Skin Sabbath is your weekly reset—part newsletter, part vlog, and a space to step outside the noise of beauty standards.
Each week, join Ashlee Neumann, a doctoral student in advertising and women’s health, as she explores her journey toward confidence by unpacking the predatory roots of the beauty industry.
We’ll demystify marketing tactics, break down regulations, share ingredient safety tips, and offer personal stories along the way.
Whether your reset falls on a Sunday, Thursday, or whatever day you need it most, this is your invitation to slow down, reconnect with nature, and rethink what beauty means—on your own terms.
Let’s find confidence beyond the standards.
Confidence (and how I stopped chasing it)
For years, I felt vulnerable—like there was always a quiet voice in the back of my mind comparing me to other women. I’d catch myself wondering if my partner was looking at someone else, convinced they had something I didn’t. I signed up for every online course that promised to teach "confidence."
One five-hour course told me to just say I was confident—over and over again. So I did. I woke up every day repeating affirmations, trying to convince myself I felt strong and beautiful. But when I looked in the mirror, or saw the images in magazines and on TV, it never stuck. I still felt like I wasn’t enough.
That feeling followed me through my teens and twenties.
It wasn’t until I began my doctoral research on advertising and women’s health that I finally saw the pattern: this billion-dollar industry had been engineered—since the 1800s—to make women feel small. The rise of the beauty industry paralleled the rise of advertising itself, with almost no regulation or boundaries around what companies could say to sell products. Confidence and self-esteem became commodities. And from that, an $800 billion global machine was built on women believing they weren’t good enough—without their product.
When I realized this, I felt angry. All those years I spent trying to mold myself into some version of the women I saw in ads—only to realize it was never really about me in the first place.
But that realization also brought freedom.
It gave me the space to begin healing, to stop chasing beauty standards, and to start defining confidence on my own terms.