I was 25 when I heard "you have breast cancer."
It was an ordinary day. Coffee, a walk, checking messages. Then a voicemail that made my heart sink: “Hi Brooke, it’s your doctor. Call me back when you have a chance.” Her voice was shaking.
When she finally reached me, she asked, “Are you sitting down?”
“Yes — why does that matter?”
“I’m so sorry. You have breast cancer in your left breast.”
I was 25. It didn’t run in my family. I was supposed to get engaged; my life was supposed to be perfect. Instead I was on the floor, clutching myself, trying to breathe. I gave myself permission to fall apart — and then, at some point on that floor, something shifted. Okay. Cry first. Then figure this out. That became how I survived the next year: one impossible thing at a time.
Nobody warns you about the mirror.
Nobody warns you about the mirror.
Chemo strips your energy and your health, but it also takes something nobody talks about: the face you recognize. For me it was a random evening, getting ready for dinner with my boyfriend. I was feeling okay, good, even. Then I went to draw on my eyebrows and there was nothing there. No brows, no lashes to frame anything, and no idea how to draw them so they looked like mine. I stood there with a pencil, feeling like a clown. I never made it to feeling pretty that night. That was the moment that broke me a little. Not the diagnosis, not the chemo chair. The eyebrows.
So I fought back the only way that made sense: I did whatever I could to feel like me. New makeup. Facials. Cold capping through every round. Hours in a freezing cap while poison dripped into my arm - but I kept my hair, and keeping my hair meant strangers didn’t look at me like I was dying.
Chemo strips your energy and your health, but it also takes something nobody talks about: the face you recognize. For me it was a random evening, getting ready for dinner with my boyfriend. I was feeling okay, good, even. Then I went to draw on my eyebrows and there was nothing there. No brows, no lashes to frame anything, and no idea how to draw them so they looked like mine. I stood there with a pencil, feeling like a clown. I never made it to feeling pretty that night. That was the moment that broke me a little. Not the diagnosis, not the chemo chair. The eyebrows.
So I fought back the only way that made sense: I did whatever I could to feel like me. New makeup. Facials. Cold capping through every round. Hours in a freezing cap while poison dripped into my arm - but I kept my hair, and keeping my hair meant strangers didn’t look at me like I was dying.
People call it vanity. It isn’t.
People call it vanity. It isn’t.
When your body stops feeling like yours, a facial isn’t a luxury - it’s evidence you’re still in there. It’s what got me back on my feet after cancer without feeling like a total alien in my own body.
Then I learned what these things cost, and realized: I could afford to feel a little more like myself. Most women can’t. That’s not a beauty problem. That’s a justice problem.
Pretty With Purpose exists so that no woman has to stand in front of that mirror alone — or choose between paying rent and feeling like herself. We fund the services that give women back their reflection: cold capping, brows, makeup, skincare. Small things. Except they’re not.
By survivors, for fighters.
— Brooke Korine, Founder
