1984: Anna was born in the Jinan Plateu (a mountainous farming region) in South Korea. Her birth name is Lee, Mee Ra.
1985: Anna was adopted into a loving family in a small town in Minnesota when she was six months old.
1994: Anna’s American mother worked at a bookstore every summer and Anna spent much of her childhood there, pouring over books about skincare and health. She loved reading about the lymphatic system, dry brushing and drinking hot lemon water first thing in the morning! She begins gathering herbs and flowers from her yard to make skin care concoctions and steam her face with boiling water. *This is an estimate on the exact year. She had to use the microwave because she was too young to boil water on the stove, so somewhere between 1993 and 1995.
1996: Anna’s mother encouraged her skincare obsession! For her 12th birthday, her mom got her a private one-on-one session with a Mary Kay consultant, and let her get every product her little heart desired!
1997: Anna’s mother got her a facial for her 13th birthday.
2001: Anna was a depressed teenager. She didn’t like how anti-depressants made her feel, so she started studying different forms of meditation and yoga asanas—all in private because she didn’t want people to think she was weird.
2003: Anna graduates high school and enrolls in esthetician school.
2004-2015
Anna starts making skincare products in her kitchen in 2004 while working as an esthetician and massage therapist, and studying to getting degrees as a Clinical Esthetics AAS, Medical Massage AAS, and a Master’s in East Asian Medicine.
She took lots of workshops including Thai yoga bodywork, yoga teacher training, qi gong, reiki, and myofascial release. In 2008, she did her first 10-day Vipassana.
For 11 years, she had 70 hour weeks (full-time student + full-time job). She experiences how essential self-care is!
2005: Anna gets her CIDESCO accreditation, an internationally prestigious qualification for aesthetics and beauty therapy. She goes on to teach students to become licensed estheticians at the first CIDESCO accredited school in the U.S. After a semester, she left as she preferred being in the treatment room giving facials and creating home-care skincare routines.
2015: Anna finds out the full translation of her birth name “Mee Ra” means “to grow up to be beautiful.”
Anna meets her biological mother in Korea. She finds out that her mother worked as a skincare specialist while she was pregnant with her, and that she comes from a long line of health care professionals. She also learns that her great-grandmother was a shaman.
Anna had always dreamt of working with a chemist and leveling up her kitchen creations to formally start a skincare line. She returns to California and immediately starts formulating products with a chemist.
She becomes a licensed acupuncturist, and starts giving acupuncture facials with all of her ‘products in development’ *from her chemist while they were modifying formulas before moving forward with production.
2017: After 13 years of making and perfecting formulas, Mee Ra Rituals is born. Anna starts selling to her patients, friends, and family via word of mouth and social media. Mee Ra Rituals slowly yet surely creates a small yet very loyal family via Instagram. Products sell out every time. She moves to San Francisco.
2017-2019
Anna tries to manage and grow the “backend” of Mee Ra Rituals skincare, but struggles because she is busy in the treatment room giving acupuncture facials.
2020: Covid-19. Anna has spent the past 16 years in the treatment room. She panics, then has so much fun connecting with people online and sharing self-care rituals! For the first time, Anna identifies as being Asian. There’s more about that here if you’re interested.
