By Anastasia Lambadaridis Heggie, Founder of Love You Well
Imagine if we were taught to love ourselves well. I think about that a lot. And I’m not talking about the Instagrammable version of self-love, the face masks and bubble baths and perfectly curated morning routines. Although the irony isn’t lost on me that I went on to found a beauty tech and skincare company called Love You Well.
I’m talking about the harder stuff: knowing your worth before someone else decides it for you, having boundaries without feeling guilty about them, resting before your body forces you to stop, and understanding that you don’t have to prove how much you can carry to be valuable. I sometimes wonder how differently my own life might have unfolded if I had understood this when I was younger.
Instagram – @loveyou.well
Being the strong one
I’ve spent a lot of my life escaping chaos while somehow also being caught up in it. It became so familiar I didn’t recognise it as chaos. I left home at 14 and went to live with my grandmother, and became fiercely independent. You learn to survive, to read a room, to keep moving. These skills took me a long way in life. I built businesses, became a mother, got married, spent more than 25 years working in skincare, and became the person who could make things happen. I was capable, resilient, and incredibly good at getting back up. For a long time, I thought those qualities were my superpower. What I didn’t understand was that constantly being the strong one can also become the thing that eventually breaks you.
Eventually, my mind and body had other ideas. A few years ago I reached a point where I simply couldn’t keep operating the way I had been. There wasn’t one neat moment where everything broke; it was messier than that. It forced me to look at patterns I had carried for most of my life and to recognise how often I had confused surviving with living. I had spent so much energy trying to create safety, happiness and stability for everybody around me that I had barely considered what any of those things looked like for me.
Where the name came from
That was where the words Love You Well really came from. Before they were a business name, they were a promise. What would happen if I stopped abandoning myself? What if loving myself was something that influenced the decisions I made, the relationships I accepted, the boundaries I set and the way I spoke to myself? I’m still learning the answers.
When I founded Love You Well in 2024, I knew I wanted it to sit at the intersection of self-love, science, skincare and soul. I’ve spent most of my adult life in skincare, so of course products and science are part of it, but Love You Well was never born because I thought the world desperately needed another beauty brand. I wanted to build something with meaning behind it. Every time a woman sees Love You Well, I want there to be a tiny reminder in there that she belongs on the list of people she spends her life looking after.
Fifty and still learning
At 50, that reminder feels more relevant than ever. This past year has held some of the biggest changes for my life and business. We moved our family, business and warehouse from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. While continuing to grow Love You Well, launching new technology, such as our Next-Generation LED Light Therapy Mask. There have been days when I have felt strong and incredibly clear about where I’m going, and others when I have wondered how I’m supposed to hold all of it. I’m usually the one bringing the energy, and I’ve had to learn that being that woman doesn’t mean I’m immune from quietly struggling too.
Maybe that is what my fifties are becoming about: not reinventing myself, but understanding myself. I can look back now at the girl who left home, the hustler, the mother, the wife, the entrepreneur, and I don’t feel the same need to judge any of them. They were doing the best they could with what they knew. I recognise my patterns faster now. Becoming isn’t about arriving at some perfectly healed version of yourself. Sometimes it’s simply noticing when you’re abandoning yourself, and choosing this time not to.
Coming back to myself
Love You Well is a growing business and I have enormous ambitions for where I want to take it, but the thing I am most proud of building at 50 isn’t actually a company. It is a life in which I don’t have to lose myself to prove that I love everybody else. I still overdo it. I still take on too much. I still fall back into fixing mode and sometimes recognise an old pattern only once I’m already knee-deep in it. But I’m getting better at coming back to myself.
I keep returning to the same thought that started all of this: imagine if we were taught to love ourselves well. Some of us were lucky enough to learn that early. Some of us learnt the exact opposite and have spent decades unlearning it. I’m somewhere in the middle of that unlearning now, and perhaps that’s why those three words mean so much to me. Love You Well isn’t a destination I’ve reached. It’s a promise I’m still learning how to keep.
