Metrin Story: Sonja

This photograph of Sonja Rennick was taken in December 2011, when she was 80 years old. 

She is sitting comfortably, turned slightly toward someone outside the frame. Her hair is silver. Her face is animated. Her skin has the unmistakable quality of skin that has been looked after for a very long time. 

By then, Sonja was accustomed to people noticing. 

“I am taken for at least 20 years younger than I am,” she wrote to Metrin in 2011. “Almost every day I will get a comment on my skin.” 

But Sonja’s story is not really about looking twenty years younger. 

It is about what decades of consistently caring for your skin the right way can leave behind. 

Before People Noticed Her Skin 

Long before those compliments became commonplace, Sonja had struggled with her complexion. 

She worked in the beauty industry and had access to the heavily advertised skincare brands of the day. She tried them. Something might seem to help for a while, but within a few months her skin would return to the same frustrating condition: oily in some places, dry in others, with breakouts and dry patches. 

“You name the top brands,” she once said. “I tried them all.” 

Then she saw an advertisement for Metrin in Time magazine. 

She was skeptical. 

“I could not believe at that time that one product would work for everybody,” Sonja recalled. But Metrin came with a money-back guarantee. 

“I thought I couldn’t lose.” 

So she tried it. 

What happened next mattered because of the work Sonja did. 

She was an electrologist. 

Every working day, clients lay on her treatment table, close enough to see her skin in a way most people never see another person’s complexion. 

And they began commenting on it. 

Sonja didn’t have to tell them to notice. 

They noticed first. 

“Within three months, I knew I wanted to sell this product,” she later recalled, “just because all my clients would comment on my skin.” 

In 1984, Sonja began selling Metrin. 

Her own experience had become something she wanted to share. 

A Life Built Around Care 

To understand why Sonja stayed with Metrin, it helps to understand Sonja herself. 

Her work as an electrologist required an unusual degree of intimacy and trust. Clients came to her for something deeply personal—their appearance—and while lying on her table, they talked. 

“People get on my table and they tend to talk,” she said. “And it stays in this room. It never gets discussed with anyone else.” 

She understood that their trust was part of her responsibility. 

“I think they know that or else I wouldn’t be here after all these years.” 

Sonja Rennick, from Metrin’s 2006 “Building Trust” profile. 

That same sense of responsibility shaped one of the most difficult decisions of her professional life. 

Sonja left the security of a department-store position and established her own business at home because she wanted to spend more time with her 13-year-old daughter. 

“She’s an only child and she’s never given me a day’s problem,” Sonja said. “I wanted to be home for her.” 

Because Sonja believed it would have been unethical to take her existing clients with her, she started over. 

Business was slow. She remembered that it took approximately two years to rebuild her clientele. She treated working from home as seriously as she would have treated working from an office: a separate telephone line, an answering machine, and enough discipline not to fill the quiet periods with housework. 

Eventually, word of mouth did what it had done before. 

People came. 

Then some of those clients grew older and began bringing their daughters. 

Sonja had created something that extended beyond a beauty service. 

She had created relationships. 

And that tells us something important about the way she approached Metrin, too. 

She didn’t believe that care ended when somebody bought a product. 

“It’s the follow up,” she said. “I think that’s very important. It shows that somebody cares. You’re not just selling it to make money.” 

That sentence may tell us more about Sonja than anything else she left behind. 

It shows that somebody cares. 

The Discipline of Caring 

Sonja believed good skin required consistency. 

When Metrin later asked for her best advice to someone beginning the system, her answer was characteristically straightforward: 

“Be diligent, great skin requires discipline.” 

She practiced that discipline herself. 

Archival accounts describe Sonja following her Metrin routine morning and night across the years. And as the years accumulated, so did the comments. 

Complete strangers noticed her complexion. Her clients noticed it. Her family noticed it. 

 Sonja Rennick, Metrin archives. 

Her niece, Lynn Mitchell, remembered seeing Sonja again after they had spent some time apart. Sonja was then in her seventies, and Lynn was so startled by her appearance that she wondered whether her aunt had undergone cosmetic surgery. 

“I said to her, Aunt Sonja, what are you using? You’ve got to share it with me.” 

Sonja’s answer was almost comically matter-of-fact: 

“I’ve already told you, METRIN.” 

There is something wonderfully Sonja-like about that exchange. 

She had already shared the answer. 

The rest was simply doing it. 

Again and again. Morning and night. 

Not for a week before an important occasion. Not until the next intriguing product appeared. Not because someone promised that time itself could somehow be reversed. 

She simply cared for her skin. 

And continued caring for it. 

The Patina of Care 

Looking at Sonja’s photographs today, we would not describe what we see as skin untouched by age. 

Nor should we. 

Sonja lived. 

She worked. She raised a daughter. She built a business. She listened to people. She earned their trust. She grew older. 

Time belongs on a human face. 

What Sonja’s photographs show us is something more interesting: 

the rich patina of well-cared-for skin. 

It is perhaps the clearest expression of what we mean by Skin Longevity. 

Skin Longevity is not the promise that a face will remain frozen at some arbitrary age. 

It is the idea that skin deserves to be cared for throughout the life we are fortunate enough to live—and that the value of good skincare is revealed not only in how our skin looks today, but in how well it is cared for through time. 

Sonja’s own description was much simpler. 

In 2011, after decades of comments from other people, she wrote: 

“Wouldn’t change, my skin never changes.” 

Then: 

“Thanks, Metrin.” 

There was no elaborate beauty philosophy in those words. 

She had found something that worked for her. 

She kept using it. 

And people kept noticing. 

Remembering Sonja 

Sonja Rennick has since passed away. 

What remains are photographs, newsletters, interviews, a few emails—and the memories of the people whose lives crossed hers. 

Together, they form an archive of a life. 

It tells us about her skin. 

But it tells us much more about the woman who lived inside it. 

It tells us about an electrologist who understood that appearance can affect how people feel. 

“I think the better you look, the better you feel,” she said. “There’s no question about it.” 

It tells us about a mother who changed the course of her professional life because she wanted to be home for her daughter. 

It tells us about a businesswoman who chose to rebuild her clientele rather than compromise what she believed was right. 

It tells us about someone who knew that selling something was not the same as caring for someone. 

And it tells us about a woman who practiced that same philosophy of care on herself, quietly and consistently, for decades. 

Not because she defeated aging. 

She didn’t need to. 

She showed us what it can look like to care for your skin as you live your life. 

And now, years after her passing, we still remember her. 

Because remembering is part of how we care.