Vanessa Fitzgerald

Written by Laura Regensdorf

Sometimes a career path unfurls in unexpected ways. “I’ve been through the ringer with health stuff,” says Vanessa Fitzgerald, whose experience in her twenties with PCOS and the autoimmune disorder Hashimoto’s led her to seek care with a New York–based practitioner of naturopathic medicine. “After six years of being a patient, I just became so obsessed with the fact that I could be well all the time.”

After embarking on her own studies, Fitzgerald opened her practice in Los Angeles nearly a decade ago, specializing in nutrition response testing, with other modalities folded in. The business name, VeesHoney, is a vestige from a long-ago blog idea—“Because you make life sweeter without the sugar,” a friend suggested at the time. Still, Fitzgerald doesn’t believe in an overly rigid approach, particularly when it comes to beauty. “I have a girlfriend with a skin care line and she hates the word nontoxic, and I agree with her. Everything’s a chemical,” says Fitzgerald of the unwarranted stigma around certain ingredients. “I still like actives in skin care. I still get Botox.” Lately, Fitzgerald, who is pregnant with her first child, has taken note of her newly sensitized skin, paring down her routine to a few high-quality steps. “The body is the most intelligent machine,” she says of the takeaway from her work. “People now understand that the body keeps the score.”

“This is a travel essential. I often get swollen from planes and time changes, but the Cryo De-Puffing Mask leaves my skin feeling taut and smooth.”

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