December 17, 2020
The Real Story Behind Our Vogue Paris Feature
photo by Bastien Gomez courtesy of Vogue Paris
I can remember sitting on my bed in high school, thumbing through the latest Vogue Italia with a stack of foreign fashion magazines by my side. These magazines were my treasures, my lifeline. I had carefully selected them during our last 2-hour drive to Columbus, Ohio. As I sat in my bedroom in my 200-year-old house in a tiny town in Ohio, they were my only link to the exciting and glamorous world outside.
I was learning to speak French at the time. I knew that I would never live there or even work there, but maybe it would help me when I started applying to fashion schools the following year. In the meantime, I could at least feel connected to the most glamorous city on the planet.
As I sat there in my bell-bottomed jeans with butterfly clips in my hair, I wondered, who were these editors that worked at magazines like these? How did they pick these gorgeous beauty products to feature and choose which outfits the models would wear? Where did they go to school, and how did they end up having the best job in the ENTIRE world? How did they ever get so lucky?
I would see a gorgeous skin cream and wonder, who was the owner of this company? Were they born into it like Max Factor, or did they somehow start their company from the ground up, learning to formulate their products, find manufacturers, and design the packaging?
Surely that wasn't something that I could ever do, but maybe I could get a job coming up with color names for the products, wouldn't that be unreal!? I would smile to myself at how silly that thought was, who gets to name makeup colors! HAHA!
That's part of why, last week, when I saw two of my moon sprays gracing the pages of Vogue Paris, I literally broke down into a fit of tears so violent and unexpected that I couldn't answer the phone when my husband called to congratulate me. My hysteria startled not only me but my two Boston Terriers that were sitting beside me as I wept.
I'm not sure that I will ever recover from the fact that this actually happened. I just keep thinking "Is this real? Is this really my life somehow?" We've had the great honor of being in several publications over the past year, but there was something about Vogue Paris, that just hit me like a gunshot straight into my core.
Looking back, maybe my highschool color naming fantasy is part of the reason that I came up with some of the silliest names possible for my products, like Unicorn Magic or Abracadabra. I was living inside the most ridiculous dream, starting a metaphysical skincare company, WHY NOT name them something so wild and so fun that even my teenage self would be proud of those names!
As my friend said to me on the phone the next evening when I confessed that I still couldn't even think about it without crying "Sarah, you're probably still going to be talking about this when you're an old granny." I realized she was probably right. So, I gave up on trying to hold it together.
I'm choosing to unabashedly celebrate this amazing, fantastic and wild ride. After all, such unexpected and amazing blessings are few and far between in life, we should definitely stop to celebrate them. And my teenage self? She never would have seen this one coming, but she sure as hell would have wanted me to celebrate it with a bang!
Thank you for being with me on this journey, and for being the reason that I even have this business! I can't wrap my mind around it, but I'm learning to accept that I probably never will, and that's all just part of the fun.
