The Beauty Bus will provide a beautician, wardrobe services, and brunch to women and girls living in shelters and transitional living facilities.
Why we care: Women and girls living in shelters often times have had to abruptly flee living situations, sometimes fleeing dangerous circumstances with only the clothes that they have on, and lack the monetary resources required to purchase basic beauty and wardrobe necessities.
How we’re solving this: Twice a month the Mobile Outreach Vehicle, “The Beauty Bus”, will visit women shelters and transitional living facilities to provide on-site beautician services, clothing and brunch with the goal of rebuilding self-esteem through beauty make-overs.
Self-esteem is the measure of how much we value, love and accept ourselves. Low self-esteem significantly impacts women and girls overall feelings about their own beauty. Six in ten girls stop doing what they love because they feel bad about their looks. Now imagine how it would feel being the mother of a daughter faced with the reality of living in a shelter. Imagine being that mother faced with the prospect of dealing with the stress and pressures of surviving everyday life compounded by the fact that you are homeless, your children are homeless and you can not adequately provide for yourself or your children. The impact of that reality can be devastating to one’s self-esteem thus creating the rippling effect of a mental barrier rooted in low self-esteem that can prevent or delay a successful re-entry into the working world.
If you have ever been fortunate enough to receive a beauty make-over, you know the overwhelming feeling of new found confidence and elevated self-esteem that exudes through you upon that first reveal. With the help of volunteer Beauticians, Make-up artists, and Wardrobe Stylists, the Beauty Bus will serve as a one-stop mobile beautification unit. Impoverished mothers and their daughters will have the opportunity to have their hair styled, receive a complete outfit, and have a healthy meal provided while being educated with the coping skills necessary to successfully overcome their current condition.
A Mac Make-up artist volunteer for the Beauty Busand told the story of why she wanted to volunteer:
“I was fortunate enough to lend my talent to a cause such as this once before and when I completed applying make-up to this 63 year old homeless lady and turned her around to see her-self in the mirror, the homeless lady looked with amazement at this new image of herself and immediately started sobbing and said that, ‘in all of her sixty-three years she had never known that she could look beautiful’. “I thought to myself how could it be that a woman living sixty three years has never thought of herself as beautiful? I knew then that this work was bigger than just applying make-up to a woman’s face. I knew that what I was really doing was applying confidence and self-esteem with every brush stroke.”
How many times throughout life have you heard the phrase, image is everything? Well if image is everything, then a healthy self-esteem and confidence is the everything that image is built upon.