I've been wanting to talk with Rebecca Alvarez's story for a while. She is an award-winning

entrepreneur, sexologist, and intimate product developer, three titles that do not often go together.

But I'm glad we waited for this moment when, like many of my very favorite conversations,

we find Rebecca and her company, Bloomy, a wellness brand, focus on clean, intimate care

essentials, at an inflection point, asking the very familiar question, well, what got us here,

get us to where we want to go next.

Rebecca, finally. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm glad it worked.

I'm so happy to have this conversation.

Rebecca, among the things you say about intimacy is that so much of the root of intimacy is unlearning bad sex ed.

What was the bad sex ed that you grew up with? My bad sex ed was actually no sex ed to

start with. I definitely saw love and my parents modeled that so well. But in terms of like in my

community, in my school, did we have sex education? Not really because it was abstinence-only education

in high school. It's wild that someone goes from growing up in an environment that is

abstinence-only to, I mean, by the time you were in college, you're very clear that you

want to study sex and sexuality. I sit at the intersection of so many things. Being Latina, a woman, I was a single

mom at that time. I just felt like I could relate to so many people's intimacy journeys.

And I wanted to create the spaces where we could talk about it. I didn't know exactly what it was

going to look like. But yes, in college, I tell this story, you know, I was apprehensive

about sexuality because my first year in college, I was actually assaulted. And I ended up transferring

home. I ended up at Cal, a very liberal, very progressive school where I could take so many

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