A Founder's Story
I'll never forget the day my doctor said, "It's cancer."
I was 37 years old, not even old enough for mammograms yet. I ran marathons. I ate healthy. I was in a high-growth tech job, raising two daughters with my husband Felipe, living a full, active life. There isn't even a single instance of breast cancer in my family history. Cancer wasn't supposed to be part of my story.
But there I was, facing hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer and a treatment plan that would change everything. What I didn't know then—sitting in that doctor's office, trying to process words like "chemotherapy" and "prognosis"—was that this diagnosis would lead me to discover a hidden danger that millions of men and women face every single day.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
During chemotherapy, my body revolted against everything. My skin became hypersensitive. Everything burned, itched, or made things worse. Simple tasks like washing my face or applying moisturizer became painful reminders of what my body was going through.
My medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins—the same doctor who'd guided me through the worst of treatment—was already helping me stay nourished. I was doing 'dose dense' chemotherapy. That meant I did in 2 weeks, the amount of chemotherapy most people do in 3 weeks. Why? It's 30% more effective at preventing recurrence. The downside, I had to rebuild my white blood cells fast enough to be healthy enough get the next infusion. This meant weekly blood tests, optimizing my diet to the cell cycle, and staying healthy. She was sending me scientific articles on nutrition. I was reading books written for oncologists on integrative oncology and nourishing the body. It was an intense 18 weeks.
She told me the first 6 weeks would be the worst. I was on a chemotherapy drug known as the Red Devil- for it's bright red color and harsh side effects. Her words exactly, "This is something you get through." So I did. Then, we switched to Taxol (the T part of AC-T), for another 12 weeks. She told me I'd start to feel better. My hair may even start to grow back. Taxol has fewer side effects, the only real downside is it can cause life threatening allergic reactions. Just one more thing to manage.
During the Red Devil weeks, my only focus was staying alive. I was still only 4 weeks out from a bilateral mastectomy and didn't have full range of motion. Between blood work, chemo infusions, physical therapy, plastic surgeon follow ups and oncology medical visits, I was at Johns Hopkins hospital 5 days a week. I was still working and would take conference calls from my car in the hospital parking lot between scheduled visits.
I ate a nutrition optimized bowl of lentil soup every day. I drank green tea & ginger drinks I brewed in my kitchen to minimize nausea. I tried to walk for 30 minutes a day, broken into 3 ten minute segments.
Coming Out of the Cancer Closet
Your hair typically falls out around round 2 or 3 of chemo. It takes time for the chemo to kill the hair follicles and for the hair to progress through the normal resting phase before falling out.
This means, it is fully possible to hide a cancer diagnosis from colleagues and friends for a while. In my case, I was diagnosed on December 1 2020, and didn't tell people outside of my family until mid-February 2021. I worked from home, I wore baggy sweaters on zoom calls. Most of my initial diagnosis visits and surgery happened during Winter break. Everyone thought I was away on some amazing family vacation.
The first people I needed to tell beyond my husband, mother, father and sister, were my two daughters. Clara was 6, Georgia was 4. Obviously, children are super in-tune with emotions and they already knew something was wrong. Also, our dog Astrid had gone to live at grandma's house. Mommy was wearing a puff vest inside the house every day and nobody was allowed to sit on her lap or be picked up. Clearly, to a young kid this all signals something is wrong.
Is spoke to an oncology social worker at Johns Hopkins about how to approach this. She said telling the kids was essential, as they have already picked up the signals and have probably created a story that is way worse in their heads. However, she recommended not labeling it cancer. The reason being is young kids don't know there are different types and stages of cancer, if they mention it to a friend they'll probably hear, "My grandpa died of cancer!" This only makes it worse. Instead, I was to come up with a short explanation that was true, but at their level. We'd only go as deep as they wanted to, and to expect that to be very shallow initially.
Based on this, I sat them down and said "Mommy is sick" they both nodded, the older replying "I know." I said, do you want to know why? They looked at me. I said, "Mommy's body is made of of tiny Legos, and some of those Legos are misbehaving." Georgia, the youngest, looked at me and said "Bad Legos." I agreed. End of conversation.
The next day, I had my daughters cut my hair off. Again, in discussion with the social worker, by having them do it they would have a clear memory of why mommy had no hair. Also, it saved me from the trauma of constantly pulling my hair out of the shower drain. 
The afternoon after I told my daughters, but before cutting my hair. I had a conference call with my direct team at work. I told them that tomorrow I wouldn't have hair and explained what was happening. There were tears and warm wishes. People didn't know what to say.
I still didn't tell many of my close friends, with the exception of one. She found out during December right after diagnosis. Her mom is a non-smoker lung cancer survivor, also treated at Johns Hopkins. She understood the process, the stakes, the terminology. We would go on walks together after visits so she could help me internalize the information. She gave me one very smart option. She said, if you ever have such strong emotions that you can't even articulate it. just send me a mushroom cloud emoji text and I'll drop everything and come over. Thankfully, I never had to do that.
I have one more core memory of 'coming out of the cancer closet'. This was maybe a week or two later and I was grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I had a face mask and head wrap on. I remember looking up in the produce section and a woman was staring at me with a mixed look of shock, guilt, empathy and fear. It was the first time I thought, "I LOOK like a cancer patient." People don't know how to react, they treat you like you have leprosy, not cancer. It is very isolating.
From Surviving to Reviving
The chemotherapy AC-T regime builds up in the system. The first round is easier on the body than the second and so on. Also, it works on the cell cycle, so my body was reacting to each round of chemo in the same pattern, only more intensely every two weeks. So, weeks 8 to 10 of chemo were by far the worst from a side-effects perspective. At this point, COVID was scary but I'd already gotten the vaccine. My kids were about to return to school in person, but I wouldn't be allowed in the infusion center if I tested positive for COVID. My medical oncologist said, "Getting COVID probably won't kill you now, but it'll disrupt the chemo cadence which increases your risk of dying later." We agreed I would do something call shielding. Think quarantine on steroids. I left my kids at home with my husband, moved to my mom's farm and interacted with nobody but her, my dad who drove me to all those medical visits and my medical team.
Eventually, I did get past the worst of it. As predicted by my doctor, the side effects got a lot easier on the T portion of AC-T. I confirmed I wasn't allergic to it, and didn't have any life-threatening allergic reactions. I was starting to feel better.
After 4 weeks of T, I met my medical oncologist again and she started guiding me with research and science-backed advice. However, this time it was about preventing recurrence. We were past the worst of it, and now it was time to look to the future. We talked about it a lot - she even called me an uber maximizer- when it came to implementing treatment and prevention. So we came up with a scorecard/roadmap to recovery and prevention. These are the categories we identified:
- Diet & Fat Management
- Exercise
- Mental Wellbeing
- Endocrine Disruptors & Environmental Factors
At this time, beauty and skincare was simply not on my radar. Hair regrowth as about mental wellbeing. Removing endocrine disruptors was about staying alive.
Because, here was my reality. As a non-obese, athletic otherwise healthy 37 year old woman with no family history of breast cancer nor a genetic mutation, all the data says I should not have had breast cancer. When I asked my medical doctors why I got breast cancer - and I did ask, a lot- it was always met with the same answer. It's impossible to know for sure, but it's probably a combination about your biology we don't yet understand and external factors.' One doctor summed it up to 'Shit bad luck'.
This is why I went down a deep path of researching endocrine disruptors. It was crucial to answering the question 'Why did I get cancer in the first place?' And, I would argue asking why is a critical stepping stone on the path to mental wellbeing post cancer diagnosis.
About a month after finishing chemo, I downloaded the Environmental Working Group's app and evaluated every single product in my home. I threw out every product (personal care, cleaning, food all of it) that had any endocrine disruptors. This was spring cleaning on a whole new level. It was a true purging. I was going to protect myself and my children.
That's when I saw it. Parabens. Phthalates. Synthetic fragrances. Ingredient after ingredient that I'd never questioned.
I started researching more. Medical journals. Clinical studies. More conversations with my oncologist. And what I learned shook me to my core.
Most of my skincare products were full of endocrine-disrupting chemicals—substances that mimic estrogen in the body.
For someone recovering from estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, this wasn't just concerning. It was dangerous. The very products I was using to "take care" of my skin could be working against my treatment and recovery.
I learned that the average woman uses 12 personal care products daily, exposing herself to over 168 unique chemicals. Many of these are known hormone disruptors—chemicals that interfere with the body's natural hormone systems.
And here I was, recovering from a hormone-driven cancer, unknowingly covering my body in hormone-mimicking chemicals every single day.
Let me describe the simplified mental image I have of what was going on in my body. Make a fist with your hand and pretend that is a cancer cell. Now, on each side of your fist there's a little hole where the fingers have curled around the palm. If that fist was a cancer cell in my body than 100% of those cancer cells needed BOTH an estrogen receptor and a progesterone receptor to link to it in order for the cancer cell to divide. Now, a single cancer cell won't kill you. It's the dividing and multiplying that is the problem. The goal of the surgery and the chemotherapy had been to remove all known cancer cells from my body. However, after that I started hormone therapy to restrict the level of estrogen in my body in order to prevent the potential of a remaining cancer cell from linking to it and dividing.
So, to recap, I am taking medicine with known side effects in order to minimize estrogen in my body, while putting skincare and cosmetics on my face with ingredients that mimic estrogen? Oh hell no. I did not go through all that for nothing.
The Search for Something Better
I thought finding alternatives would be easy. It wasn't.
"Clean beauty" brands promised safety but still contained hormone disruptors when I read the fine print. "Natural" products weren't necessarily safe—poison ivy is natural too. "Dermatologist-tested" meant nothing about hormone safety. "Hypoallergenic" said nothing about endocrine disruption.
I spent months researching, reading medical studies, consulting with my oncologist. I tried product after product. Every single one had compromises—either it wasn't truly hormone-safe, or it didn't actually work, or it was prohibitively expensive.
I was exhausted. I was frustrated. And I was still recovering from treatment. The last thing I needed was another uphill battle.
But I kept thinking about all the other women going through this. The ones who would trust their doctors, survive their treatment, complete their reconstruction, ring the bell marking the end of chemo—and then unknowingly undermine their recovery with the products sitting in their bathroom cabinets.
Do you want to know the true tipping point for me? My oldest daughter Clara was taking a shower and washing her hair with a shampoo we'd bought off Amazon. 40 minutes later, she's in our kitchen and her face is red, her lips are swollen and her skin is blotchy. She looks at me and says, "Mommy, I can't breath." Immediately, we went to the ER and they triaged her and treated her very rapidly. Yes, she was having a life-threatening allergic reaction, based on the pattern on her back, probably from the shampoo. They treated her and she was fine. Sitting in the ER that night, that's what triggered me to act.
Apparently I'll go to hell and back for myself, but threatening my children could not be tolerated.
Someone needed to create what didn't exist.
The Decision to Build Juventude
I didn't set out to become a skincare entrepreneur. I was already a successful tech leader and was also running our successful family business—Growing Wild Floral, a 30-year-old flower farm in Delaplane, Virginia. I had a degree in Applied Economics from Johns Hopkins, I am a certified economic forecaster.
But none of that mattered when I couldn't find what I desperately needed.
So I decided to create it myself.
I partnered with plant-based skincare chemists who formulated antioxidant-rich hormone-safe products. I continued to research endocrine disruption from established, peer-reviewed scientific journals. I tested everything on myself first—because I refused to sell something I wouldn't personally use.
The name came to me during one of my long runs after treatment. Juventude—Portuguese for "youth" or "youthfulness." But not the kind of youth that comes from anti-aging creams and Botox. The kind of renewal and vitality that comes from truly taking care of your body. From giving it what it needs to heal, to thrive, to flourish- from Nourishing Life.
Actually, I really hate the term anti-aging. Having gone through what I did, having run calculations on staging to predict probabilities of living until your child is 10, that makes you see things differently. I know aging is a privilege, one not to be taken for granted. However, I also know, YOU DON'T HAVE TO ACT, LOOK OR FEEL YOUR AGE.
Enjoy youthfulness, nourish life, have fun - just don't take aging for granted, the alternative is way worse.
What Makes Juventude Different
Every product we make follows three non-negotiable principles:
1. Absolutely No Hormone Disruptors
We exclude every ingredient on the Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX) list. No parabens. No phthalates. No synthetic fragrances. No compromises.
2. Medical-Grade Transparency
Every product has a complete ingredient safety scorecard. You can see exactly what's in each formula and why it's safe. No hiding behind proprietary blends or vague terms like "fragrance."
3. High in Antioxidants
Cancer survivors need extra support for skin recovery. Every formula is loaded with plant-based antioxidants to help your skin heal and protect itself.
But here's what really sets us apart: I'm not just the founder. I'm the first customer. Every formula has been tested by me, refined based on my experience, and guided by the medical professionals who saved my life.
Why This Matters Beyond Me
Today, I'm five years cancer-free. Five years of clear scans. Five years of rebuilding my health, my strength, my life.
But I still think about that woman sitting in the infusion chair, terrified and overwhelmed, trying to figure out what's safe and what's not. I think about the newly diagnosed woman Googling "HR+ breast cancer survival rates" at 2am because she can't sleep. I think about the survivor who's done everything right but doesn't know that her "clean" beauty routine might not be as clean as she thinks.
Juventude exists for her. For you, if you're reading this and recognize yourself in my story.
The Invitation
If you're navigating treatment right now, I want you to know: You don't have to figure this out alone. The skincare industry has failed us by prioritizing profit over safety. But you have options now.
If you're in recovery and wondering whether your current products are truly safe, you deserve answers. Not marketing buzzwords. Not greenwashing. Real, medical-grade transparency about what you're putting on your skin.
If you're someone who just wants to know that the products you use every day aren't working against your health, you deserve that peace of mind.
Every product we make is something I'd use myself or my children. Every ingredient is one I'd recommend to a friend going through treatment. Every formula is designed with your health and safety as the absolute priority.
You've been through enough. Your skincare shouldn't be one more thing you have to worry about.
Connect With Me
This is just the first entry in my founder's journal. I'll be sharing more about what I've learned, the challenges of building a truly safe skincare company, and the lessons that keep me going.
Have questions? Want to share your story?
📧 Email me directly: lindsey@juventudeskincare.com
📱 Follow along on Instagram: @juventudeskincare
Ready to make the switch to hormone-safe skincare?
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From that infusion chair to five years cancer-free, this journey has taught me that what we put on our bodies matters just as much as what we put in them. I built Juventude so no one else would have to navigate this alone.
With hope and determination,
Lindsey