Why Quarantine Made Us Better

And … here we are. It’s finally summer and most of us are beginning to climb out of our pandemic caves, squinting into the bright light, and reflecting on what-the-hell-just-happened. 

We wanted to look back at where we’ve been and share a few of our first-hand observations and hard-fought lessons.

A Whole Lot of Time on Our Hands:

• A month into quarantine, we polled some folks to see what was happening behind closed doors and learned The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of being sequestered with family for four months. Wait, was that only four months? You know that weather term, “real feel”? We’re pretty sure quarantine's real feel was like, forty months. Four hundred. Years. 

• Stressed Out Skin. Stress was the dominating emotion (followed closely by boredom) of our cooped-up spring and we all baked a lot and drank a lot and - shocker - it all showed up on our skin. Stressed skin needs special care.

• Swampy Skin. Stress, sugar and red wine aren't the only culprits when it comes to our quarantine skin issues. We’re heading into summer wearing tented little swamps under our masks; creating micro weather patterns around our nose, mouth and chin; and festering an imbalanced, oily new issue called, Maskne. The good news is we have lots of tools to ward off this return-to-puberty.

• Ugh, yes, “Join Audio” 😳 Web cameras are NOT KIND. And after those first shocking images of our web-ified little heads blinking back at us on-screen, we’ve had to learn some tricks and up our skincare ante to get web camera-ready.

So flipping this thing over, we’re finding the positive. On the whole (all that wine drinking and carb-loading aside) we've also found ways to make the most of our situation. We’re sleeping more, cooking more and we’ve created home gyms. We’re gardening and taking DIY to new levels. And arguably the most positive byproduct of spring 2020 is how we’ve immersed ourselves in family time. These have been tough times but for many of us, times of re-evaluation and positive change.

So repeat after me, I solemnly swear to take my quarantine life lessons back into the rat race, when it returns.