Making It Up
Danessa Myricks is the first to admit that her path to the beauty industry was unconventional. “I say that I am accidental in every way,” she says. “I knew nothing, I had no money, but I did have passion.”
Myricks began her career working in sales for a magazine publisher. She often saw makeup artists at photo shoots in the office. “I saw this life that was so separate from me at that time,” she says. “I was that corny girl in the corner who didn't even wear makeup.”
When the publisher closed, in 2001, she thought back to those makeup artists she’d seen in the office: people who were getting paid to express themselves creatively. She decided to try to become one of them. She supported herself with temp jobs while she began cobbling together makeup kits and doing unpaid work as a makeup artist to gain experience in the industry.
“I would just create color-cream piles that I would use for everything, as eyeshadow, as lipstick, as a blush,” she says, describing how she combined drugstore products to create the shades and textures she envisioned.
Her innovation came out of necessity. “I had to get very creative with layering unconventional things together,” she says. “And also I had to get very creative in creating shades, because the spectrum was very narrow. I knew that there was more possibility than what I was seeing in the store.”
In 2015, she founded Danessa Myricks Beauty as a response to the beauty industry’s lack of inclusivity. “I had experience working with all of these brands, and what I found is that they had their idea of who they were creating for, who consumed makeup,” she says. “I didn't see me. I didn’t see my friends.”
Her brand, which offers a range of multipurpose products, is now sold at Sephora. But Myricks says there’s still a lot of work to be done. “There are so many formulas that don’t translate on medium to deep skin tones,” she says.
She insists that, while some might think of makeup as frivolous, it affects a person’s life in big ways. “It changed how I worked, it changed how I showed up in meetings and in conversations, it changed how I showed up in relationships. It changed my entire life as a woman on this planet,” she says. “What we're doing is way more than putting color and texture in a pan or a pot. We're really impacting how people see themselves in the world.”
