Holistic Esthetician: Nikki Fontaine

This is Nikki Fontine. We have interviewed her before on Radio Maine, and today she's here to tell us a little bit of an update as the work she's now doing as a holistic aesthetician and still working as an artist and many other things. Thanks for coming back to have a conversation with us, Thank you, Lisa. I'm so excited to be here, thanks for inviting me. I am excited to have you here because I know on the weeks that you're here and you actually help me with my skin, I'm very glowy and my makeup looks perfect. Then other weeks that you're not here, I'm certain people are thinking what happened to Lisa? So clearly you're very good, at least this role that you have and other roles that you have. Thank you so much for saying that. I'm so happy you've got to experience the benefits of it and not only how it looks, but how it feels to take care of ourselves in that way. We talked to you the last time because you had been working at the gallery and you had transitioned from being a pretty high level makeup artist in New York City. You had come to Maine as a result of the pandemic, and in the interim, you actually went through a whole new training program, many training programs. In fact, you became licensed in a whole new field, and I really want to hear about that journey. I want to understand why you decided to take that path. First starting off, moving to Maine, as you mentioned, was such a big shift for me. It was the first time that I was living in nature since I was a kid, and a lot of things shifted in my life in that time. I was spending a lot of time outdoors. I was taking art courses at the Art Students League of New York online at the time, and I was taking a lot of anatomy drawing courses, and my time was kind of taken up with those things. Being outside, focusing on my art and my beauty routines kind of slipped. I wasn't doing as much. I wasn't wearing as many cosmetics. I was ocean dipping and walking through the forest, and I was healing in a lot of ways on a lot of levels. And as a result, my skin really healed. I struggled for years with peral dermatitis, which is a redness, rash, inflammation that a lot of women get around their mouth, and mine actually got so bad it traveled up to my eye. It's painful and it makes you self-conscious, and I was on set a lot and had to wear makeup a lot had to present a certain way, and when I moved to Maine and I wasn't wearing makeup, oddly my skin started to heal and I was learning to live with the elements and I guess it was almost like an accidental healing that happened, but it shifted things for me and I inadvertently learned about skin health and taking care of my skin in a way of not doing so much to it. Backing up a little bit, adjusting my nervous system, working with plant medicine and skincare, things that are the pillars of my practice now and that I work with my clients on. Now, the path that you took is interesting because you went for your formal training to become an aesthetician, but then you also did a lot of work holistically, which wasn't necessarily all incorporated in the training that you had as an aesthetician. You had to have kind of a simultaneous parallel path, I think. Yeah, I did it a little backwards because I came from this world of makeup and I had been touching faces for 15 years, and because I studied facial anatomy, I really had a good grasp of this skin as an organ. I went into school with a big goal in mind. I knew that I wanted to focus holistically at that point, I had been through the transition in Maine, I had healed my skin in this really profound way. I also was really influenced by this book Renegade Beauty by Nadine Artemis, which is a really wonderful deep dive into skin health, living with the elements. It taught me all about the microbiome, the protective barrier on our skin, all of these components that are really crucial to skin health. So when I went to get my estheticians license, I knew I wanted to start a holistic practice, and I think some people go into getting aesthetics and then they find the holistic path. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this license and how I wanted to help people with it. So yeah, it was a little bit of a different trajectory, I think with a very specific goal in mind. So one of the things that I know that you've had a pretty significant interest in is the plant medicine, and you were drawing plants, but you also are using plants in the work that you do, and you now work in a place that very much recognizes the importance of plants and using botanicals and in fact using botanicals that are made right here in Maine for skin health. So tell me a little bit about the particular plants that you use that are effective for this work. I'd love to, well, I'm very lucky to have found Amanda Foreman who owns Abura where I now work and I now practice, and she is also just as passionate about plants. We geek out about plants together, which is so fun and get really creative about formulations. But it all started, I'm an artist, so I originally started observing plants and wanting to draw them to capture their beauty. They have an impermanence, so it was a way of kind of understanding them. And the more I did that, I started doing a deep dive into one plant at a time. So I would take a plant, I would draw it, and then I'd get curious and I'd learn about its properties and how it could benefit the skin, how it could help the skin, how it could be plant medicine to nourish our bodies. So I would take little notes on all my drawings, and then I wanted to experience the medicine. So I started formulating and making things, and I started making skincare that I found was really beautiful, and it highlighted this beautiful relationship between plants and humans and this symbiosis and how they can really nourish our bodies. And the first plant that I fell in love with was calendula. I grew it in my garden, I harvested it, and I made jojoba infused botanical oils from it, and that changed everything for me. That's my initiation plant. I say, and I'm not a licensed herbalist, but I'm curious and I'll always stay curious. So I make that a practice of mine where it weaves in my art practice, it weaves in my curiosity, and now I get to practice actually using the plants on my clients that I care about so deeply. And it's wonderful to use a product that you made, that I made or that Amanda made by hand that has an energetic flow to it, and then using it on this person to help heal whatever conditions they may have. Calendula in particular is such a healing herb. It's gentle, it's soothing. I tell people I make a calendula bomb and I say, put it on everything burns cuts scrapes, and these things are accessible to us, which is also beautiful. So having grown calendula previously in my garden, what I love about it is it's so vibrant as a flower. It's a sun shiner. Yeah, it's bright orangey yellow. It feels very summery. And then as you're making these infusions, does it retain some of that color? Absolutely. So, it all depends. I just made a batch of my calendula bombs that I let steep in jojoba oil for a year, and this was part of an experiment of how potent can I get this oil? And I use the jojoba company in Maine. They're a wonderful facility that produces pure cold pressed jojoba oil that I love, which is most like our skin sebum. So I use it as all of my bases for my oils, and I steeped it for a year. When I opened that jar, the smell was so intoxicating, the color was this deep amber, and I make my bombs out of that, and I add other things in there that's going to retain moisture to the skin. I add a little bit of local bees wax. That's what I use as my massage medium. But to answer your question, yes, it retains its smell, its properties, and it's another way of preserving that beautiful flower and using its benefits for many, many months to come. Are there other flowers or other plants that you're also attracted to and use regularly? Yeah, absolutely. I would say that's a huge pillar of my practice is learning about plants and knowing which ones can affect change in the skin in the way I want. Blue Tanzi is a favorite of mine. It is super calming and soothing. So redness, irritation, sunburns, anyone that comes in with inflammation, anything that needs calming and soothing, even the name Blue Tanzi, and you think of the name of these flowers, calendula is bright and sunshiny. You think of it as adding in warmth and healing. Blue tanzi is going to be very calming and soothing. It's going to take everything down a notch. I use a beautiful Blue Tanzi healing balm that Amanda makes for a lot of my sculptural facials where we are manipulating and moving the muscles quite a bit. We're releasing quite a bit of tension and energy, and I love the juxtaposition of having this soothing blue tanzi going deep into the muscles and releasing and calming inflammation in the skin as we're doing all of this work to also stimulate the skin and bring blood flow to the surface. So that's a favorite. I love yaro. Yaro is a beautiful balancing herb. I could go on and on. I love rose. There's so many herbs that are so amazing for different things and for different people. If you have a problem, there's probably a plant that can help it. The facial sculpting is something that you and I have talked about over months, and I find it really interesting because we think about massage for other parts of the body, but obviously we have many muscles in the face and neck, and if we are mostly just using them the way we would every day smiling or maybe not smiling or frowning. Then they may not get the kind of workout that probably they deserve or would be healthy. So from what I understand, the facial sculpting really is very rejuvenating. It really does exercise those muscles in a way we can't in other ways. It's also called facial rejuvenation actually. And I'm going through the certification process right now for a specific method. It's the sculptural facelift, also called facial rejuvenation, and it's really about releasing stagnant energy and emotion that we hold in our face. You'd be so surprised at how much tension and emotion we hold in the face and how that affects our whole body and our whole being, how it affects our nervous system, how it affects how we go out into the world and how we present. And my practice around facial sculpting is really about relaxing those muscles so we can start to come home to ourselves. We can start to slow everything down, nourish ourselves in that way. But some beautiful benefits of the facial sculpting method is reduction in fine lines. It's meant to be an alternative to Botox and fillers, which something that we're learning right now is that might have detrimental effects down the line. So how wonderful to have an alternative as an option that might feel amazing. It also is really amazing at relieving tension and pain. It's great for pain management. I have a lot of clients with TMJ, sinus pain migraines, and we are on a treatment plan, a pain management plan to help reduce those symptoms. And I've even had clients come off of prescription muscle relaxers. Once you get those muscles in that relaxed state, and we do a whole meditation in the beginning to get you in a calm state with your nervous system, once you release those muscles, they start to understand that, that could be their natural state. If you leave the muscles in a really tense place, they start to manipulate that. That is their relaxed state. So it's about retraining not only the nervous system, the muscles, it's about releasing that energy, releasing any kinks in the hose. I like to say calming the nervous system and rejuvenating. And another benefit is the blood flow. It brings fresh blood flow to the surface of the skin, which you've experienced. The glow afterwards is incredible because all of those fresh nutrients are coming into the skin and into the surface feeding the skin fresh nutrients. It's also lymphatic drainage benefits. There's so many different things that it's amazing for, and it's become one of my most sought after treatments, but also just a pillar of how I practice and how I look at skin health as a holistic aesthetician. I think that it was interesting for me because I've had, I think it's called the Goddess Yes. That's our signature facial at I've had that a few times with you and it's very relaxing, but it's interesting to me that other people will say, oh, you look so glowy. So it's not just me coming out and thinking, oh, that felt great. It's also other people who will say that. And what you're describing where we hold this tension in our faces, I think is particularly I find important for me in medicine because there's a lot of times where I have things kind of coming at me and I'm really trying to maintain kind of a space of no judgment, but also be helpful. And so I'm guessing that there's probably some amount of like, oh, I don't want people to feel like I'm in any way frowning at whatever it is they're telling me. You're wearing the emotions on your face. Exactly. So I suspect I probably am not as aware of holding tension as I might be, but my dentist is like, why are your teeth ground down? So absolutely. I'm thinking this might be a good thing for people who grind their teeth. Absolutely. I have clients too that will try the sculpting facial to try it because it's something different. It's something new. And they'll come out of the facial and say, I did not realize that I had this much tension in my face. I didn't realize I was in pain. Because we get used to it and they're like, this is life changing. This is amazing. Especially a lot of, I work with mainly women. A lot of my clients are women. I work with men too, but a lot of women, we hold a lot of tension in our jaws and our mouth, and there's emotional reasons for that. There's also physical reasons for that. So releasing that is opening up a whole world for us, and it's not only uplifting those muscles, it's uplifting our mood. It's actually putting that feeling of lightness back into the face. And I really do think a big part of it is the joy we wear. A big part of beauty to me is the joy we wear from a life well lived and from feeling good because there's really no cosmetic that can fake that well. And that is the interesting thing is that you'll come and you'll do my makeup and my makeup looks great, but if you put paint on an unprimed surface, then you're just going to get whatever you're going to get. Having your skin look great is really important before you even start with the makeup. Which leads me to another question, which is how does one's overall health, like hydration, exercise, the food that we eat, how do those impact the skin? Monumentally\! It's a huge, huge impact. Our skin is an organ. It is part of us. We are not separate from it. We see the outer effects of it, but the skin is a window into what's going on inside. And the reason I wanted to practice holistically is because that's exactly I view skin health is whole body health. So things like sleep, things like exercise and sweat, things like stress management. One of the biggest things people overlook is the nervous system. And I'm always talking about the nervous system because calming the nervous system has so many effects on the body. It has effects on your cortisol, on your hormone levels, on so many different aspects. Everything from taking care of your liver, taking care of your gut health. There is a gut skin axis, there's a liver skin axis. These things are all related, and the skin's an elimination organ. It's a secondary pathway to detox. So if the liver's having trouble detoxing and the digestion is having trouble eliminating waste, it's going to find a way to come out of the skin through sweat, through detoxification, and that's the part that we see. So you might be able to ignore some gut health stuff. You might be able to ignore some liver health stuff, but when it shows up on your skin, we should be grateful and say, thank you. Thank you for letting us know what's going on inside. So that's a huge part of how I practice is internally, how are we supporting the body? And then another part is externally, how are we supporting the body and how are we supporting the skin? Because the skin is also, it breathes. We breathe in the air, we're around, we absorb product. So we have our microbiome that lives on top of our skin, which when it's healthy and diverse, it's a really good thing. When we have a good population of good bacteria and our protective barrier, our acid mantle, our sweat, our sebum, protecting all those vulnerable layers beneath, those are two major components of skin health as well. We really want to treat the skin. I view it like treating it as a garden, both internally and externally. So a garden needs biodiversity, it needs nourishment, it needs water, it needs food, it needs gentleness and care. So not over stripping, not over cleansing, nourishing, supporting, big, big part of how I practice. So one of the things that you and I have talked quite a bit about is the idea that women tend to be caregivers. And I know that in healthcare, a significant number of people are women, so they're caring for people at home, whether it's a small child or whether it's an aging parent, some other relative or friend. They go into work, they're caring for people at work. But you also as a practitioner, you need to be able to care for yourself. So how do you maintain that balance? How can any woman who's in a caregiving role maintain the balance of caring for others and caring for themselves? How do you do it as a practitioner? I won't lie. It's difficult in our modern world, and I have such a sweet spot for anyone in the medical field, nurses, doctors, my mom's a nurse, as you know, we've talked about that quite a bit. But caretaking, doing a lot of it, not having the time always to put it all down for a minute and take a minute for yourself, it's so crucial and it's one of the hardest things to do in that mode of taking care, of taking care of taking care. I would say some things that have definitely worked for me, scheduling things out a bit. So I get a massage by Shay, who also works at Abura who is an amazing practitioner. Just the most healing energy I've ever felt out of a little human being. Once a month, I'm getting a massage by her, and I'm taking that time, 90 minutes for myself. Same thing with facials. A restorative facial is really important to me. Once a month, having that time to not only rejuvenate the skin, but calm the nervous system and take time to put it all down for a minute, we're carrying so much. We're taking care of so many people. You deserve to be nourished too big part of it's how we talk to ourselves. Do I deserve to be nourished? Yes, I'm taking care of everyone else. I deserve this too. But it's carving out time for it, which is not always easy. Scheduling out is a great thing. I also think it doesn't have to be rituals don't have to be a big, big, monumental thing you do. You can take time each night to create a little routine for yourself. Oil cleansing, keep it simple. People way overdo the skincare. We're over cleansing in our society. We really value cleanliness, which is good in most parts, but when it comes to the skin, we overdo it. So taking a small ritual, taking five, 10 minutes to oil cleanse, to nourish the skin to breathe, enjoy a cup of tea while you're doing it. Sometimes I'll take my rituals outside the sun's out. I'll say, you know what? I'm going to go outside and do this and just take some fresh air. It can be five minutes. Those little tiny things add up over time. Then when you need time to just completely decompress for an hour or more, come in and get a treatment. Take care of yourself. It's hard to say, make time for it, but it's so crucial because like you said, we're doing so much caretaking of other people and we deserve to be nourished and cared for too, or I've learned you cannot show up unless you come home to yourself first and take care of yourself first. I completely agree. And I have worked with people who have scheduled massages. Some of the busiest people I know, I worked with the head of an emergency and she told me, "I have my monthly massage and this is what I get done." And I think that it's important because it's easy to say to yourself, oh, well, this is too expensive, or I don't have the time. But then if you really think about, sure, there are cases where people really don't have the time or really don't have the money, and that absolutely is a thing, but a lot of people have more resources and they're just choosing where to spend them. I mean, how much does it cost to go have drinks with friends, which is good, but maybe balance that out with a different sort of self-care, a facial, a massage, something like that. Yeah, and that's an interesting shift that happens too. Life fluctuates. You may not be able to do something every single month. I have clients that say, I can do this seasonally. That's beautiful too. Anything that you can do to take care of yourself and carving out that time and space to do it, being gentle with yourself about it, it feels so good. It feels so good to care for yourself in that way. And slowly you realize, wow, my cup is full. So I'm showing up differently in my life. And that brings me to another point of every service I do, every treatment I do, we do a meditation before and after the service begins and as a closing meditation, and it's always based on what I'm going through in my life, what I'm hearing from people. It can always be different, but one of the themes this week that I was talking about in my sessions was about the season shift and was about us going through this fiery summer, moving into the softness of fall and learning to put things down and take time to come back inward and come back into rest. It's a very challenging thing to do, but when we do it, we show up in the world so differently, and it's such an honor to be a space that can provide that for people. That's my biggest wish, is to provide that safe space for you to come in, put everything down, nourish yourself, care for yourself judgment free, and just move through what you need to move through so you can go show up in your life and be the amazing person that all of us are. We're all working really hard. Well, I appreciate your taking time out of what I know is a very busy schedule for you to come and update us and what you've been up to for the last few years. How can people find you if they'd like to have a conversation or even a facial from you? Absolutely. Thank you so much. So you can find me at Abura skincare. We are right on Congress Street, Munjoy Hill, right at the top of beautiful Munjoy Hill in Portland. I call it a sanctuary. It really truly is. You can book a facial with me there. You can also find me on social media. I'm on Instagram at Nikki Fontaine. I share very simple skincare health tips. I show a little bit of behind the scenes of what I do, and those are really the two places. Well, very good. I can't wait to talk to you. Well, I talk to you pretty regularly anyway, but with the rest of our Radio Maine friends, maybe in a year or two and see where you are at that point. Thanks for coming in. Thank you so much, Lisa. I always enjoy our conversations I do too. I hope that you take the time to find Nikki online. Abura is in case you're wondering, A-B-U-R-A. It sounds a little different than it's spelled because it's certainly worth the time to take care of yourself and your skin. And I really love the creative way that Nikki has included a lot of really interesting things, plants and art, and the importance of taking care of ourselves into all in one wonderful package. So thank you for coming in today, Nikki.