Beauty...
Be your own
kind of beautiful
Be your own
kind of beautiful
By Mollysims.com
Experiencing burnout? Get ready to chill the f**k out with The Queen of Chill, Cyndi Ramirez-Fulton. Today we sit down with the founder of The Chillhouse, a new-age spa offering timeless spa services, to discuss the art of self-care. She’s sharing expert tips to bringing the spa to your home, the oils you need in your nighttime routine & WTF is gua sha. We get real about the importance of communicating our mental health issues and what you need to get that #restingchillface. The chill starts here.
“It was a long time in the making. Growing up in my twenties, I was in and out of college. I was in and out of jobs. I didn’t really know where I belonged. I was a bartender/waitress. I was at different nightclubs, sports bars, all sorts of random places. And then, of course, there comes a point sometimes where you reach burnout. If you’re in that industry. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was out partying slash working till like five, six in the morning. And that’s even being conservative with those hours. There were nights where I was not home till 8:00 AM. It was really bad. So I obviously realized I was at a dead-end road for me personally. I know a lot of people have made great careers out of it, but personally, I couldn’t do it anymore. My body was beaten up. So having no experience, having no college education, real college education, no degree, none of that, I had a hard time entering the workforce, and I had no real idea what was I going to be when I grew up”
Cyndi explains how Chillhouse is making the spa cool again. “You walk in and, you’re immediately greeted with lo-fi hip hop. Like Doja Cat and Sza. It’s not like bells and chimes and smooth jazz music, that’s all gone. Even in your massage rooms, it’s all instrumental hip hop. So right off the bat, you already know you’re in a place that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The space itself is really beautiful. It’s really beautifully designed. And we really wanted to be very simple in our services. Tried and true. We know what you want. We know you like the things that you should be getting from like a more routine, a routine perspective versus just the new fad that’s out there. I’m not saying they don’t work, but we’re not about that. We’re about tried and true and classic and timeless while also being in a very refreshing and new nouveau-style space.”
“Self-care is survival.”
“What I mean, is that it shouldn’t feel like a guilt-ridden term anymore. I think we need to simplify it. I think we need to realize that self-care are those everyday tasks that you do for yourself to counteract the stress that you’re constantly being smacked in the face with. Whether it’s stuff that enters your life out of nowhere that is unexpected, or it’s just the everyday stuff that you deal with that makes you stressed out. So for me, it’s that little skincare moment. I think that a lot of people haven’t really identified those moments for themselves yet. Our goal is really to give them every possible tool in the book to help them identify those moments. It can be as simple as picking up a book, you may not even realize that it is self-care, but it is. And again, none of it is being selfish. It’s literally just being in survival mode. If you’re not happy that comes that transpires into your life. So of course it’s all about filling up that cup and making sure you, yourself are rooted in good and centered and feel happy.”
“Self-care is a mindset, and it should be part of your lifestyle. Go call your therapist, find a therapist, or maybe it’s not therapy that you need, but maybe you introduce yoga into your life or meditation. There are so many various forms of self-care.”
“I personally have only had a couple of panic attacks, but they really shook me to my core. And that was that moment. My husband actually deals with pretty bad anxiety, and I’ve kind of watched him navigate it for the past several years of our lives together. That has changed my entire concept of mental health in general because I come from a generation and even culture, my mom is Latina, and we don’t really talk about mental health. And after talking to so many friends and seeing what my husband goes through, I realized just how everyone deals with a version of anxiety and depression and mental illness and people are very quiet about it. For the most part. We’re all very silent about this and are very inward with it, but we’re at the forefront of this self-care movement. I think it’s important for us to be leaders in exposing these stories and telling people, Hey, listen, it’s totally okay to admit that you do need to seek help, that you need to feel a need to navigate this in some way, shape or form.”
“Gua Sha is an ancient tool, an ancient Chinese tool that helps sculpt the face. You can actually use it all over your body. I use it in my shoulders to relieve tension and all that, but it is mostly used for your face. It really helps you increase blood flow, inflammation & drain the lymphatic. But to me, it’s also taking that skin or routine up a notch, right? It’s that extra little step that really helps you see more visible results with the actual structure of your face.”
“We have a collection of four face oils and body oils. Our whole evolution of products is really about taking the spa experience that we’ve created and bringing it into people’s homes. We did that with our first set of products, which are chill tips, which are the nails that I have on right now. And then we launched the oils earlier this year, I think around March. And the reason for the oils is like our origin story really was around a massage. And because of that, we’ve introduced facials two years ago. We’ve had facials now for the past couple of years. And with that, we’ve entered the skincare world.”
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