Today I’m opening up and sharing my struggle with cystic acne, what I’ve learned, what I’ve done, and how I’ve healed. If you struggle with feeling beautiful I hope this episode helps you feel seen. Let’s dive in.

In this episode Allie discusses: 

• Her struggle with cystic acne 

• How she covered it 

• How she healed

Mentioned in this Episode:

Instagram

Courses (Use the code PURPOSESHOW for 10% off!)

The Purpose Show Facebook Community

I am freaking out!! Declutter Like A Mother (my BOOK!) is officially available for pre-order!

Mom life. We’re surrounded by the message that it’s the tired life. The no-time-for-myself life. The hard life. We’re supposed to get through it. Survive. Cling on by the last little thread. And at the same time, Carpe Diem—enjoy every moment because it’s going to go by so fast. The typical mom culture that sends us all kinds of mixed, typically negative messages. We shouldn’t take care of ourselves; it’s selfish. The more ragged you run yourself, the bigger your badge of honor. But also, ditch your mom bod and work out. Don’t yell. Make more money. Show up. Be better, but not at the expense of time with your kids. I am putting a hard stop to all of this. While being a mom, running a business, and whatever else you might have going on is hard, it is a lot and there’s lots of giving of yourself, the idea that motherhood means living a joyless, nonstop-hustle-with-zero-balance kind of life, where you give and give and give and never take, needs to stop. 

I’m on a mission to help you stop counting down the minutes till bedtime (at least most days). Stop the mom guilt and shame game. Stop cleaning up after your kids’ childhood and start being present for it. I want to help you thrive in work, home and life. I believe in John 10:10 that we are called to living an abundant life and I know moms are not excluded from that promise. Join me in conversations about simplicity, some business and life hacks, spirituality and lots of other good stuff that leads to a life of less for the sake of enjoying more in your motherhood. I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hi, my friend! Welcome to The Purpose Show podcast! Let’s take a deep breath before this episode. My hope for this episode is that anybody that has experienced something that is typically not shown as beautiful in our society would feel seen, would feel safe and understood. 

I know that as a society we are really doing a lot of the deep inner work lately in the last year or year and a half. And it’s so good. It’s so good. 

It’s hard, it’s weird, and there are extremes to that. There are people that take the good inner work and turn it into extreme and hateful. There’s a lot of bad that comes with the good sometimes. 

But I do think it’s good that the way we’ve been communicating messages to young people and to all people as a society, especially in certain industries like the beauty industry, is getting shook up right now. And it’s so good to see that because I do think it needs a lot of work. 

I really want to use this episode to open up and share. Vulnerability is not natural for me. It takes intention and it takes effort. I’m putting that out today.

I just really am hoping that you, in some way, whether you also have struggled with cystic acne or any form of skin condition or anything at all, or if it’s a weight thing for you or even a race thing, anything that you’ve felt like you’re not beautiful because ______ (insert whatever the thing is), my hope is that you would feel seen.

Maybe there are pieces of my story that feel dramatic to you and you don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Maybe there are pieces that just won’t align for you. And that’s okay. All I can do is speak from the experience that’s been mine, be vulnerable and share.

I can’t control how that’s received by each one of you. The intention that I set before I hit record was just to really open up, share, and help you feel safe, seen, loved, and good enough. More than enough. And to maybe inspire you to stop trying so hard to be anything other than yourself. 

So having said that, I want to start with my history with acne. For me, breaking out started pretty typically around the time as hormones started to really come alive and into my body. There was one year in junior high that I was homeschooled, but I was still connected to some of my friends  who were at my school. 

I remember going back and seeing them all and being so worried because I had all of a sudden started having these breakouts on my skin. My mom had let me start wearing makeup and I was trying to learn how to cover them up. I remember the anxiety of having these bumps and breakouts, and then also kind of feeling like it was okay because my friends also had these breakouts and I felt a little bit more normal. 

It continued that way into high school and on. In high school, I was like everyone else and just had breakouts. Then I got into later high school, like senior year, and most people’s breakouts had started to clear up, but there were still some of us that it hadn’t happened for. 

Then I noticed that these breakouts started to get worse than seemingly everybody else’s. I remember getting these massive painful breakouts. They were just massive. It was in my head that there was no way that this was a zit, but I couldn’t figure it out. 

I remember this one time going to school and feeling like I was in actual pain from one of these breakouts. This is cystic acne. I just didn’t really know it. 

I had a giant breakout on the right side of my face, on my temple. And it was so full, so giant, so painful to the touch. Even without touch it just hurt. It was literally throbbing on the side of my head all day. I remember going through my day and trying to keep it hidden with my hair. 

Then in class I noticed that as I tried to move my hair a little bit it pulled really hard and hurt really bad and I was like, “What the heck?” And I realized that this cyst had exploded and stuck in my hair. And I remember how disgusting I felt. 

I remember actually feeling full of self hate. I was so disgusted at my face and myself and just felt so embarrassed, like I’m for sure the only girl in the school that’s sitting there with dried pus keeping her hair stuck to a face explosion.

It felt so awful, just the shame that I felt in that moment, going into the bathroom and getting a paper towel with warm water and trying to clean myself off, get my hair off of my face and off of this gunk. It was so gross and so humiliating. 

I remember at that moment realizing that my skin is not normal. There’s something wrong. And the conclusion there was, “I am disgusting.” 

Then I graduated from high school, moved on with my life, got jobs, did all these things, and became an adult. And I still had this acne and it wasn’t going away. 

I had gone through all of it. My mom, she did such a good job trying to help me. We did all the things—Proactive and all the different face washes and systems that were coming out around that time. 

But nothing was working. Cystic acne is an internal issue. No matter what anybody says it is coming from within, so these topical systems just weren’t doing anything. 

I had also been diagnosed with a hormone disorder—polycystic ovary syndrome—when I was 17. And then it was like, “Well, if you balance your hormones, this will stop.” 

I don’t think that I took birth control until I was engaged, but I know that birth control was mentioned as a way to balance hormones, which from the research that I have done and what I have seen in my experience with the birth control pill was not the case for me at all. 

But I do remember my mom really not wanting to put my body through that hormonal journey, so I didn’t do that. But I did everything else, all the different things. I changed my diet. There was a pill that I took for acne. There were so many things that I tried.

Then I went into adulthood, got married, and I remember working so hard to clear my skin for my wedding. I remember my mom really coming alongside me and trying to help me with this. One of the gifts she got me for my wedding was actually a series of very expensive and new, high-tech skin treatments before my wedding. 

It was a microdermabrasion, photo facials, peels and all this good stuff. I was so thankful and so excited. I had decided, “Oh my gosh, my skin is going to be clear for my wedding! This is awesome. This is the best gift ever. I’m so excited.”

I had gone through those things in the months leading up to my wedding. And then right before our wedding we actually had some severe traumatic experiences on Brian’s side of the family that occurred. Oh my gosh, you guys, first of all, I had no boundaries and I didn’t know anything that I know now, so the stress from all of that was so severe that it just took over my body. 

It affected me so much. I broke out so severely all around my mouth and along my jawline. Just these cystic breakouts for my wedding. 

I remember having my hair done the morning of my wedding. I had my hair done and my veil on and I was walking into the mall because I was going to get my makeup done for the wedding by the Mac counter. I had an appointment right when they opened. 

I was walking in and I was so happy. My hair was done. I had my veil on. I had a t-shirt and sweats on because it wasn’t time to put my dress on, obviously. 

I was walking into the mall to go to my makeup appointment and people were staring at me, because I obviously was a bride that day but I didn’t have any makeup on yet. And I remember not feeling happy. 

Yes, it’s my wedding day. I’m a bride. My hair looks amazing. Look at me. I’m glowing. I’ve got my veil. I look beautiful.

But feeling extreme shame and heaviness that people were looking at me because I didn’t have makeup on and I was so broken out from the stress and the hormones. And the cystic acne was all over my jawline and my chin. I felt so disgusting on the morning of my wedding. 

I remember the conversation with the makeup artist and how hard she tried to cover it. I remember looking in the mirror and saying, “Could you please do more? It’s not covered enough.” And her saying, “This is the best I can do.” 

I remember driving in my Honda Civic to the wedding location and looking in the rear view mirror right before I got out of the car to go to the location to get dressed and just feeling like, “My God look at all of this makeup caked on my friggin’ face. This is not who I am. I don’t even look like myself.” 

I hated it. I actually remember wiping off quite a bit of the makeup, not so much around the breakouts, but on the eyes. I just felt fake. I felt fake like I was wearing a mask, and I hated it. 

I remember bucking up, suppressing it, getting out of the car, going and doing my wedding, even though I didn’t feel good and I had so much shame. 

I guess what I’m trying to communicate with these pieces of my story is that I carried shame about my skin and it followed me through pretty much every major event in my life—birthday parties, camp as a kid, sleepovers with my girlfriends, senior photos, family photos, family get-togethers, my wedding. 

And it didn’t stop. It still didn’t stop. It kept going. 

I remember being pregnant with my first baby, Bella, and having such extreme cystic acne. It had actually spread down to my chest, on my breasts, shoulders, and back, which was new for me and really hasn’t happened again since. Something about the pregnancy hormone specifically with a girl just really screwed me up. 

I don’t know, but it was bad. I felt awful. I felt so disgusting. This disgust carried through my life. 

As an adult who was still experiencing this, I basically had concluded that I am disgusting and I am not beautiful. And in order to be even bare-minimum-acceptable, I must cover up; I must hide. And these incredibly false, incredibly heavy and damaging conclusions stayed with me throughout my adult life, into my motherhood, and on and on and on until extremely recently.

Acne and breakouts just continued to come up. I think that the general consensus about people who have breakouts is that their skin is dirty, so it’s really not fun at all to feel dirty and disgusting and to feel that people think that you don’t take care of your skin. 

Also, if you guys have listened to episode six you know that we were also incredibly short on funds to really take care of this problem. Brian always holds so much space for me. He has unlimited space for me. 

I remember he’s always just known about this for me and been sick over it for me that I’m hurting. I just remember several points in our marriage where he worked extra, sold something, or did something to help me try a new treatment to try something for the cystic acne and nothing worked. 

This affected me. It affected my marriage because it was affecting my self-esteem and I didn’t feel beautiful. And when you don’t feel beautiful and you feel like you are gross, disgusting, you are not worthy, you’re not beautiful, that comes out for sure. 

I wouldn’t go out and do things like a normal person, because there were certain times of the day where the sun and the lighting outside was just terrible for my acne. That’s what I had believed, so I would dread doing things at certain times of the day, because it was going to make me look so much worse and it was going to be way harder to hide with certain lighting.

I obsessed over products and what covered the best. Basically my job became to full-time cover myself up. I did not leave the house so much as to go for a walk with my children without makeup. And I am not talking about dabbing a little bit of concealer on just to even out the discoloration or whatever. I am talking a full face of heavy, full coverage makeup just to run a quick errand, to go for a walk in my own friggin’ neighborhood with my children, to go to my parents’ house. 

No one saw me without makeup ever, except for Brian, and even that was very hard for me. And that’s ridiculous. It’s so sad. 

I remember one of my really good friends at the time, she’s since moved away, but we raised our kids together when they were really little for a lot of years. We were really, really good friends. 

I remember her telling me, “I’ve never seen you without makeup.” And me saying, “Oh, really? I feel like you have.” And her saying, “No, I’ve never seen you without it. I don’t even know what you would look like without makeup. That’s so weird. We’re such good friends.” And me thinking in my head, “You have no idea how bad my skin looks without makeup.”

I became a master at the color wheel and hiding the red. Pairing the green concealer with regular concealer. I did go to beauty school. I dropped out right before I finished, but I did go and I learned so much there. 

I studied YouTube. I learned everything I could possibly learn so nobody knew how bad it was. Obviously you can’t hide the actual bumps, but everything else was hidden. 

I could minimize the bumps. I was so good at it. And I poured this effort into my skin and my face every day. 

And this really all comes down to what messages I received about skin and about beauty. That it looks a certain way. This is what is beautiful. And if you don’t fit into that category, you are not beautiful. Period. 

So, I upheld this image and this is why I didn’t let anyone see me without makeup. I would have an early morning workout or something and be going to my trainer’s house at her home gym at 6:30 in the morning in full makeup, which also sweating in full makeup is incredibly bad for your skin.

But I had seen it as my only choice. My only choice is to break out more, because no matter what I do the breakouts are not stopping anyway. I’ve gone makeup free for as long as I can. 

I’ve done all the different skincare systems. I’ve changed my eating. I’ve tried to balance my hormones. I’ve tried birth control. I’ve tried everything and it doesn’t work. 

So my only option is just to cover, hide, and get super good at hiding so that it really doesn’t matter if I keep breaking out. I’m going to break out anyway, no matter what I do. I might as well get really good at just covering it. 

And that is how I lived for at least 17 years. That’s really a low estimate because I’m not even counting all my teen years and I’ve been married for 14 years. That’s a generous estimate. I’m being kind. It’s probably more than that.

I’ve lived carrying that load every single day. Covering every single day. This is the energy that I was putting out into covering up. Upholding this image, this covered face. Upholding this facade. 

Upholding the energy of covering, faking, I can’t let anyone see it, I can’t let anyone know. Nobody can know what I really look like. Nobody can know what’s really going on. 

With makeup, in some ways it can be very all or nothing, because once you do a deep, heavy covering up of your face you’ve now covered your natural contour lines. You look like a ghost and you have to fake contour, fake blush, highlight. Now your brows look weird and disappear. Now your eyes look super gone. It stacks on top of each other. 

I would spend so much time on makeup to cover and hide because that’s all I knew to do. I had concluded that if this is what beauty is, my skin is so far from that. It looks absolutely nothing like that, so I must hide and morph into as close to that version of beautiful, that definition of beauty as I possibly can.

Eventually, I got so tired of upholding all of that. The energy of hiding and trying to control the image that’s being put forth is exhausting and depressing at best. I don’t even remember exactly when this shifted for me. 

I think it came in part definitely from my work with Sarah Spears, but I just remember feeling so tired, so tired of this. At multiple parts in my journey, and in my adult life, I felt tired and just wanted to be done. I would say to Brian all the time, “I wish I could wear no makeup.” 

And he would literally look at me and not understand why I would even feel that I couldn’t wear makeup. Which again, it just goes back to his lovebugness and how much he’s always just seen me with so much love. It turns out, all along, that is how I needed to be seeing myself.  

The way that Brian sees me has always been an example of how I really need to see myself, because it’s so full of love, acceptance, and just complete adoration. I wish I could have gotten to the place he was at with me sooner. 

But this is the journey, right? I’m grateful for it. And here we are talking about it and hopefully I can teach others through it. 

I don’t remember exactly what caused this shift in me, but I did just eventually get tired enough to relook at everything and to consider not trying so hard. Keep in mind too, part of my adulthood, part of that journey has been becoming a person that’s on a very low scale, but somewhat in the public eye. 

There’s a lot of video. There’s a lot of photography. There’s a lot of going live. There’s a lot of filming and things that are a part of my life and a part of my job. It would be another whole episode for me to go into some of the stories and the shame and the embarrassing things that have happened in my career that have to do with my skin. 

Anyway, something began to shift and I really just began to question everything that I was doing in this area of my life. There’s one question in particular that kept coming up in me. It would just pop into my head at random points in my day when I was washing my face, taking a shower, focusing on my skin in any way. And it was, what if I just didn’t do all of this anymore? 

What if I just stopped trying to hide this? What if I dropped the immensely heavy energy of covering up? What if I just dropped it? 

What if I just accepted myself? What if I just loved myself as I am? There’s a novel concept, right? 

What if I just didn’t do all of this anymore? What would happen? What would actually happen? 

You have to realize that this was a huge shift for me. A huge, massive, terrifying shift that the idea of possibly just not doing all of that anymore was not on the table at all. It was terrifying to even be having this thought.

But that question just wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept coming up. I kept just sitting with that and wondering, “I just wonder if there’s something to accepting myself.” 

The more I learned about energy and the intention that we bring to things. What we focus on expands and the way that we think about things is what ends up being the reality; it ends up being truth. 

At this time I was healing my relationship with food and my body very much. And I just noticed, “Okay, I’m learning all these things. I’m learning how to shift these things with my relationship with my body, how I eat, how I’ve been using food in unhealthy ways in the past and all this stuff. This is similar to this acne situation and makeup. It’s so heavy to continue to hold this up.” 

I noticed the way that I felt when I was doing my makeup and putting all these heavy covering chemicals on my skin. Basically the attitude was, “You know, screw you, face. You won’t clear then I’m going to cover and suppress and make sure nobody knows what you really look like because you are unacceptable to me and to everyone. Shame on you!” 

That was the message that I was giving myself. And that message was being repeated every time I did my makeup. It wasn’t the makeup itself, but how I was thinking about myself. How I was feeling about myself and how I was doing my makeup—covering up these big, giant bumps. 

It was not good. It was not fun. The internal dialogue was dark and heavy at best. 

And so, I started to look at this area. I started to read different things about self, your skin, and loving your skin despite acne. I was curious about whether anyone else has this and if anyone else did this. 

I actually came across multiple Instagram accounts, multiple articles, different people and different sources talking about this. And talking about how messed up it is that we feel the need to hide and using this language that really resonated with me and where I was at in my part of the journey. 

I had been learning with Sarah (and through reading, doing my own inner work, going through my own process), that our bodies talk to us and give us messages about what’s going on, what needs correcting and what needs support all the time. Everything that becomes a physical symptom is just a message. And through ailments, illnesses, and things that are going “wrong” in our bodies, we can heal. 

These things that are problematic to us are messages of what needs healing and what needs support. And when we respond to our body giving us those messages, things can clear up and get a lot better. Illness—and I’m using the word ‘illness’ very broadly right now—much of the time is a way to heal. It’s like this paradox. 

And so, I started to learn about that and was really coming back to this idea of: What if I saw this acne as a message and I responded with love and attention rather than hate and suppression? I started to bring this to my sessions with Sarah Spears and we would do the energy work on my skin and my history with my skin. 

Guys, I went back. We did so much therapeutic work. Sarah uses all kinds of different means of clearing heaviness that’s inside of a person. Clearing negative energy that you’re bringing to yourself. And I was bringing so much to my skin, which was only making it worse. 

I did a lot of things like going back into past experiences, reliving them in my mind and finding love in them instead of shame. Going back and reliving through the situation in high school where the cystic breakout on my temple had exploded and my hair had stuck to it. Going back and revisiting that. Feeling that. Rewriting that story and coming out of that with a different energy. 

There’s a lot of work in hypnotherapy that does this. Also neuro linguistic programming is something you could use. Tapping, EFT. Things like that are all tools that we can use to do this work. 

I’ll let you guys do your own research on those things, but this is just what I did to begin to enter into healing in this very tender area of my life and my body. Through that work I really started to see that my acne seems to be connected to self hate and not loving myself. And the message that my body was giving me was, “Hey, this needs to be looked at.” 

The times in my life that I had really, really crazy cystic breakouts were directly connected to times where I was going through something and not loving myself, not accepting myself, not giving myself space to feel. Suppressing my own emotion. Suppressing how I feel for the sake of somebody else to make someone else happy or to not be in the way. 

That’s a big one for me—not wanting to take up space, not wanting to be in the way, not wanting to be me at all. Just be quiet, be good, don’t be a problem and just be easy. That’s something that was told to me my whole life…

“Oh, you’re such a good kid. You’re so easy. You don’t make a peep, do you? You’re never in the way. You’re just kind of there. I forgot that you were even there.” 

That is because of suppression. Because I was not allowing myself to take up any space because I was always told that I was way too much. So I decided to just be quiet and be nothing because I didn’t want to be too much because the message that I received was that being too much is obviously the worst thing you could ever do. 

Isn’t this a lot? Isn’t this heavy? And this is just scraping the surface with a pinky nail. It’s nothing compared to everything that I have learned in the work that I have done in myself.

I started to do this work. I really started to dive deep, and I mean really deep—tears, crying, releasing things, releasing the past, releasing experiences, releasing trauma. 

I used breath work a lot as well. If you’re not familiar with breath work, it’s so worth reading about and trying. You can even hire breath work coaches. I haven’t done that, but I’ve heard good things about doing that. 

When I would work through something, go back into a memory, release an experience, whether traumatic or just damaging or whatever, and release with my breath these things out of my body, my skin would break out. But not like it did. Not the big, giant, bulbous cystic breakouts but just little breakouts. 

And from my research I have learned that is a sign of purging. The skin is the largest organ in the body. It is very responsive to what we put into it and what comes out of it. And a lot of the time what comes out of your body will also show up on your skin. 

And so every time I purged negative emotions that were really harming me and making me sick, my skin would reflect that and break out a little bit. Then it would become white heads and release from my pores. Then my skin would be clear for weeks and weeks and weeks with not a single breakout. 

And then I would go back in and do some of the work and it would purge again, clear up, and be clear for a long time. It was really cool. That’s what that shift actually looked like for me.

Another thing that I did to aid that shift as I was doing that hard inner work was—this is going to feel a little weird, but this is just what I did and that’s all I’m here to share is my experience—I started to replace the energy of force and the energy of self hate with love, acceptance, and gratitude. Those were my three big words in healing my skin—love, acceptance and gratitude. 

There’s a saying and I don’t know who this came from, but it’s “what you resist persists.” And I have found this to be true in many, many areas of my life—relationships, skin, body, and so many different things. Even in parenting, it’s true.

Basically what was showing up in my skin was that I’m resisting these breakouts. I’m resisting myself. I’m resisting the inner work. 

I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to revisit these past experiences. I don’t want to dive deep. I don’t want to go within. I don’t want to go in there. 

It’s scary. I don’t want to deal with it. I’m going to avoid it. I’m going to suppress myself even further. 

And my makeup that I was using, the specific type of makeup, the way that I was applying makeup, the amount of layers of makeup that I was applying, all of those things matched the energy of what I was doing internally. I was suppressing my emotions, hating my skin, and feeling disgusting. 

Instead of looking at my skin, instead of listening to what it was trying to tell me (because I didn’t know to do that then), and accepting it as messages. Instead of loving it and seeing it for the good that it was, I suppressed and hated. And that was the same energy that I was putting into my makeup. 

I was suppressing physical symptoms, hiding, covering, and hating. So I began to just shift that.

I still wear makeup. It’s a part of my job and I actually enjoy wearing makeup. I really do. 

I enjoy the art of highlighting natural beauty, but that’s not what I was doing. I was completely covering and remaking a whole new face. It was so much energy and it was all negative energy. 

Does that make sense? How the way that I was applying makeup, the way that I was covering up my face matched the energy of suppression and hate that was going on inside of me? 

This is what I’m talking about when we look at setting the intent and looking at the energy behind something that we’re doing. It’s huge. It’s everything. 

And you will always find a connection to the way that you’re doing something and what’s going on inside of you as it relates to that part of your life, if that makes sense. And so, like I said, I really started to shift into love, acceptance, and gratitude. There’s a lot that I did to clear my skin and to help my skin. To accept and love my skin. 

When I would wash my face and take my makeup off, that used to be a very emotional time, a very tender time that was full of a lot of self hate. Instead I shifted that. I would be taking my makeup off and I would look at my skin and just try to love it. 

I would look at it and I would just say loving things to it. Sometimes in my mind, sometimes out loud. I’d say, “I see you. You are beautiful. I love you. I accept you.” 

I would repeat things like that while I was taking the makeup off, while I was washing my face, while I was applying blemish ointment, while I was moisturizing. Every time I had my hands on my skin, I made it this ritual of love, acceptance and gratitude. “Thank you for these messages. I’m doing my best to hear you. I’m doing my best to clear this. Thank you for supporting me. It’s important that I clear these things out of my system.” 

I think we all could agree that we’ve at least heard enough to know that if there is toxicity in your spirit, it can physically make your body sick. People get cancer from unforgiveness and things like that. We’ve all heard pieces of studies that have been done and stories like that and I believe that that is true.

If you are curious about that, go and research it and start reading books. I think I’ve read seven different books on this topic. I am fascinated by the connection with the mind, the body, what’s going on internally, the emotional body and the physical body. It’s crazy. Super interesting. 

Anyway, I started to shift that in my skincare and in removing my makeup time. It took a while, but then I started to want to shift that with putting on my makeup. And this is more recent for me. 

This is the thing about energy. Everything wants to match. You can’t be in a really high energy, high vibration place and then choose really, really low energy choices. It just doesn’t match. 

High energy will make you make high energy choices—high energy food choices, high energy parenting choices, high energy marriage choices, and high energy word choices. Everything matches your energy. 

So as my energy was starting to shift, I started to notice every time I went to do my makeup in the morning, I just didn’t want to put that stuff on my skin. I didn’t really know what was in it, but I knew it wasn’t good. 

I was using big brands that are famous for having toxic ingredients, but that’s what works to cover, right? And that was the struggle that I had had my whole life. I started to really not feel good. I would do it anyway and then do my videos or do what I needed to do for work, then take my makeup off right away, let my skin breathe, and go on into the afternoon with no makeup on. I did that for a really long time.

I really started to feel like, “Man, this makeup is just not matching my energy and how I feel about my skin. I’m really doing all of this inner work and really learning to love my skin and listen to it when it does have a breakout. I’m listening to that message. And it just doesn’t feel good to me anymore to be covering and suppressing. It’s still feeling the energy of suppression and I’m really not suppressed anymore.”

I did that for a while where I would just wear makeup when I needed to and then take it off as soon as I could. Then I started replacing a couple of things with more natural brands. 

The foundation was a really hard one for me. It took a long time to find that. I’m actually recording an episode today about all of the brands that I have found that have worked so well for me and that’ll be coming soon. 

I started to just shift a few things. Then I was almost in rebel mode. Why do I even have to put anything on my face? Why is it not enough?  Why are we not normalizing acne? 

Normalizing acne is normalizing skin and skin is literally the most normal thing in the world. We all have it. This is so stupid that this perfectly textured, smooth, perfect skin is the standard. Everyone has stuff on their skin. 

If it’s not wrinkles then it’s discoloration and blemishes. It’s so stupid. I got really, really, really effing fed up and I just stopped. 

I went weeks without wearing makeup and when I did it was super light and just barely. I would leave my skin totally clear, put on some sunscreen, a little bit of mascara, and just fully go to things with my scars. I have a lot of red and purple scars and indentations on my skin. And that’s just when I’m not broken out. 

When I am broken out, there’s obviously really bright red spots. And I was just going, broken out or not. I was doing life. I was going live on Instagram. I was making videos and doing work without makeup. I even started to run errands, go places, and do things without makeup. 

And I started to feel really good. Then when I came out of that I was like, “Okay, that felt really good. But I do enjoy putting makeup on, feeling evened out and put together. It makes me feel good. But I also have days where I am in a no-makeup vibe.” 

I decided that I wanted to shift into intuitively doing what I wanted to do every day. If I didn’t want to wear makeup one day, I wouldn’t wear makeup and it didn’t matter what I was doing that day. So feeling free and empowered to show up naked-faced to work, to recording, to whatever I want, but if I didn’t feel like doing that I could also put some makeup on and feel aligned with how I wanted to feel that day. 

But in putting makeup on, I didn’t want it to be toxic anymore. It wasn’t matching my vibration anymore. And so, I did the big purge and I got rid of all of my toxic makeup. Everything that wasn’t completely natural, I got rid of it and I replaced everything. 

I started the big test of trying out all these different products. That episode will come out about which products. It may need to be a video or something. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, but I’m doing that today. Anyway, I really began to shift how I do makeup completely.

I want to say, too, that when I was going to social circumstances and things without makeup, I noticed how I felt. I would notice what thoughts were coming up and how I was feeling in these different social circumstances where I would normally have a full face of makeup and now had none or hardly any. 

I would use what came up from that. I would use any shame or fear that came up from that to grow and move deeper into self-love and deeper into self-acceptance. 

Today I have completely nontoxic makeup. I go a lot of days without wearing makeup. I’m not wearing makeup right now. 

It’s noon and I have done my whole morning. I have gone out with the kids. I’ve gone on a video conference call on zoom with my team. 

I’m doing my day. I’m doing all these things. And I don’t care. I’m not worried about it. 

Right now my skin is really clear. Of course, there are scars and things, and I am working on those, but the energy is different. When I am putting the scar reducing oil on my skin, I’m doing it with love. I’m still saying those affirmations to my skin, speaking life over my skin, loving and accepting my skin and being grateful for it. 

These scars are no longer disgusting things that need to be hidden and covered, but they are now reminders of how much my body supports me and how it talks to me. It’s scars from all the messages it gave me about the turmoil that was going on inside of myself as a teenager, as a young adult and even not as a young adult because this has been my whole life. 

Just going through all the messages of, “This is not good for you. You need to pay attention to us. Hey, there’s a lot of self hate happening.” And acne is directly related to hatred of self, rejection of your truest self in metaphysics. 

That is for sure a running theme in my life. It was trying to talk to me and I didn’t know how to listen because I wasn’t taught how. Now I know and I can teach my daughter and my kids how to listen to that. How to hear those messages and what to do about them. 

These scars are just a reminder that my body is brilliant. A reminder to listen, to love, and to accept. And like that book says, “The body keeps the score.” It was giving me messages. It was loving me and talking to me. 

And when you really stop resisting something, like I was saying earlier, “What you resist persists,” when I stopped resisting the breakouts and I just loved myself as I currently am and accepted it, it really did start to clear. It’s so much better. 

Having a fit of breaking out is so much more rare for me now. It does still happen, but I will say it is always a message. Every single time it is directly related to me not allowing myself to feel something that I need to feel. Suppressing myself, not wanting to take up too much space, not be a problem, or be in the way. 

Any negative energy that gets suppressed my skin is just where it goes. Now I see that as something to be grateful for, believe it or not. This is kind of where I’m at now. That’s the conclusion. 

The conclusion used to be, like I said at the beginning of this episode, that I am disgusting and my skin needs to be covered. And now it is that I am so loved and I am beautiful. My skin is skin. 

This is normal. Photoshop doesn’t get to depict what is normal in my book. The beauty industry is shifting and it needs to shift a lot more and I want to be a part of that. 

It changes everything. It changes the way I use filters on social media. It changes the way I do my makeup, use makeup, and what makeup I’m using. 

It changes the way I take care of my skin, what skincare products I’m using, and what is going through my head as I’m applying things to my skin. Learning to be intuitive about what to do for my skin that day is just like learning to be intuitive with what I eat. It’s been one of the biggest lessons of my life that I’m so incredibly grateful for. 

Now I love my skin. I’m not afraid of it. I’m not embarrassed by it. I deeply and completely love and accept my skin. That is an affirmation that I say every day and now fully believe. 

I hope this helps you. I hope it makes you feel seen and safe. I hope it really lit you up and gave you some new ideas of how to see yourself, whether or not your big issue with your body is acne. If it’s something else, I think that all of these things can be applied to really any area that it needs to be applied to. 

So, yeah, that is kind of what I want to say as of now and at this point in my journey. I’m happy to share more, happy to answer questions if you’re in the Facebook community that goes with this podcast. If you’re not, it’s just The Purpose Show with Allie Casazza. 

It’s free. It’s a large Facebook group that is incredibly well admined and a very safe space for questions and thoughts. I would love to hear if there are more questions that you guys have, so I could do a follow-up episode.

That is what was on my heart to share at this point. I love you. I see you. You’re beautiful. And I hope that you step deeper into self-acceptance through this episode.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me! In case you didn’t know, there’s actually an exclusive community that’s been created solely for the purpose of continuing discussions around The Purpose Show episodes. It’s designed to get you to actually take action and make the positive changes that we talk about here. I want you to go and be a part of it. To do that, go to alliecasazza.com/facebookgroup. 

Thank you so much for tuning in! If you’d like to learn more about me, how I can help you, how you can implement all these things and more into your life to make it simpler, better, and more abundant, head to alliecasazza.com. There are free downloads, online courses, programs, and other resources to help you create the life you really want. 

I am always rooting for you, friend! See you next time! I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hey mama! Just a quick note, this post may contain affiliate links.