Celebrating unity in diversity
and the power of peer support
Looking for a place where you're always accepted for who you are? It's here.
Our Mission
Comfortable In Our Skin helps young people of all appearances and abilities achieve their full potential by fostering peer support and celebrating unity in diversity.
“Unity in diversity” encompasses a broad range of conditions, races, and sexuality as well as physical states traditionally labeled as “handicaps” or “birth defects,” which we reject as promoting prejudice, exclusion and unnecessary feelings of inferiority. We want to promote a global culture that celebrates differences and works to ensure that every child can become a secure, productive member of society.
Comfortable In Our Skin is a support organization that is unique in many ways. It’s meant for kids and young adults. It combines the power and reach of multiple social media outlets. It does not define its members by a diagnosis. For those who are patients (you don’t have to be), it’s the only patient support website we know of that was created by someone who has both the doctor and patient perspective.
At ComfortableInOurSkin.org we want to know you no matter what you look like or who you love. Others will too. Explore what true beauty is, and find it in you. Whether you have a rare syndrome, a rash, a birthmark, a stutter, an acne emergency or a bad hair day, you’re not alone.
Let’s work together to create a world – online and off – where no one will be judged and rejected because of physical or mental differences. What we all have in common is the need to figure out how to be comfortable with our differences and unique qualities, inside and out!
Current Officers:
Founder/President – Margaret Lee
Vice President/Secretary – Alexis Navarro
Treasurer – Yasmine Sabri
Director of Technology – Lindsey Wanberg and Emma Zhang
Director of Social Media – Alexis Navarro and Hannah Mumber
CIOS Core Team (Past and Present):
Sarem Rashid
Justin Besen
Danielle Garry
Nathaniel Finch
Tatyana Fonseca
Lauren Kreitman
Lucero Leon-Chi
Kevin Liu
Kaitlin Mallon
Keith Morley
Elizabeth Tocci
“I'm a Boston pediatric dermatologist who sees everyone from newborns to young adults with birthmarks and skin problems. I love meeting people from different ethnic and social backgrounds. I think all babies are wonderful and I want to help them reach their full potential mentally, emotionally and physically. I joke that I was born to be a pediatric dermatologist because of my rare vascular birthmark condition, diffuse capillary malformation with overgrowth (DCMO). A third of my whole body is pink or purple. But there’s much more to my story.
I grew up without a specific diagnosis, partly because it didn’t exist until recently and partly because I didn’t want to be defined by one. I was bullied for my ethnicity even more than for my blotchy skin. They both made me feel like an alien.
Not anymore. I am comfortable in my own skin.”
- Dr. Margaret Lee, MD, PhD (Founder and President)