When We Were Young
Can you remember what you wanted to be when you were little?
Some kids want to be clothed in magic, claiming their future lives as fairies or Kings and Queens of fairytale lands. Some kids fall in love with STEM, dreaming of building our cities high above the clouds, or bringing to life the technology of our imaginations. Some kids are born for the humanities: poetry, literature, music, and art intertwining with everything they do. But me? I wanted to “be a maker of makeup”.
I can still remember my first beauty product. I was 6 maybe 7 years old. I had been doing theater for a bit by that age, which meant I got to wear stage makeup when I was performing. But I’ll never forget the fire-hydrant red Baby Lips cherry lip balm that lived in the drawer of my bedside table, far before my theater makeup kit was created. I remember smearing thick layers of it on my lips, fascinated by startling glob of scarlet on my lips. I remember the smell of it, and the feeling that I was going to do something special whenever there was an occasion to wear it. It was just a lip balm, and yet the simple act of putting it on made me feel so happy.
I remember another time, I was a bit older maybe 10, at a friend’s birthday party. She had this special blush puff that she encouraged us to try. It was a makeup brush with blush powder inside it. If you swept the brush across your skin it would leave behind a trail of pink glitter, something I had never tried before. I was delighted, rubbing the brush over my cheeks again and again, unaware and uninterested at what it might actually look like on my face. I will never forget the look on my Mother’s face when she came to pick me up and found me with bright pink cheeks. I will never forget the comments I heard about how I “looked like a clown”. I will never forget the image of my mom rinsing my face in the sink as I laughed in the mirror, enthralled and amazed at how pigmented the blush was. Makeup was never about trying to “be more beautiful”, it was never about vanity at all to me. Makeup just happened to be the thing that brought me joy.
Now you may be wondering, Olivia, why in the world are you telling stories about times long past in a series about bringing more awareness to the in-sufficient representation found in the beauty industry? Well dear friends, the point I’m trying to make is this: as you can tell from my stories, makeup has played a critical part of my life from the time I was a child. Some of my earliest memories are ones of playing with my Mother or Grandmother’s makeup. Yet until I was 14 years old, I never once realized that being in the beauty industry was even a possibility for my life because I had never heard of a Korean being in the beauty industry. I was being suffocated, the zest and hope for a passion filled existence non-existent, because in the realm of the Korean Americans I knew, the choices we were given for careers and life paths didn’t resonate with me. And up until I realized that my life was wholly my own, and that I could be whomever I desired, I didn’t even realize that I could choose another path. It sounds ridiculous now, but honestly there is overwhelming truth to the saying “you can’t be what you can’t see”. It wasn’t until I saw a prominent Korean American blaze her own path in the fashion industry that I realized that I too could break out of the mold I was put in and blaze my own path in the beauty industry.
