On daily rituals, quiet resilience, and the art of showing up for yourself.

The Morning Ritual

The morning light filters through the backyard as Frieda settles into her chair with a single cup of coffee. No phone. No iPad. Just the quiet communion between a woman and the space she built from the ground up.

This is her ritual, she explains—eight to nine months out of the year, even on chilly mornings, she begins her day right here. Frieda radiates something hard to define. Not frantic energy or forced positivity, but a kind of aliveness that feels earned. Present. Grounded.

When I ask her about herself, she doesn’t lead with hardship. She leads with life.

Built with Intention

Every detail of this home was chosen—Frieda and her husband spent a year and a half building it together. The backyard was his dream, the interiors hers. 

After coffee on the patio, Frieda walks. Four to five times a week, an hour to an hour and a half. Never on a treadmill—always outside, always moving. For years, she and her husband would hike all the way up to the Griffith Observatory from their neighborhood. Even recently, on a trip to the desert when her friends were dealing with knee pain and back issues, she went walking alone.

“It’s in my blood,” she says simply. 

She’s also practiced yoga for nearly sixteen years. Nothing can replace it for her. Not Pilates, not any other workout people suggest. This works. This grounds her.

Her daughter inherited the same devotion to movement. Both walk. Both practice yoga. Both understand that caring for the body is a form of honoring the life you’ve been given.

Her Story

When I gently ask about her health, Frieda’s eyes soften for a moment.

She was diagnosed with cancer in August 2024. Weekly treatment for three months, then radiation through May. It’s not behind her—it’s still very much her present.

Before we began, she’d made something clear: she didn’t want this conversation to center solely on her diagnosis. She wanted to talk about her life, her rituals, what brings her joy. And she’s right to redirect—the cancer is part of her story, but it’s not the whole story.

The diagnosis itself was the hardest part, she tells me. Not the treatment, not losing her hair. The moment of knowing was what undid her. But once she understood what lay ahead, she made a decision: she would not be consumed by it. She would stay above it, get through it.

She has always been someone who looks forward rather than back.

Resilience in Her Blood

This kind of resolve doesn’t come from nowhere.

When Frieda was sixteen, her father died. He was only fifty-one. She loved him deeply, but there was no room to stop. There was school. There was life waiting to be lived. She kept going because she had to, because that’s what you do.

She tells me she’s very much like her mother, and as she shares more, I begin to understand what that means.

Her mother was a Holocaust survivor—Auschwitz. She carried the numbers on her arm and an unshakable philosophy about moving forward. She didn’t dwell on what she’d endured. She’d lived through the unimaginable, and for her, that was enough. She didn’t need to revisit it, didn’t want to stay in that darkness. She chose to keep living instead.

Frieda mentions that even in her mother’s final years, she was still fully engaged with life—still finding moments of joy and connection. That spirit of resilience is something Frieda carries with her.

What Carried Her Through

During the hardest weeks of treatment, Frieda kept walking. Not always at seven in the morning like usual—sometimes later, whenever her body allowed. But she walked.

Her daughter came to stay with her, becoming her right hand through it all. There was never pressure, never urgency. Just presence.

When I ask if she ever felt lonely or isolated during treatment, she’s quiet for a moment, then shakes her head.

There are support groups, plenty of them, but she’s never felt drawn to that. She has her people, and that’s enough. She’s centered in herself, grounded.

Her routines haven’t fundamentally changed since her diagnosis. It’s still the morning coffee on the patio. The walks. The yoga. Her skincare routine. The mascara and lipstick before facing the day.

Small, consistent ways of showing up for herself—that’s what keeps her steady.

When I ask what she might tell someone walking through their own difficult season, Frieda considers the question carefully.

“Focus on what’s good,” she says. “Be grateful for what remains, even when so much feels broken. Life will never be perfect—there will always be something hard, something painful. But if you can find the strength to meet it from a place of positivity rather than defeat, that changes everything.”

And then, with quiet conviction:

“Be kind.”

She remembers the nurses who met her exhaustion with gentleness, who showed up with positivity even on her hardest days.

“Kindness returns to you multiplied. If you put goodness into the world, you’ll find it waiting for you when you need it most.”

The experience showed her a strength she hadn’t fully recognized in herself before, and deepened her gratitude for the practices that kept her grounded through it all.

Discovering Blumenès

During treatment, Frieda stopped most of her rituals. Between weekly chemo sessions, she was just trying to survive long enough to go back and do it again. The medication dried her out completely—eyes, nose, mouth, skin. She developed allergies for the first time in her life. Her skin became hyperpigmented, looking sunburned even though she’d been nowhere near the sun.

By the time radiation ended in May, her skin felt foreign to her. Depleted. Lifeless.

Her dermatologist prescribed a cream that helped fade the hyperpigmentation over two months. But even after that, something was missing. Her skin had been through too much.

Frieda doesn’t spend hours in the mirror, but she jokes that her husband says she can’t take out the garbage without her lipstick on.

It matters to her, this small act of care. It’s about showing up for herself in small, consistent ways. And after everything her skin had been through, she wanted something that would help her feel like herself again.

That’s when she returned to the Blumenès products she’d received months earlier from Mishel, the brand’s founder. The two women had met through their husbands, but there was an instant connection between them—the kind that transcends circumstance, that feels like recognition.

Frieda had been waiting for the right time. She didn’t want to layer products or muddy the results. She wanted to try these alone, to see what they could do on their own terms.

She established a clear routine: Gold Drops at night after cleansing, Surreal Silk Serum in the morning before moisturizer. Nothing else. Just those two products, morning and night.

The transformation exceeded anything she’d hoped for. Every night, she washes her face and applies the Gold Drops before bed. In the morning, she tells me, her skin feels soft and alive again.

At seventy-five, with no surgery, no injectables, no shortcuts—just intention and care—her skin glows.

She’s meticulous about it, she tells me with a small laugh. Every single drop matters. She doesn’t want to waste even one.

It’s not vanity. It’s something deeper. It’s a ritual. It’s the daily act of choosing herself.

What Remains

As we finish our conversation, I’m struck by what Frieda represents—not just for this brand, but for anyone navigating the challenges of life.

Even now, while navigating treatment, she could give herself permission to let the small rituals go.

But she doesn’t. She keeps moving. She keeps choosing herself. She keeps finding moments of joy and beauty.

Frieda’s Favorites 

Hero Products:

Gold Drops

Surreal Silk

Currently Reading:

The Bird Hotel by Joyce Maynard

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

Frieda’s story is a reminder that true radiance is not about erasing our struggles. It is about honoring them, while refusing to let them have the final word.