Around age 11, every Sunday after church, my mother would let me charge one beauty product from the local pharmacy. For the entire week leading up to this event I would scour every fashion magazine deciding which product I should buy to carefully organize in my repurposed fishing tackle box. By the time I was 18, I was a licensed aesthetician, and opened my very own facial boutique in my hometown. I raided the kitchen cupboard and garden beds for natural ingredients that I whipped into DIY treatments to suit my clients’ needs and featured Sothys of Paris and Trucco by Sebastian, a cult-favorite at the time. 

My curiosity for life and travel soon had me leaving my small town and heading to Dallas, where I lived next to the second Whole Foods, and would spend hours shopping the aisles filling my basket with anything that I could possibly translate into beauty.

NYC had piqued my curiosity at age 17 (another story for another time) so I took a gamble, and with just $200 in my pocket and no promise of a job, I moved to Manhattan determined to pursue my dream of becoming a makeup artist and working in fashion.  

I started by working the front desk of The Morgan’s Hotel, the first boutique hotel opened by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager of Studio 54. I worked for a designer in the fashion district, the very first MAC cosmetics store on Christopher Street, and, over time, began to assist legendary makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, all while building my own portfolio.  

I lived in tiny apartments, wore vintage Levi’s and thrifted t’s, worked gruesome hours and through years of hard work, prettied the faces of many models and celebrities for publications including Seventeen, Glamour, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, the same magazines I pored over as a child.

In 2003 I chose to move back to Texas to care for my father who was battling ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). We spoke often of whether his years of living in farming communities and the possible exposure to environmental toxins had something to do with his illness. He wondered whether living his life through a lens of wellness, like I had always tried to do, would have spared him from ALS. It was during these years I cared for him that he gave me the “wink” to fully embrace the person that I was and the lifestyle that I had quietly pursued. Losing him was the catalyst that drove me to rethink my career in pursuit of making a difference in other people’s lives.     

I left New York and headed to Venice Beach, California in hopes of throwing my makeup kit in the ocean (figuratively!! I would never do that to the ocean!). Within a few months, I picked up the book Not Just a Pretty Face by Stacy Malkan, which exposes the beauty industry and their use of potentially harmful ingredients, and had a life-changing awakening.