“DO NOT TOUCH ANY OF MY MAKEUP ANYMORE! IF YOU EVER DO IT AGAIN, I WILL MOVING OUT!”
Lily is crying and screaming at the bottom of her lungs, her face is full of anger and pessimistic. In the middle of her moaning, a middle-aged woman is shrieking from outside:
“Throw all your nonsense lipstick or whatever it is out of my house!”
That is Lily’s mother – a traditional Asian woman who believes in ghosts and drinks ginger tea every time she gets sick. She immigrated to America by boat in 1990, met Lily’s dad in a refugee camp and got married.
Lily grows up with nonstop stereotypes of how to become an “accepted” woman:
“The most important thing is to find a good husband who can take care of you.” Or :
“ A good woman should not dress up; they should be simple at all times.”
Unfortunately, Lily is the opposite person from her mother’s expectations. Lily loves hip-hop, overnight parties and drinking. But at home, she pretends to be a submissive and obedient daughter who likes reading books . Since she was young, Lily obsessed with get-ready channels and makeup tutorials by beauty bloggers around the world. She used to steal her mother’s lipstick and pretend to be a makeup artist in front of the mirror. She took it off as quickly as she could when she heard her mother was back home. She kept doing that until she turned 14 when she got her first job at a bookstore. Lily was so happy because she could buy her first lipstick by a minimum wage. She loves buying new products and collecting all the trendy products. She knew that her ultimate passion was makeup and creating her makeup brand.
But she knows her parents would not approve of “makeup” as her plan. For them, women better marry at a young age, or they will be a “leftover” on the market. Women should not put on too much makeup to keep their natural beauty. So, she tried to hide everything from them. But her parents have no idea that she was bullied from kindergarten because of looks. Lily always feels insecure about her appearance and gets shamed by her peers. But finally, makeup brings her confidence not because it changes her face, but because she knows she is the most gorgeous girl when she works for her passion.
But she could not hide everything, her parents discovered her makeup products and tons of pictures of her with makeup on. They were irritated and threw everything before she got home from school. She kept crying for the whole week in depression and then started to re-buy everything with her hard work . But after that, her parents will throw everything ever again and she keep replacing it more than 10 times. Then that day came, the day she finally felt hopeless and not respected by her own parents.
“ I WILL LEAVE THIS HOUSE AND PROOF I COULD BE SUCCESS WITH MY PASSION!”
she left. desperate. lost. ambiguous.
She moved to LA with the last $100 and a small suitcase. She would do every job to save money from a janitor at a hotel to a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. After 3 years of working without any rest days. She started building her own brand, investigating the ingredients, collab with the pharmacist and designing her own makeup line with all the experience and knowledge she gained from the past 15 years. The pre-launch process took her almost two years to finally publicise her first lipstick collection into the market. Her brand was not getting as well as she expected. But she did not admit defeat and kept pushing forward. 10 years later, she is nominated as Top 10 Influencers in the Makeup industry with a $500 million company.
“Makeup gave me the drive to follow my passion!” _ Lily wrote in her Vogue interview.