DON'T MISS A THING

Join us for a peek inside the empowering world of Christy Adams (AKA Nurse Christy), founder of SkinSplendid. Created based on the need for an unconventional aesthetic med spa, Nurse Christy and her women-led team (including her daughter) offer a holistic approach to medical aesthetics. Based in New York and Montclair, NJ, SkinSplendid focuses on the patient’s overall health and nutrition, and incorporating that into an aesthetic treatment plan that is patient-focused. As an adult nurse practitioner and registered nurse for over twenty years, Christy has worked in many areas of medicine, and her focus has always been on overall patient safety, health, and wellness through a patient-centered approach.

Read on and be inspired by Christy Adams in this edition of the Lh Empowered Women Empower series.

Be Empowered by Christy Adams, Founder of SkinSplendid

Love Happens: As our name and the tagline of our publisher, KOKET, denotes, at Love Happens, we are firm believers that you cannot achieve any level of success without love. When did you first find your love for beauty?

Christy Adams: From a very early age. I loved looking at faces, I loved art. I loved design, so I was actually an interior design major. This was before HGTV and all that, so when I started college, I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I also love science, so I ended up switching my major from interior design to biology, but I still had that love of art. I danced growing up, so I always had that artistic side to me. But, I also loved nutrition since I played sports. I started biology thinking of pursuing medical school, but I wanted to find something that was artistic and had all the components I liked. So I found nursing, and I ended up getting a nursing degree as well. 

Lh: What led up to your decision to start SkinSplendid?

Christy: It was such a long road. It was not some direct arrow. I wasn’t planning on doing aesthetics. Aesthetics didn’t even exist. I was in nursing school and wanted to be a cRNA. After nursing school, you have to work in critical care and the ICU, so I started working there. I decided quickly to become a charge nurse and went the management route. Following that, I went to business school. I decided I wanted to get my MBA, and my goal was to run a hospital. So I finished my MBA and applied for jobs to run an OR. But, I kept getting denied jobs because I didn’t have experience. I was very frustrated. 

After months of looking, I ended up managing dialysis. I did dialysis and critical care for years. Long story short, I got an interview to be the administrator over plastic surgery. I thought it sounded interesting. I was offered that job, and that’s what opened up my door to the whole aesthetic world. That was in 2014. I immediately fell in love with it because, to me, it was just like artistry. And then injections started getting more popular. I decided to get my nurse practitioner degree because you could do more as an NP opposed to an RN. So I went back to school. 

I never really thought about owning my own business until, once again, doors kept shutting on me. But I wanted to do other things. I was growing plastic surgery and derm practices. I knew I needed to find something. And then I thought, wait a minute, I could just do this on my own. I could do my own thing. Since I saw a lot of businesses, I saw a lot of what I liked and didn’t like, so I had a clear vision of what I wanted for my patients. In the places I was working in, I wasn’t getting that. I wasn’t getting the time or quality with my patients. I felt like I was being rushed. So I wanted to find a place where I could be comfortable, patients could be comfortable, and I could do what I wanted safety-wise with my patients. That was my goal.

Lh: Can you tell us more about the people that come to you? What are they asking for most often? 

Christy: Most often in neuromodulators, like Botox and fillers. We do want to focus on skincare and skin health. I try to do very little filler, though; I’m actually very conservative in the industry compared to most injectors. That’s what makes us stand out. We focus more on skin health. If someone comes to us with acne or a skin problem and they want lips or filler, I’ll tell them I want us to focus on getting the skin healthy first before we do any injectables. Some people like that approach, some don’t. But the skin is the first thing people see. We only give patients what they need. I say no, probably more than I say yes. 

Lh: What empowers you most? 

Christy: I’m empowered by my family. You can never have a successful business without a good partner, and my husband is a really strong partner. He has another job, but he works on the business as well, so it’s really a team approach. It would be very difficult to have no one or even someone that doesn’t support it. People are always surprised that my husband helps with it, but how could he not? When you have a business like this, especially now, it’s like a family business. It’s kind of all-encompassing. 

They always say, do what you love, and you won’t work a day in your life. That’s kind of BS. Because you have to work. It’s really kind of a dangerous thing to say to a young person because there are a million jobs I hated before I got to this point. But I wouldn’t have been here if I didn’t go through all those bad jobs. Sometimes you just have to work through jobs that you don’t love. You’re not going to love everything, and that’s just life. 

What empowers me is when I look back, and I can’t believe that I created this whole thing that enables me to live, and it’s all my doing, you know? It was all with a lot of hard work, though. People look at the business and think, “oh, must be nice,” but they don’t see the hours where I worked until 4 am, wrote papers, and studied like crazy. It empowers me that I have worked so hard. You just have to stay motivated. Sometimes I didn’t know the end goal. But I kept going.

Lh: What makes SkinSplendid stand out? 

Christy: We’re unconventional because we’re actually a medical practice that specializes in aesthetic medicine. Most med spas are owned by business people that don’t actually do the treatments themselves. I’m the owner and the medical provider, which makes us different. People come to us from other med spas saying they felt rushed and like there wasn’t enough privacy. They say they felt like they were just a number. We’re not like that at all. Our core value is patient safety. We’re also very innovative. We are one of the first med spas in the country to get an ultrasound machine and to begin doing ultrasound needle-guided injections. We’re also an evidence-based practice, so we look at clinical research, and that is what guides us on how we approach patient care.  

Lh: Do you have any mottos or favorite quotes you like to live by? 

Christy: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” It’s a dangerous field because people are such cowboys and cowgirls; they will do whatever. And that’s why we got the ultrasound machine because we can now see inside the tissue, inside the skin. Another quote is, “the harder I work, the luckier I seem to get”.

Lh: What is next for Christy Adams and SkinSplendid? 

Christy: I want to continue to grow, but slowly and organically. When you have a small business, I think it’s really important to be very strategic about even bringing on new people because I want a really good, positive culture. You have to be really careful about who you are bringing into your business because you always have to protect the business. I want to be around for the next ten years, so I’m going to be very slow and strategic about our growth.

Learn more about Nurse Christy Adams and SkinSplendid at skinsplendid.com

More to Love!

More Stories by Empowered Women Ready to Inspire You