A Natural Beauty - episode 65
Insta-Summer series guest #3. Nicola’s adventure in life has led her right to where she is now - styling women for their wedding through her speciality of hair and make up. As she herself says, It isn’t how people look but how they feel. If you can get them to feel lovely on their wedding day, they will look beautiful as well. It goes hand-in-hand. Nicola derives immense pleasure from coming alongside these brides and collaborating to come up with a look that is uniquely them. And who wouldn’t want to be around so much happiness for a living!
Instagram has helped her business even during COVID. Nicola has built connections with people by sharing a mixture of her professional life: various potential looks for hair and make-up, along with some from her personal life: walks with her dog, trips to the beach with her daughter. It’s a fun peek inside her life. I am grateful we carved out this time to connect one-on-one. It was a pleasure.
Honest. Hard-working. Kind.
— Nicola
Beautiful
Thoughts from A Natural Beauty
Helping brides feel, and look, beautiful on their wedding day, the way Nicola does, got me to thinking about beauty. What is it really? It is technically defined as physical attractiveness or good-looking. Hmmm. I get that is the classic definition. I believe it is way more than that. A few quotes to get started:
You define beauty for yourself, society doesn’t define your beauty. — Lady Gaga
Beauty is being comfortable in your own skin. — Iman
Let’s hear from a couple of men:
Beauty is the illumination of the soul. — John O’Donohue (Irish poet, author, priest - had to Google him)
Not your appearance, but your humility and power of love define your beauty. — Debasish Mridha (American physician, author, and philosopher - had to Google him too)
I love all four of these definitions; they speak to me which is obviously why I chose them. As a culture I think we’ve come a long way but we still have a long way to go. On the one hand we have added “body-shaming” to our lexicon because it’s a real thing but we also idolize celebrities who “look perfect.” Of course our better minds know better. Like so many things it is a process to detox from the way we are programmed to think of beauty. Maybe finding the beauty takes a bit of cultivation away from the shallow markers we are used to.
There are hundreds of songs with beauty or beautiful in the title. That tells us something. For me there is nothing like the raw, vulnerable song as sung by Joe Cocker, 1974. Google it. YouTube it. He is so in love you can feel how beautiful this person is to him:
You are so beautiful
To me
You are so beautiful
To me
Can't you see
You're everything I hoped for
You're everything I need
You are so beautiful
To me
I wonder, what does the word beautiful bring up for you - immediate first impressions. What does the word actually mean to you if you stopped to ponder it a bit. Do you know you are beautiful? That is actually a hard one to claim, I will admit. Isn’t everyone beautiful in their own way? (Cue the 1974 song…) And if you don’t get that you are too, why not? We need to take a beat, and look at the heart of each person. I believe that is where the true beauty, being beautiful, lives.
True beauty radiates not from outer cosmetics, but from the simple joy of making a difference for those that need your voice, passion, and time without expecting or wanting anything in return. — Deborah Barnes
