Issue link: https://www.ascpskindeepdigital.com/i/1547015
60 ASCP Skin Deep Autumn 2026 D uring one of my most memorable permanent eyeliner appointments, my client told me she cries every night. As I explained aftercare and advised her to avoid getting the area too wet, she asked if this crying would ruin the tattoo. I took a chance and asked her why she cried. As tears streamed down her face, she told me her son had died by suicide a few months earlier. She wanted to get the eyeliner because she needed to do something to feel better. That is just one example of how trauma can show up in the treatment room. As a beauty professional, your job is to interact with clients and make them feel beautiful. Over the course of a year, you likely see hundreds of clients and interact with thousands of people. About one in 17 people in the US has experienced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and 70 percent of people worldwide have experienced a traumatic event. 1 At any point, you could be working on a client, like the one I just shared, who is struggling with trauma-related symptoms, and there is a strong chance you won't know. Most people would never guess that I have experienced PTSD, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder for over 20 years and need high doses of medication to function every day. Most people who interact with me would never guess that during my teenage years I was trapped inside Columbine High School for hours as I watched my teacher bleed to death. Most won't know that my father was so abusive that my mother anonymously called child services repeatedly to get us removed from our home. I don't look like someone whose night terrors are so real I need medicine to sleep and I wake up dripping with sweat and wanting to cry most mornings. The reality is that I am a middle- aged woman who goes about her day like most others do, and the people who interact with me will never think otherwise. + I'm sharing this because professionals in this industry helped get me through some of my darkest moments, and they likely never knew it. When I was younger, and when things got rough at home, my mother used to take me to the mall to get makeovers from the women working at the beauty counters. They made us feel so special and pretty that in that hour, we left our problems at home. Things eventually became so dangerous at home that we left my father and went into hiding. My mother suddenly had to find work and support three children after being a housewife for 17 years. In our experience, domestic violence shelters didn't take women with teenage sons, so we became homeless. The day we left happened so suddenly there wasn't time to put shoes on; what we wore was all we had. For job interviews, my mother would buy an outfit on a credit card, leave on the tags so it could be returned, and go to the cosmetic counters where the women would do her makeup. Those women probably had no clue they were helping