We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chelsea Carreira. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chelsea below.

Chelsea, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

I knew I wanted to have a cute and catchy business name. Something different than what you normally see. The two C’s represent my initials. My nickname was CC from the time I was young from someone who was extremely important to me during a pretty hard time in my life. The “Beautymark” was a playoff of two things. 1.) my little “business” I had as a child making birthday cards for everyone in my family. On the back I’d always sign it as “Chelseamark” which I think was because of seeing Hallmark cards. Lol. (I was really little) so I thought it would be cute to incorporate my first ever business into my real business. 2.) A beauty mark is a real thing that many people have on their face! And since it is a beauty business, it all worked out great.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Growing up was not super easy for me. I was bullied really badly from the time I entered kindergarten up until my early adulthood. To this day I still experience some comments that aren’t very nice but I digress. Being bullied was an extremely hard time for me because I’m the type of person that wants to be friends with everybody. One of the things I was bullied about the most was my looks, and I was often told how ugly I was. Because of this I wanted to hide. The best way I knew how to hide was behind a mask of makeup to make myself feel more beautiful. So I proudly wore a ton of make up as a mask to protect me against cruel words. In doing this, I realize I was really good at make up. I started to do you friends make ups for auditions tryouts. I also started really practicing different luxe on myself. I gained my first clients my first year out of high school and from there I knew that this is what I wanted to pursue.

I knew that I loved the art of makeup itself. But I also knew that I wanted to help other people feel beautiful and confident in their own skin. Sometimes we forget how beautiful we are until we see ourselves in a little bit of a different light, and it works as a reminder that we are beautiful and we deserve to be confident.

From there, I dabbled in special effects make up, which I absolutely adore. It’s sort of works the opposite as beauty make up, typically turning someone into a grotesque creature. I also decided to go to beauty school to obtain my aestheticians license and become a skin care specialist, which I also have found a lot of love in.

Working with brides for their a special day is really rewarding. Knowing that they will look back on this day and you will be a huge part of it is really awesome.

Working with someone to heal their skin issues that they’ve felt insecure about most of their life is also rewarding. Helping them discover their confidence again by assisting in their skins recovery journey is also really awesome.

I think what sets me apart from other artists is simply where I started from what led me here. I also truly believe in making each experience, memorable and fun I like to laugh, make jokes, and really just enjoy the company of the client and help them to feel really comforted and welcomed in my studio, or in my presence.

I’m most proud of how far I’ve come. I know there were a lot of people that believed me and I know there were a lot of people that were skeptical. And I am super proud that I am able to run my own business and take care of myself, my pets, and live a pretty fulfilled life off of doing exactly what I love, and what I ultimately wanted to do more than anything else.

As briefly mentioned, bringing humor and entertainment into my services is something that sets me apart from other makeup artist and people in the industry, because I truly do love to make people laugh when they’re in my chair, and I naturally am very animated. I enjoy storytelling and also really listening to their stories and providing animation to even the stories that they’re sharing with me. So I really take pride that each experience my clients have with me is going to be a fun one. However, if there is someone who isn’t really looking for that type of experience, I am able to read the room, tone it down and we won’t go there but typically I do have clients that really enjoy the true nature of who I am, which ultimately is a giant goofball and part-time comedian ha ha.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Funding for my business was entirely done on my own. It was a very slow process. I essentially did everything one step at a time until I had a clientele where I was able to put more money towards investing in my business.

I didn’t start out with the most high-end makeup. I did not start out with the best makeup travel kit. I started very much from the bottom. Each paycheck I got at my normal 9 to 5 job and I purchased some thing that could go toward my kit until eventually, I was able to build that bad boy up!!

I worked a secondary job for many, many years before completely going solo on this business owning journey by myself. A part of me was scared to completely lose a steady paycheck unsure about if my business would be successful enough to pay my bills, and take care of my basic needs.

It took me many years to build my kit how I wanted it. Throughout beauty school I bought a few of my major machines that I needed for specific facials. I did that slowly during the duration of my time in beauty school, because even though I was in beauty school (beauty school is pretty much full-time) I still worked every night from 3 to 5 hours at my 9 to 5 office job, so I still had a little bit of income coming in and I slowly purchased the things I needed to build my studio.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

So, she is not necessarily my business partner or cofounder as a whole. Buuuut she is my hair gal! She goes with me on all major jobs to assist in hairstyling. She is my bridal beauty business partner in a sense! Because of her, I am able to take on larger groups, such as bridal parties, who want both hair and makeup services with her help. She does all the hair and I do all the makeup in those groups. Instead of me doing 1, 2 or 3 people’s makeup and hair on my own. Her being on my team allows us to take anywhere from 7 to 9 clients per group easily.

Her name is Marissa and we met through family, because we are cousins! We grew up together and somehow both wound up in the same industry as adults. So now we can team up and take on large groups of people desiring beauty services for special events!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.CCBEAUTYMARK.com
• Instagram: Www.instagram.com/CCBeautymark
• Facebook: Www.Facebook.com/CCBeautymark
• Other: https://linktr.ee/ccbeautymark?fbclid=PAAaYaFBWuroIej2ww-LTk5Q2ovJqGtzvYfZf5QZfiSxr7sWliB4kLjYDUSLI_aem_AY8MRRr-Dem-Z_R0ehTK8gg0Bkl9MLyltvO4O0E_IX1KLD7XDGUhEu8QJFaBWBcYN1g

Image Credits
Sara of Kiss my Aperture Tim of Motion City Films Antonio Alvarez Photography Alyssa Brooke Flores