When I first started dating my husband Eric, I did what any good girlfriend would do: I peeped his medicine cabinet. And in it, I found an orange prescription bottle for Doxycycline.
Doxycycline is an antibiotic used to treat a variety of skin infections, including acne. Eric had been taking it every single day for ten years straight to treat his adult acne.
My husband first struggled with acne in his teens, and he tried to treat it (unsuccessfully) with skincare at the local drugstore before finally asking for a prescription medication. I wish a simple, straightforward skincare solution had existed for my husband's younger self. I wish he could have saved himself all the damage to his health that the daily Doxycycline would eventually cause. Since conventional skincare didn't work, he simplified the solution by going the extreme route of daily antibiotics. One pill and the acne was gone, but at great cost to his health.
When you struggle with visible skin flare-ups, you just want them to go away. You dream about being able to leave the house bare-faced and proud. Being a hard-driving, tough love kind of athlete, you start to go really hard on your skin. Harsh soaps, essential oils, drying alcohols. Maybe if you punish it enough, it'll get back into shape. Conventional skincare capitalizes on this to sell you more "holy grail" products than you need with "hot new miracle" ingredients that sound too good to be true. For jiu jitsu athletes, essential oil soaps utterly destroy sensitive skin. Your skin trouble never goes away, even though you're doing all the "right" things.
At Mil Usos, we went a different route: fewer products crafted with intention, using clinically proven ingredients that have mountains of evidence for soothing and supporting irritated skin. This means we use "boring" ingredients like green tea, curcumin, bisobolol, activated charcoal, and jojoba oil. We adore the dependable, yet under-appreciated ingredients like cranberry seed oil, sea buckthorn berry oil, and glyceryl laurate. None of these ingredients are exotic or newly discovered. They just WORK, and they work FAST.
In jiu jitsu, you need good fundamentals. The same is true in skincare. All the exotic extracts and even some of the trending prescription retinols mean nothing if you aren't feeding your skin what it needs to have a strong and resilient skin barrier.
I made this skincare for every grappler who suffers like my husband used to suffer. I made it because skincare shouldn't be so damn hard. It shouldn't be a money grab. It should be simple and effective, and always with high-quality ingredients.
Mil Usos is like the kimura of skincare: you can hit it from any angle, and that shit WORKS. Our products will soothe a variety of skin troubles because we use proven ingredients that work from every angle. We're proud to keep our skincare honest and hard-working for our fellow training partners who struggle with their skin.
In a world of endless options, thank you for considering us. We aim to bring you the most value and show up for you in all the ways you expect us to. Osss!
Why I started training jiu jitsu:
Before I started jiu jitsu, I was a dancer. Martial arts were nowhere on my radar.
At 26-years-old, I was living in the mountains of rural Peru with a physically abusive ex-boyfriend. He was Peruvian, and I was the foreigner. As the violence became more common and more extreme, I realized I might not survive it. I had no place to run. I had no access to a Peruvian bank account. I had no family, no resources. The area was so rural that there wasn't even a local police force.
I carefully planned my escape, and when I finally made it back stateside, I vowed never to allow myself to be so vulnerable again. I knew I needed to train. I found an old Gracie challenge video on Youtube, and after seeing the superiority of jiu jitsu against other forms of martial arts, I decided to give it a try. The year was 2014.
Training jiu jitsu wasn't a straight line for me. It wasn't love at first roll. I've struggled with injury, and I've trained under insanely dysfunctional professors in super weird cultish schools. I've wanted to give up many times. I've cried on my way home from class more times than I can count. I am not talented at fighting, but I am hella talented at grit. That grit (and unresolved trauma!) kept me going for most of my jiu jitsu life.
Now, things have shifted a bit. Overall, jiu jitsu has become more welcoming and easier to exist in. Not everyone needs to train like a professional MMA fighter. Some of us are just trying to put ourselves back together and figure out how to exist in this messy world. And I think that is a perfectly legitimate reason to train. There is room for all of us in this sport.