Rising Stars: Meet Valeria Ponce De Leon of Glendora

Today we’d like to introduce you to Valeria Ponce De Leon.

Hi Valeria, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
The Fountain of Youth Skin and Body Care really began with my mom, Roxana. Long before my sister and I ever imagined ourselves working together in this industry, she had a vision for creating a place centered around care, wellness, beauty, and helping people feel better in their own bodies.

My mom was the first one in our family to become a massage therapist and later an esthetician. She was also the first one to take the leap into entrepreneurship. Over the years she owned two businesses in Pasadena and later opened another business in Duarte. That location unfortunately never had the opportunity to fully take off because of the city moratoriums happening at the time. For a lot of people, an experience like that might have been enough to give up on the dream altogether, but my mom never really let go of hers.

Watching her is ultimately what influenced both my sister and me.

I followed her into massage therapy and have now been in the industry for about 20 years. Over time, I kept expanding my education and developing my own approach to wellness. I became an esthetician, studied Reiki and sound healing, and began combining my background in bodywork, skincare, music, and holistic wellness. Eventually that led me to create Cymatica Healing Arts within The Fountain of Youth, where I am able to explore another side of healing through sound therapy and immersive wellness experiences.

My sister Claudia originally took a completely different path. She came from the banking industry, so she brought a different perspective and skill set into the family. When we decided to finally bring this dream together, she also became an esthetician. Now she is continuing her education in nursing with the goal of becoming an aesthetic nurse. Our long term vision is for her education to help us eventually expand The Fountain of Youth into a med spa and continue growing the level of care we are able to offer.

When we finally opened The Fountain of Youth Skin and Body Care together, it felt like something that had been in the making for years was finally coming full circle. It was no longer just my mom trying to carry her dream by herself. Her daughters were standing beside her.

For us, that is probably the most meaningful part of the story.

We are three women from the same family, but we have taken three very different paths to get here. My mom brought the original vision, decades of experience, and the courage to keep trying even when previous businesses did not work out the way she had hoped. I brought years of massage therapy, esthetics, holistic wellness, creativity, and a desire to keep evolving what wellness can look like. Claudia brought her business background, became an esthetician, and is now building the medical knowledge that we hope will shape the next phase of the company.

Together, those pieces became The Fountain of Youth.

Our goal has never been to simply open a spa and stop there. We want this business to continue evolving so that we can better serve our community. Today we offer massage therapy, skincare, advanced esthetic treatments, body treatments, wellness services, and holistic experiences, and we are constantly continuing our education and looking for ways to improve what we offer.

The journey has not been perfect or easy. Building a small business is difficult. Building one with your family adds an entirely different layer because you are learning how to be business partners while still being a mother, daughters, and sisters. We have experienced setbacks, financial challenges, disagreements, and growing pains. But I actually think those parts of our story make what we are building more meaningful. We are learning that legacy is not something that appears overnight. It is something you build little by little, sometimes through struggle.

As Latin American women, there is also something incredibly powerful to us about being able to create something of our own. Our version of the American dream is not necessarily about becoming successful overnight. It is about taking the opportunities and skills we have been given, working hard, continuing to educate ourselves, creating opportunities for the next generation, and hopefully leaving something behind that is bigger than any one of us.

When I look at The Fountain of Youth today, I see much more than a spa. I see my mom’s perseverance. I see the chances she took before we were ready to take them ourselves. I see everything she taught her daughters without probably even realizing she was teaching us.

She planted the seed.

Now the three of us are growing it together.

And what is exciting is that we still feel like we are at the beginning of the story. Our hope is that one day we can look back and see The Fountain of Youth not only as the realization of my mom’s original dream, but as the beginning of a family legacy that continued to evolve, serve our community, and create opportunities for the generations that come after us.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Definitely not. I think one of the biggest lessons for us has been realizing that loving what you do and being good at your craft does not automatically make running a business easy.

One of our biggest challenges has been the financial reality of keeping a small business going while still trying to grow it. There is always something that needs to be invested back into the business, whether it is equipment, products, education, marketing, maintenance, or simply keeping up with overhead during slower seasons. There have been months where we have felt really encouraged and others where we have had to ask ourselves what we need to change.

Another challenge has been balancing the business with our individual lives. We are not people who had unlimited time or resources to pour into a startup. We have had other jobs, family responsibilities, school, motherhood, and everyday life happening at the same time. Sometimes building the business has meant working a full day somewhere else and then coming back to work on marketing, appointments, events, or administrative tasks afterward.

Working with family has also required a lot of growth from all of us. We love each other, but we are three very different people. Learning how to communicate as business partners, divide responsibilities, make decisions together, and not allow personal disagreements to affect the business has probably been one of our greatest ongoing lessons. When we are aligned, we accomplish so much. When we are not, we feel the difference immediately.

Marketing has also been a learning experience for me personally. We are competing with large spas, med spas, franchises, and businesses with much larger advertising budgets, so we have had to become creative about getting people through the door. A lot of what I have learned about branding, social media, content creation, events, and promoting our services came from simply figuring it out because the business needed it.

There have definitely been moments of doubt. There are days when you look around and wonder whether all of the work is going to pay off. But then a client tells us how much better they feel, someone comes back and brings their family, an event sells out, or we see one of our ideas actually working, and it reminds us why we keep going.

I think the biggest struggle has been learning that building something meaningful takes much longer than people sometimes realize. We are still figuring things out. We are still improving. But every challenge has forced us to become more resourceful, more creative, and more intentional about what we want The Fountain of Youth to become.

We are not a finished success story yet, and I actually love that about where we are right now. We are still in the part of the story where we are fighting for the dream.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My work has always centered around helping people feel better in their bodies, but over the years the way I do that has continued to evolve.

I have been a licensed massage therapist since 2006, so bodywork was really my first language in wellness. After nearly two decades of working with people hands on, I developed a very intuitive understanding of the body, tension patterns, stress, and how much our physical and emotional well being can affect one another. Later, I became an esthetician, which gave me another way to care for people through skin health, advanced treatments, and helping clients feel confident in themselves.

What I love most is that I do not really fit into one box. I have continued studying different modalities including Reiki, sound healing, skincare, body treatments, and technology based wellness. I am also a lifelong musician, so eventually my background in music and wellness naturally came together and I created Cymatica Healing Arts, my sound healing practice within The Fountain of Youth.

Through Cymatica, I work with crystal singing bowls, gong, chimes, drums, tuning forks, and other instruments to create immersive sound experiences. I am fascinated by cymatics, vibration, frequency, and the way sound can shift the way we feel physically and emotionally. I have also started creating more immersive events that combine sound, breathwork, music, atmosphere, and community. I really enjoy taking wellness outside of the traditional spa treatment room and turning it into an experience people remember.

I think what sets me apart is that I approach every person as an individual. Whether someone is coming to me for massage, a facial, body work, or a sound experience, I am not interested in simply running everyone through the same protocol. I pay attention. I ask questions. I look at what that person actually needs that day and pull from the different skills I have developed over the years.

I also love combining the traditional with the modern. I can appreciate the technology behind advanced skincare and body treatments while also appreciating something as ancient and simple as touch, breath, vibration, or sound. I do not believe wellness has to be one or the other.

What I am most proud of is how much I have allowed myself to evolve. I started as a massage therapist almost 20 years ago, and I could have stayed in that one lane forever. Instead, I kept learning. I became an esthetician. I explored holistic healing. I returned to my connection with music in a completely different way. I learned marketing and content creation because our family business needed it. I started producing my own wellness events and building Cymatica Healing Arts from an idea into something that feels uniquely mine.

More than anything, I want people who work with me to feel cared for, seen, and a little more connected to themselves when they leave than when they walked in. Whether that happens through my hands, skincare, sound, or simply creating a space where someone can slow down for an hour, that is the work I am most proud of.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I would say resilience is probably the quality that has mattered most to my success. I have learned that things are rarely going to happen exactly the way you planned, especially when you are building a business, raising a family, and trying to grow at the same time.

I have had to learn how to adapt, pivot, teach myself new skills, and keep moving even when something does not work the first time. I am naturally very creative and resourceful, so when I see a problem, my brain immediately starts looking for another way around it.

I also think curiosity has played a huge role in my growth. I am always learning, whether it is massage therapy, esthetics, sound healing, skincare technology, business, marketing, or something completely outside of what I originally thought I would be doing. I have never wanted to stay in one box.

More than anything, I think success comes from being willing to keep showing up. I have had moments where I doubted myself, felt overwhelmed, or wondered if something was going to work, but I keep going. I keep learning, creating, and finding new ways to move forward.

To me, success is not about never struggling. It is about not allowing the struggle to be the end of the story.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fountainofyouthskinandbodycare.com
• Instagram: @fountainofyouthskinandbodycare
• Other: https://thefountainofyouthskinandbodycare.glossgenius.com/contact