Some people shape us in ways we don’t realize until much later. It’s rarely the speeches or the life lessons that reach my center, but the smaller things such as a repeated phrase, daily ritual, or familiar rhythm. Preferences that, for a moment, become part of our world and never really leave.
I was applying a red lip on a client yesterday and in the process, she told me that one of our old beauty school instructors had passed away a couple years ago. Her name was Maxine. I hadn’t heard. I didn’t know. And yet, I had just been thinking about her strongly a couple days ago.
It’s strange how memory works like that. Or maybe it isn’t strange at all.
Maxine had a presence. She was opinionated, quick, stylish, and never apologetic for knowing exactly what she liked. She was the kind of woman who told her students what her mother had always told her: put on your lips. There was something about the way she said it that stayed with me.
Like lipstick was for direction and readiness. Lipstick was a limb.
She used to support my career by ordering concealer and Ruby Woo red lipstick from me, years ago now. That specific shade became a kind of signature, like an exclamation point at the end of her presence. She knew her color. She knew her voice.
And that’s what I remember most: A feeling—that Maxine knew how to be fully herself, and that I wanted to unlock that same quality in myself.
We don’t always notice when someone is giving us permission to take up space, express ourselves, and wear what we want unapologetically.
And yet they do through tiny mantras, favorite shades, and the repetition of a habit they carry like a torch and pass to us without even knowing it.
When I applied that red lip for my friend and fellow beauty school alum yesterday, it felt like more than just makeup. It was to honor Maxine.