being for a bargain blush.

Shopping Safe Means Shopping Smart – The simplest way to avoid a counterfeit item is to buy directly from the brand itself. We all love Sephora, which is a reputable authorized retailer and a safe source, but brands often offer better sales directly to their loyal customers, so sign up for their emails and newsletters to stay in the bargain loop. Beyond that, follow these tips from the FBI:

• Check that price tag. Unscrupulous sellers will often mark prices slightly lower to give the appearance of authenticity. And if the price is WILDLY less, close your wallet.
• Scrutinize the packaging. If the lettering looks off or the package color deviates from the norm, walk away.
• Be wary of limited edition labeling…especially if your favorite brand doesn’t typically have limited offerings (or collaborations).

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Being brand loyal means being informed. Occasionally, we all buy something that doesn’t work out, which is one final reason to shop in reputable locations that also have a solid return policy. You only have one face. Don’t risk injuring it for the sake of a bargain.

[Article first appeared in The Beo Club app. Reprinted with permission.]