Shaped Secretz

Self-care has become top priority in people’s lives. When it comes to weight loss and relaxation, there are several treatments to explore. We caught up with Courtney Lockridge, owner of Shaped Secretz, to discuss the benefits of lymphatic massage and…

Words Christina Rosas Anastasiou

2,040 words · 12 min read

THE FULL STORY

2,040 words · 12 min read

IN THIS STORY

Shaped Secretz

Fashion

12-minute read

Courtney, it's so nice to finally meet you!

I’m so happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

I want to talk about your background. I know that you worked for several CEOs and executives and that really

inspired you to be who you are today. Tell me how it all happened.

Yes, so I took it back to when I was in college and I was going to school for pre-med and looking for a side job, and I found an office executive assistant position for this multimillionaire. While I was working with him, I saw all the benefits of working for yourself. I was like, there’s a lot of things that are in sales for you to [become] a millionaire; you have to sell a service or sell a product. You know, I started to look at things differently and I looked at what I was doing with my life. I was groomed into the medical field. I was like it's just so much school that you have to go through and all of this money that you have to pay… I don't know if I want that. I know I want to have more freedom. If I was a doctor, I would be at the hospital a lot. I wouldn't have as much time with my family, you know. So I shifted my major to business, finance, and computer science, and I kind of just went around [to] different companies working for them, like right up under them. I was the executive assistant or the human resources or office manager. I was in the back end of the business, but right up under CEOs and executives. I just loved what they were doing, and I wanted a piece of the pie.

Isn’t it interesting how your pre-med background worked with business? People might ask how you were able to switch your career path. Let’s discuss the industry itself. What have you seen change, and what has been trending the last couple of years?

I think what made a big difference, of course, was COVID. People had more time to be at home, and they were eating and gaining weight. They also had time to have surgery, so that's one thing that we do here. We take care of post-operative patients from plastic surgery. I thought it was a very good field to have access to because people need help. A lot of clients don't know how to take care of their body after surgery. We work with clients who need help with weight loss and they need some assistance with removing toxins and waste and helping get their dream body. Whatever they went to the doctor for, we’re the ones with the post-operative care that put the cherry on the cake. Beauty is never going to go anywhere; even with COVID, people were sneaking out to get their hair done and their nails done. No matter what happens, people always want to look good and feel good. It's recession proof. [I told myself,] you know business a little bit, so I was like let me get in on this. I just love how it makes people feel.

As far as post-operative care, can you give an example of, let's say, one plastic surgery treatment that you would work with?

Yes, so, for example, if somebody were to get a tummy tuck or liposuction in an area of their body, post-op care helps to prevent specific diagnoses like fibrosis and seroma. Fibrosis is when fat cells get clumped up in the specific area and, if you're not rubbing it and moving it or massaging it, then it becomes hard and feels like a ball. So, you go through all this work to do surgery, to get your dream body, but you have lumps in specific areas because you aren't taking the time to make sure that you had regular massages and lymphatic massages to push everything out—to push all the toxins and fat cells to soften up and let go in the specific area where you know it's supposed to. We help with post-op care as early as the next day.

That's a really good thing to do! Do people know that? I mean,

I’m sure they're advised on what they’re supposed to do, but do they actually do it?

There’s some doctors that don't really recommend it. I had some friends that didn't and they weren't right. They thought they didn’t need it, but then they came to me and they did have some lumps in some areas. You can get really sick. There’s seroma, which is liquid fluid buildup that could be up under the skin, that can get generated from not taking care of yourself. And if it gets bad, you have to go to the doctor for them to manually take out the fluid that's in your body.

There’s also the risk of infection, right? There’s no contraindication with any of the treatments that you do including post-operative care?

There are certain things, of course. You can’t have a pacemaker or be pregnant because we do utilize certain technology such as ultrasound habitation and radio frequency. If you have metal items in your knees or thigh, it wouldn't be recommended, or if you have cancer… things like that. Most of the time, no matter how overweight you are, there is no BMI max limit; it's more open to utilizing the machines in the massages. Then, there’s CoolSculpting. With CoolSculpting, you’ll get turned down. With lymphatic massages, you can be in any weight; it doesn't matter.

It doesn't make any sense for you to come here and have your goals and then you leave me after your session to go eat fast food. You just have to be on the same page. You have to make a commitment to living a healthier lifestyle, which includes exercising and drinking lots of water. One of the requirements here is that you have been drinking at least two liters of water before and after your treatments because we are flushing all of these things out of you. We want you to be as clean as possible, and so the more [water] you have in your body, the easier it is for everything to get pushed out through your urine and in your bowel movements.

Let’s talk about the scope of lymphatic massage and what it entails. Can you briefly describe what it is and what benefit do people get from it?

So, there's a couple things that you can get. There’s quite a lot of benefits from lymphatic massage. One thing I tell people is, if you experience grogginess, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, things like that, it’s most likely that your lymphatic system is backed up. That’s one of the systems that we have in our body that needs to be activated by us. It doesn’t automatically work on its own. So a natural way to activate the lymphatic system is by exercising. You know, you're pretty much okay, you're good, if you’re exercising. But if you're stagnant, your lymphatic system is backed up. It’s buildup, and things are just not moving how it's supposed to. So when you come in for an lymphatic massage, I’m basically doing the manual work that would be happening if you were to be active and exercising.

Let’s get into CoolSculpting because I know there’s a vast range of treatments. What type of results do we see?

Most of the time, my clients have one specific area. We’re not going to for the same result. Seventy-five percent of my clients are coming in for the abdomen, which is great; that's the core. It’s where a lot of stubborn fat is, and it's hard to kind of remove it no matter how much you exercise or diet. So if you have fat cells that's right up on that skin and are very movable, then I recommend one of our treatments called Shaped Secretz Fat Blaster. It includes about three to four different modalities.

The first one that we utilize are the laser lipo pads, which basically are red laser beams that go inside to your skin and right up under and attack the fat cells and make them smaller, so it's trying to shrink the fat cells that way. We work on the fat cells that way for about twenty minutes and, in between me switching modalities, I’ll do a lymphatic massage to push anything that got worked on in all the fat cells. We have to either shrink or burst them. I try to move it towards the lymph nodes to make it easier for everything to get pushed out.

After that, we utilize ultrasound fat cavitation; it helps to burst the contents of what's inside the fat cell. It becomes liquid and, so when those fat cells become liquid, it becomes like moving the wand around in that specific area. You’ll hear a weird squeaking noise because the sound waves are actually penetrating through your body and the waves are making the fat cells vibrate. So, from them vibrating and shaking and doing all of that, it bursts. It liquifies, and then that's why it's important again, after the modality, to do lymphatic massage to push everything out that we burst. Then, depending on the type of stomach [the patient has], like a hard stomach, if it's not movable, I will introduce wood therapy with actual wood tools. It helps to scoop and create that curvature that you want, and it’s really just like the cherry on the top.

I always close my out with radio frequency skin tightening. It utilizes heat to warm up the body. What that does [is] it helps to create collagen within like 90 minutes; clients always see some type of difference within their first treatment. You can either lose anywhere between a quarter of an inch to, the most I've seen, two-and-a-half inches of the first treatment.

How many treatments do you usually recommend?

I don't. As long as clients want to keep coming back, because it’s not my body and I don't know how small they want to be; I don't want to offend anybody. I’m all about body positivity. All I say is the more the better, but I don't know when they want to stop. I don't know what they want to keep going. I always tell my clients to try out at least two treatments—see what that looks like for you. Everybody is different; while one person could take, you know, two or three sessions to get to where they want to go, one person mainly was a quarter of an inch for the first. Another client may lose two-and-a-half inches, so I can't really tell because everybody is different.

What advice do you have for an aspiring beauty entrepreneur?

To keep going! To be consistent. I’ve probably started over six to seven businesses in my lifetime. Each time, I got better; I understood different things. I didn't know before, and this is all about pushing through. I just won this pitch competition not too long ago; it was my second time applying. Last year, I applied and didn’t get it. I applied again and I got it! So it just makes sense just to keep going. Don’t get discouraged from it. We need to have struggles. I love struggles because I can say I went through this and look at where I am now. I want to be able to have a story. You want to be able to say “I made it here!” It will motivate other people to say, “Okay, well, she went through that, she still had the confidence to try to get it.” I just want to be, you know, that person or that model person that people can say, “Okay, she did it and I can too.”