Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Holland. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.
I think positive changes to the American education system would be to balance curriculums with more elective classes and relevant life skills. We spend over 12 years in school and graduate as “adults” without any education in the necessary understanding of filing taxes, managing checkings and savings accounts, renting or buying a house, insurance or building credit and so much more. In addition to the curriculum not teaching students necessary life skills it also places an extreme focus and bias on the traditional college route while dismissing or undervaluing trade work. There are so many brilliant students who simply don’t have the capacity to sit still and do book work for six hours a day, but if you show them under the hood of a car or the chemistry and artistic process of dying hair then suddenly they’re taking off like they’re the smartest kid in the room.
The standard track that students are encouraged to follow is highschool, college and then career, which is emphasized by the requirement to pick your future career as early as sixth grade so you can get into the right classes early. Once your classes are set the focus becomes the highest learning level (honors, AP, early college credits) which correlates to how good of a student you are. I once had a guidance counselor deter me from starting work study (working part time in exchange for school credit hours) by saying that work study was “for the trade school kids who won’t go to college and need to get started early” and that I had “too much academic potential” for that. Some of those kids are now master plumbers and electricians making more than anyone else I know because they had a knack and interest in something other than book work and they found a passion and career all in one. No matter what happens to the world we will always need plumbers, mechanics and welders. There will always be buildings to be built and facilities to be maintained and people will always pay to get their hair or nails done. I think the biggest problem with our education system is that kids aren’t encouraged to be smart in their own ways and aren’t given all the different options they have in terms of a career because some are viewed as lesser paths than others.
I really tried to take the college route but having made it to where I am now, I’m so glad that I didn’t. At 25 years old I’m watching friends who just graduated college struggle to qualify for jobs in their field, or still struggling to pay bills with the job they did manage to get while being tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Meanwhile I’m nine years into my career, have built a successful business and started a secondary career path without accruing any debt.
I understand this is a case-by-case situation. One of the biggest factors to my success was the effort of my parents to instill a strong work ethic, educate me on financial literacy and life skills and support my “non-traditional” career path by trying to find tools and education to help me grow. Not everyone is lucky enough to grow up with someone who’s always in their corner and helping them along, which is exactly what our school systems could be. Instead of teaching kids that there’s one right direction to go with their career, maybe they should teach that if they truly love something and work hard at it then there are ways to make a successful career out of that passion. It speaks to a larger overarching issue of assuming that success looks the same for everyone: College based 9-5 career, house and family by early thirties and retirement and travel by sixty. This may have been the dream and standard of success over the last fifty years but before asking people if they are successful I think we should ask them if they are happy, because to me they are the same. I think if our education systems focused on helping kids find what they love and cultivate it into different career opportunities then perhaps people would grow to live a full and more content life.
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?
My artistry didn’t start out with the goal of becoming my career, it was simply something that I loved. I had always been interested in art but that shifted to makeup artistry when I started doing stage tech for my high school’s theater in my freshman year. I became really interested in learning stage and theatrical makeup to compliment the already fantastic work of our actors and found a real excitement for it. During my sophomore I took it a step further and began assisting a local makeup artist who specialized in pageant contestants and frequently traveled the East Coast to provide makeup for different pageant circuits until I graduated high school.
By this point I had realized that this was something I could make a career out of. I had already started shifting towards bridal clients on my own but I wanted grow, so I started to explore formal education, It was actually my mom who discovered The Makeup Designory in New York City. This intense, accredited 612 hour program took the natural ability that I already had and honed it into the skills and confidence that I knew I could reach. Unfortunately this was the summer before the Covid-19 pandemic, which left my industry shut down and forced me back in to waitressing. As someone who had just finished my education and was excited to start a career in the biggest city on the East Coast, it was an incredibly stressful and discouraging time. Thankfully, this changed in the start of 2021 when I had the opportunity to move to Los Angeles. Despite the fact that I never intended to move to the West Coast and was scared to leave my family and everything I knew, I felt that this was an opportunity I could not pass up and I think I knew deep down that it was the step I needed to truly launch my personal career – Luckily my intuition paid off.
It took about four months of scouring Facebook pages and job listing to offer a lot of TFP (Trade For Photo) and free collaboration work, but this is where I met some of my best connections and developed my specialty of “no makeup” makeup. Apparently this wasn’t quite as common around LA and it opened a lot of doors for me in the world of commercial beauty and headshots, which I quickly fell in love with. By my sixth month mark I was booking larger projects and starting to build consistency and after a year I had regular clientele and had booked projects that I could have only dreamed of. I took a lot of pride in the natural, enhanced style of makeup that I had developed and It was greatly appreciated by my newfound clients. I spent another year in the city absolutely loving what my career had become and how my portfolio had developed, but Los Angeles left me longing for a lot. I knew that I wanted the next step of my career to be obtaining my estheticians license, something that would be extremely difficult to do while managing the expense of living in the city. Despite a career that I loved, LA stopped feeling like an opportunity and started to feel like a stepping stone I was stuck on, and so I decided to move home to Maryland in the spring of 2023.
Being back for almost a year now, I could not be more happy with my decision. My experience in Los Angeles built my skillset and portfolio well above my competition in the Maryland area and I found the perfect esthetics program for my schedule, which I am now almost halfway through. I have become booked enough with bridal and event clients in the Washington DC/Northern VA area to require a small team of artists to work with me and I frequently fly back to LA for larger jobs with some of my favorite clients. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by all the ideas and potential that is constantly floating around in my mind, reminding me that there is more to be done, that I can still grow so much more. But when I stop to look at all that I’ve accomplished by twenty five years old, I truly could not be more proud. I am a bicoastal makeup artist with nine years of experience in my profession, three contracted part time employees and a budding secondary career in esthetics that I will be diving into before the summer. I am so grateful for all of the people in my corner over the years that encouraged my passion and helped me shaped it into a career, but I am also grateful for my own perseverance and trust that I could accomplish everything I dreamed of.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Its very easy to be excited an inspired when doing beauty or editorial work for brands or fashion shoots. When I first started seriously pursuing makeup as a career option I pictured myself and my moments of pride being avant garde looks in magazines and thought that’s the best it could get. I can confirm that this is a very rewarding feeling, I’m currently waiting for a shoot that I was a part of to launch in Sephora when the brand gets displayed and its such an exciting time, but truthfully my most rewarding moments are bridal makeup. Bridal makeup is not necessarily my greatest love when it comes to doing makeup, however, the circumstance and the impact that it has is what fulfills me the most. My brides love their wedding makeup but for some there is a very distinct moment when they look in the mirror at the end and I get to watch their whole expression change. Their eyes go wide and then grow really soft, usually before a huge smile lights up their face and I’ve even had a few tear up when they see themselves for the first time after their makeover. As artists who is chosen to be present on such an important day we have the ability to add such a special touch and positively impact the bride’s entire experience. Spending an hour in close proximity to someone, keeping conversation to help them relax and feel excited all while putting effort and passion into creating a custom look that meets the vision in your head magical process on its own, but when you watch someone take in the work that you’ve done, see how it brought out their best features and see the recognition in their eyes in the exact moment that they feel truly and undeniably beautiful…to give that to someone through a talent that I’ve worked so hard for is truly a privilege that I will never tire of.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
This always surprises people, but I have gained many of my most significant clients through Facebook! When I was in Los Angeles I searched Acting/Modeling/Photography pages every day to comment on relevant posts and network with potential colleagues and this is how I met or was discovered by my biggest or most consistent clients. Now that I’m back in Maryland I stay active on all of the local bridal and event pages to comment on posts from newly engaged couples, bridal party members or other artists. I’m really not a personal fan of social media but I know how necessary it is for my line of work and I think Facebook is the most under rated resource for finding potential clients.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sarahelaineartistry.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=wix_google_business_profile&utm_campaign=1707512822418189082
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahelaineartistry/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/p/Sarah-Elaine-Artistry-100087413064608/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/sarah-elaine-artistry-frederick-4
- Other: https://www.zola.com/wedding-vendors/wedding-hair-makeup/sarah-elaine-artistry https://www.theknot.com/marketplace/sarah-elaine-artistry-frederick-md-2041684 https://www.weddingwire.com/biz/sarah-elaine-artistry/7dbf15c0368b027a.html
Image Credits
Toby Tiet Parker Harris Jimi James, JXL Creative