I’ve been listening to a book by Jamie Kern Lima, called Believe IT. She is a remarkable young woman, who started a natural cosmetics company because she needed better coverage for her rosacea while working as a TV anchor. She ended up selling it to L’Oreal for B$1.2, yes, that’s a B. She also created quite a stir by pushing the beauty industry to be more inclusive and show more real women in their advertising. I find her story incredibly inspiring.
Why am I telling you about this? I don’t even use makeup, although I do take care of my skin. It’s because I was struck by her mantra: you can’t fake authenticity.
Jamie and her company, IT Cosmetics, became the biggest beauty brand on QVC because she was authentic. She would take her makeup off on live TV so people could see her rosacea and hyperpigmentation, and how well her concealer worked. She brought in models that looked like real people, with real skin issues. Other companies tried to knock off her products but they didn’t dare do what she did, and so they didn’t have her success.
All of this seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time, she was told by experts that people would never want to buy makeup from her, because she didn’t look like a supermodel. She was told her products wouldn’t sell on QVC because she didn’t bring in glamorous young women in their early twenties, with perfect skin, to model them. That’s how it was being done in 2010. It’s easy for us to say now, in 2021, that of course she was right to follow her intuition on this, but as Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. Jamie had no way of knowing, aside from the still little voice inside her, that it was all going to turn out well. I think her superpower, aside from an ability to work incredibly hard, is in her courage in listening to that voice, and following it despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary.
How many of us are scared to show our authentic selves to the world? How many of us are listening to the experts who tell us that the way it’s always been done is the way it must be done? Jamie endured hate on the Internet for speaking her truth – not many people have her courage. Social media can be a wonderful place of connection and community, but it can also turn into a place of vicious bullying, death threats and worse. This is where true friends and supporters really shine – Jamie had her network of people who believed in her, because they had seen her real heart.
If you have a message to share with the world, if you dream of helping others so they don’t have to suffer in the same way that you did, you have to have the courage to step out there and show yourself.
Are you with me? I believe in you. Will you believe in yourself?