The full version of this story is too long to include here, but the following is as short as I can make it while addressing the simple facts that created these magical products.

My adult life has had two career tracks, and BearFaced grew at their crossroads.

The first path is as a “creative"… although the term isn’t my favorite. This is the career I was born to pursue and the fire in my belly from my earliest memories. I have worked as a touring musician, a ghost writer, a costume designer, a fine art painter and most creative gigs in between. This passion would ignite me, and then I would watch as my health crumbled in my hands, my body unable to keep up with the demands of my life.

Traditional doctors (whose traditions are novel and disconnected from our actual traditions) were of no help, and often contributed to a worsening condition which evaded medical diagnosis for decades. During this time I attended schooling and slowly developed my second career path. For those struggling with health challenges interested in that specific journey, I will include more detail in my blog.

I pursued education in nutrition, skincare, massage, yoga, herbalism and- when all else had “failed”- shamanism, to figure out what was going on that would tie together my varied physical challenges. I was too ill to afford many of the treatments and benefits of these practices, but I figured if I could learn about them through a career path, then I could pay my way through a fundamental education to unravel this mystery-illness. I was fortunate enough to establish myself in the spa industry and worked not only as a licensed aesthetician, but as a Spa Director in Arizona, Texas and Maine.

All of this informed who I was becoming, and the paths of creative work and healing work intertwined more over time. A deepening of this journey was an experimental 4-year diet of exclusively animal-based products. This led me to an apprenticeship in a butcher shop, and eventually taking a job working at a wild game processor skinning black bears, moose and deer. You can read more about this in the Ethics section.

While each modality and drastic lifestyle change I made contributed to temporary improvement, nothing moved any needle for my well-being until I began studying the endocrine system through the lens of such “prometabolic” doctors and biochemists as Broda Barnes, Constance R Martin, Hans Selye, Ray Peat and others. After several decades of training in the wellness industry, I had finally found cogent explanations for related issues which had previously garnered only vague responses… from traditional and alternative practitioners alike, who left me with no answers but with crippling debt.

By 2023 the frightening symptoms I had experienced for years were steadily reversing themselves one-by-one. Meanwhile, BearFaced- which I had began as a labor of love without ever investing myself in it fully- had begun a life of its own. People were finding the products and then developing a loyalty to them which made my heart sing.

As I began to feel healthy and vital again, I decided to incorporate my extensive history in advanced skincare and herbalism into the brand, incorporating high end ingredients into my formulas to marry with the unparalleled magic of black bear tallow.

These products are born somewhere between the beauty of a living tradition and the beauty of a meaningful death.

It is with reverence and deep appreciation that I welcome you to BearFaced.

We are accidentally a skincare company. Our true goals are richer and more layered-

to serve as a witness for a bear who has given us his life, to invite kindred humans to honor that meaningful sacrifice alongside us,

to deepen our relationship with our own ancestry in order to fully respect the ancestry of others, and

to create products which invite our deepest inner beauty to shine radiantly,

through bare skin.