- Hello and welcome to Living in the Lehigh Valley, where our focus is your health and wellness.

I'm your host, Brittany Sweeney.

Being diagnosed with cancer can be scary, and treatments like chemo and radiation can lead to changes in your body, including your skin.

That's why Breast Cancer Support Services, in Berks County, offers clean makeup classes, helping patients to feel good about themselves while using products that won't irritate their skin.

A swipe here, a dab there, and a lot of blending.

These techniques are used in most makeup classes, but this one has some very special students.

- I loved this!

This was awesome.

- Breast cancer survivors.

- I'm not normally a makeup kind of person.

I usually don't wear makeup.

With my job, it's a little bit hard to just keep the full face of makeup on.

So being able to get together with other women who also want to learn some tips and tricks, and just have a good night together and, you know, bond a little bit, it's nice.

- Ashley Hughes, of Fleetwood, and her mom, Tammy Hughes, attend most of the classes offered at Breast Cancer Support Services, or BCSS, in West Reading.

- My mom and I like to do all these classes together.

- We look at what upcoming events there are, and then, we come and just bond with some of the other ladies that also do the classes with us.

- It's something we can share.

I love makeup, but she's actually not a big makeup person, so it's something fun for her to do.

- The mother-daughter duo are making the best of an experience they never hoped they'd share.

- My breast cancer journey started almost ten years ago.

I was doing a self-breast exam and found a lump.

- Years after treatment, including a bilateral mastectomy and finding out she had the BRCA Mutation, Tammy's daughter would also receive life-changing news.

As Ashley says, "Copy-paste."

- There was a lot of shock.

I was never expecting, at 31, to be told, "I'm so sorry, you have cancer."

- Ashley also had the BRCA Nutation, which puts those who have it at a higher risk of developing breast cancer.

- Something we share that we don't necessarily want to share, but it is what it is.

And I help her through it as best as we can.

- Helping her daughter through treatment by staying by her side, including here at the Safe Beauty class, offered by BCSS.

- Breast cancer can be serious a lot of times, and we tend to forget that we're women, too, and we need to feel good.

- Nina Rowley is a board member and Program Chair at BCSS.

- My skin changed from the different treatments and the different medications that I had to take.

I had trouble with aromatase inhibitors, which inhibit your hormones and their production.

And so, I felt like a teenager again with my face!

And it took a while to find something that could settle it down.

After her own skin changed following cancer treatments, she felt there needed to be a class offering safe alternatives to skin care and makeup.

She found Motives Cosmetics, which offers clean products.

- Those custom-blend products were designed for burn victims.

And so, they have a lot of soothing botanicals, which just helps with the skin, whether it's from a cosmetic standpoint, or even a skincare standpoint.

- Maleeva Lengel teaches the class aimed at offering a bit of makeup education, and a big confidence boost.

- I really felt that this was a community I could serve, and serve well, and I also found it's just a great time for them to take care of themselves.

- They don't have a lot of the chemicals and things that we find in a lot of makeup products, which is nice, especially when you're going through radiation treatment, chemotherapy, and even after.

Using talcs and different things are just not safe for your skin, especially if you have, in our case, like the BRCA Mutation, it just throws a high risk for even more cancer down the road.

- Switching to clean products to hopefully have a clean bill of health in the future.

- All of these products are actually great.

They feel light on my skin.

I came a couple of weeks ago and we did the custom foundation - I love that stuff.

It is so nice and so wonderful.

So any of these products, I would recommend for somebody who's going through this to be, you know, have that nice light face of makeup, but still feel confident in it.

- The classes are offered every couple of months and are free to breast cancer patients and survivors.

Those interested can contact Breast Cancer Support Services of Berks County.

That'll do it for this edition of Living in the Lehigh Valley.

I'm Brittany Sweeney, hoping you stay happy and healthy.