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Look Good Feel Better

In these informal workshops, professional beauty advisers from top cosmetic houses demonstrate skin care and make up skills. They will help you cope with any skin changes you might experience and they can show you how to look good and feel better during and after treatment. All participants receive a free gift of products used during the session so that they can continue the good work at home.

Celebrating 10 years of Look Good Feel Better

I first heard of ‘Look Good... Feel Better,’ the skin care and cosmetic makeover programme for women with cancer, back in 1992 while serving on the Reach to Recovery International Advisory Committee in Geneva. It struck me as a brilliant idea and I wanted desperately to import it from the USA for the benefit of our patients here at the Cancerkin Centre. With advice from American contacts, I called the Cosmetic, Toiletry & Perfumery Association in London – serendipitously, as it turned out, for they themselves had been looking for a cancer charity in this country with whom to pilot the programme. In a nutshell, I met over lunch with their then Chairman and Director General, Richard Bradley and Marion Kelly; we all felt that tingle of excitement and decided to go for it. A structure of working committees and groups was set up and many meetings were held over the next couple of years to establish every aspect of the programme. The first training sessions took place in the newly-opened Cancerkin Centre where the beauty advisers were able to work with real patients.

We launched the ‘Look Good… Feel Better’ patient workshops shortly afterwards and well, the rest is history.

It is thrilling to realize that in just 10 years, as the programme has spread across the country, now operating in 36 hospitals and cancer centres, more than 25,000 British women living with cancer have enjoyed the wonderful ‘Look Good... Feel Better’ tonic. Each one of them will also have received the valuable gift of all the preparations and cosmetics they had used in the workshop, thanks to the generosity and devoted work of the many volunteers, cosmetic companies and staff involved.
Gloria Freilich

Cancerkin ’s complementary caring services are available to patients with breast cancer, free of charge for a series of sessions, regardless of where they have been treated. Use the form to register and you will be contacted about appointments.