Reflections: My Horn of Plenty

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Editors love words. It is why we do what we do, not because we like to mark things up with a red pen. There are a lot of fun words that sit high in my book: facetious, behoove, cavalcade, malarkey and bogart. However, one of my faves is cornucopia, a word often taken at face value as a horn-shaped container filled with fruit, grain and flowers. This horn has deeper meaning especially in light of this month’s Thanksgiving holiday.

The cornucopia, although often associated with Thanksgiving, has its roots in Greek mythology, where an infant Zeus broke off one of his caregiver Amalthea’s horns (read: she was a goat) while she was nursing him. The container and the word have come to be symbols for the harvest, plenty, nourishment and abundance.

Katie+Anderson

I am grateful for a lot of things this Thanksgiving. For starters, I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to take the reins of Skin Inc. this past May. I am grateful for the host of expert estheticians, brand owners and spa managers who helped guide me as I navigated the spa industry waters to ensure that our current and future content met and exceeded expectations. I am grateful for all you readers who stuck with Skin Inc. while I navigated those waters. But most of all, I am grateful that I am in such an ABUNDANT beauty industry.

We work in the cornucopia of beauty, which has seemingly limitless options for ingredients, formulations, treatments and devices. There are a lot of choices out there, but can you picture the industry without all these choices?

Take this issue, for example, where Louis Silberman discusses treatments for skin of color, and James Beckman, M.D., discusses the formation and treatment of stretch marks. Can you imagine if we lived in a limiting beauty industry where all ethnicities received the same skin care and treatments? Or, those with stretch marks were all told to apply the same cream and hope for the best? I can’t! The American’s complexion certainly is not one-size-fits-all, and so the modality and topicals chosen to treat them should not be either.

I’m grateful for beauty abundance, for an industry that never ceases to amaze me with new technologies to write about [and experience] on a constant basis.

OK, I’m also grateful my mom has agreed to help me cook my first solo Thanksgiving dinner this year—at least I’ll look good doing it.

Yours in education,

Katie Anderson

Katie Anderson, Managing Editor

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