We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Renae BrownWatson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Renae, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

A few years ago I was a single mom of 1. I was trying to figure out how to make more money and decided I would get into doing lashes. Each client pays about $90-$125 on average per visit. each visit lasts about 2 hours. I wanted to go the legal route (as I’m not someone that can get away with stealing a .05 cent bazooka gum). I saw that in New Jersey, a lash tech is supposed to have an esthetician’s or cosmetologist license in order to (legally) provide these services. I decided to use my natural talent in makeup to draw in clients while I practiced lashes on a mannequin and considered estheticians school. Initially I only did makeup on myself. I began to get positive feedback from friends and followers, on social media, who encouraged me to continue. I eventually decided to start practicing on my friends. With that, came friends, acquaintances and friends of friends who began reaching out for makeup services. I fell in love with seeing clients loving their results and feeling beautiful as a result of my work. I am a girl’s girl. I love helping women feel empowered and beautiful. I love assisting people to feel more confident in general, but people who identify as a female specifically. Also, as a black woman, knowing that we spend the most money in self care items per year, I I decided that I want to open a beauty bar that offered self care services including makeup, nails, lashes and facials with a focus on black skin and beauty. There is a very clear lack of representation of black women and knowledge of black skin in mainstream media. This made my approach not only profitable, but more importantly, helpful to women like myself. For this reason, I decided to enroll into estheticians school in Sep 2020. In June 2021 I graduated with my certificate in skin care and became a licensed esthetician after passing the NY State Board exams in October 2021.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I am the owner of Bbeauty Lounge And Spa.

I am currently servicing beauties in the NYC/NJ area. I am a traveling MUA and the head Makeup Artist at Bbeauty Lounge And Spa. I am a licensed esthetician, and heavily focus my approach to beauty in skin care and balancing the skin. I service women for different beauty needs ranging from Bridal to birthday events. We will expand to skincare services in 2024 when we open our first location in Atlanta, GA.

We are a brand that believes that self care is a luxury that everyone deserves. With a focal point on highlighting black skin and addressing black skin care concerns, we believe this puts us at an advantage because this allows our clients to feel recognized and important, as they are! Our clients can expect to be treated top notch with excellent customer service from highly skilled, creative and knowledgeable professionals. We are proud and excited to set a new standard of beauty meeting customer service meeting luxury.

How did you build your audience on social media?

@brownbeautybabe is actually my second beauty page created for the business. My first page, which was named the same thing, was hacked at around 3k followers. The truth is, building a social media presence isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes courage and grit to keep posting even when your intended audience isn’t interacting (when they very likely just aren’t seeing it, and for a slew of reasons, some out of your control, and some in). Trying to grow followers requires humility, because you have to be willing to be honest with yourself and see whether or not you’re showing up the way people want to see in order to trust your brand. If you weren’t you, would you trust your brand? Would your service or product appeal to you? Would you follow your own instagram page, if you weren’t you. Learning to see from an unbiased lens, and being meticulous in the approach whether or not my brand looked how it’s intended to look to the audience who views the page (website included) and also consistency are the top keys, in my opinion towards building a social media presence. The next key I’ve found are most important are not taking things too seriously. The videos that were most responded to were trending (music or a challenge), informative or educational and entertaining. I noticed, for my brand, its best to do at least two of these in one. My audience didn’t seem to respond if it was too mundane and educational. they also didn’t respond if it felt like I was “trying” to be funny. Balance and be as natural as possible in terms of presentation.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson that I had to unlearn in this business was that I naturally wanted to appease my audience, and which ever way possible in order to get their attention and their patronage, so I would try to do looks or trends that didn’t necessarily feel natural for me now don’t get me wrong knowing and understanding trends in this atmosphere today is extremely important as a business owner, especially when you’re dealing with a certain age range in your target audience however, I felt as though there were times that I was losing my creativity and my drive, because I was trying to fit in a box, and even when I stayed on trend when it came to makeup looks such as cut creases I was not getting clients to book with me and that discouraged me. It also led me to learn followers does not necessarily equal clients! My hand, naturally does a soft beat. I can and do, do full glam but it still is not what I call transformative make up lol. What I refer to as transformative make up, is make up that makes you look like a totally different person, it transforms you. This sounds like something someone would not want however, I have heard it a few times or even read in social media comments where people have said that if they wanted it to look like themselves, they wouldn’t hire Make up Artist so they want to look like someone else for the night, which is completely fine because Make up is supposed to be fun. But, speaking for myself, my hand naturally goes for a soft glam, beautiful, effortless, timeless. I had to unlearn the idea that I had to fit into everyone’s box. Also, I had to learn that the popular make up artist is often the overworked make up artist because a lot of people prefer to not spend $100 or more on a make up application and again this is fine, but as a business owner, it’s important to practice self preservation. I can’t promote a luxury brand and feel as though I’m living anything but that. Make up is such a wide range and skills can range just as widely. I am now getting into FX make up and for those who do not know what that is that is working often on production sets, think of scary movies, think of sci-fi shows, movies such as the hobbit or Harry Potter… you’re making some thing come to life that is not necessarily there in real life even something as small as a bruise or a cut on a crime scene show is FX make up. For my private clients, I am still very much a glam artist. However, I had to learn that there isn’t just one way of doing make up just because it’s trendy within the black community to do it. There are plenty of black women who prefer timeless, soft beats, and I am the make up artist for them

Contact Info:

• Website: bbeautylounge.com
• Instagram: @brownbeautybabe
• Facebook: Brown Beauty Babe