Start A Class, Change A Twang, & Get Some Healing

MEMORABLE MAKE-UP MOMENTS

A word from Mya James

Teaching?

I don’t even know… Probably the first Modern Make-Up Society class. It was like we developed the curriculum, we tried it out, ran it for 10 months, and tried to work out all of the kinks. It’s like a car. Your building and building it. You don’t know how it will work until you pull it out there onto the road. The first class was really cool. That’s when we knew we had something signature.

Traveling?

My most memorable moment abroad was my instructors class the professor for it in London kept failing me. We were going to go away for Christmas break. She came up to me and said “ Hey, take a diction class when you go home. Nobody can understand you. The reason you keep failing is, because you sound like a cowboy.” It kind of cleaned up my accent just a little bit. If your from Texas you have a twang. We don’t notice it until nobody sounds like us.

Personal?

This year… I met a young lady named Destiny through another business owner here in Houston. She wanted to do something special for her repeated client. It was during prom time. Prom time is a really signature moment here. With Destiny she has a skin lupus. Which is one of the most aggressive diagnosis of lupus in existence. Because of course your skin is the biggest organ. 

Your body is fighting against your body. She had a lot of near death experiences and a tough time in high school. We helped facilitate the prom experience for her. Because her Mom had been paying continuous medical experiences. As with any child that is sick. So as much as her Mom wanted to provide a lavish prom for her she couldn't. Destiny had just come off an expensive hospital stay. She had to take a costly form of chemo therapy. 

The reason why this was so memorable was because she has scars from the lupus. Some times they would open like lesions. So you can image how it looked. She would be called things like walking dead and zombie. At that particular time her lesions were closed and she was really happy about that. Mind you, she still had the scars and uneven skin tone. She was brown when the lesions close they are still pink. I couldn’t imagine going through school like that. Let alone a formal event. 

So when we did her make-up it took her so long to look in the mirror. As I was going through the make-up process everybody was looking. Their eyes were getting big, because they didn’t know how I was going to do what I did. Everyone was confident after the first phase when I unified the skin and got it to look like even skin. I finished up then she took pictures with the photographer for her prom photos. Finally her Mom goes just look in the mirror for a minute, and it was just. 

I was getting chills and I was about to cry. Because it was just the look on her face I don’t know. To me its just make-up, but its so not. For make-up in that one moment to erase all the things she had been through, and all the names she had been called. If its just make-up that did that then its healing. It's healing.