We were lucky to catch up with Shania Glover recently and have shared our conversation below.
Shania, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
At a young age I knew I wanted to be in the fashion industry. I had a love for clothes while I was playing with Bratz dolls and watching Hannah Montana during the early 2000s when everything was colorful and spunky. My first love was styling and designing, so I told my mom at the age of nine that I wanted to go to college to be a fashion designer. As I got older my passion grew in other branches of fashion like modeling and makeup artistry.
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.
My name is Shania and I’m an aspiring model, an upcoming makeup artist, and future fashion designer. Where I live is a small town called Statesboro and here there is little to no market for fashion with the exceptions of local boutiques. Getting into the industry is hard and still something I aim to be apart of, so what I’ve done to pursue my passions was find local talent who shares the same artistic goals as me.
As a teenager I started to look at myself more closely to consider myself a model and I needed the practice in front of a camera. First I tried it by myself on my phone, then later on I was referred a local photographer by my mom.
January 2023 I decided to put my makeup business out there and offer services to people as I was on my job with business cards. In August 2023 my local photographer Ari asked me to do makeup for a photoshoot project in Savannah, Georgia for a modeling agency she recently began to work for. As a makeup artist I’m given a lot of creative freedom to enhance someone’s facial presence wherever they go; weddings, photoshoots, a night out, etc, and its the best part of being a makeup artist.
I believe the best thing about being a fashion designer and a makeup artist is my eye for color and what colors look best on what kind of face structures and skin tones. The most common makeup service my clients book for is called “A__natural beat” which entails a full face and neutral eye shadow colors like browns, taupes, nude pinks, black, and a hint of gold, rose gold, or silver shimmer. From those selection of colors I’m allowed to create an alluring look that only enhances the features my clients have. The best part of the job is making them feel beautiful and special about what they already have.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Something that I have to keep reminding myself is not to compare myself to everyone. There are many people I know that are twenty something and are thriving is their god given talents. Sometimes I feel like I’m behind as I pursue other passions, work, and balance adulting on top of it wondering how everyone else can do it while they do the same.
Thinking this way starts from one negative thought to the next ending with me feeling like I’m not good enough or that I’m behind time. I realized it only stifles me and keeps me from focusing so that I can take the next steps to becoming exactly what I need to be, so I keep my head up. I write down my affirmations, remain positive, and plan. However I’m careful with how much I think of the future I plan for. I focus on the present and what I can do now to achieve what I want in the future.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
On the contrary there are a lot of things I wish I would have known or what I could have done in the past. One of those things is getting a license/certificate for makeup. Makeup was something that I’ve picked up on how to do visually through social media. I watched thousands of short tutorials on facebook and YouTube videos to just grasp the idea of how to do a full face. The hardest part of it all was being creative. What kind of makeup do I want to do? Should I stick with something simple or should I challenge myself? The answer I gave myself was “Do whatever you feel. You’re in control”.
I decided not to go for a certificate in makeup because I was told that it wasn’t really needed to be a makeup artist, which isn’t wrong. What they didn’t tell me was that being a freelance makeup artist is very tough starting out and that it would be smart to earn your clientele at a beauty salon or makeup counter with that certificate. Back then I wasn’t open to doing makeup underneath a corporation or working inside a salon. Now I know that I would’ve at least gotten a head start but I don’t regret not pursuing the education because I was not ready for it. I didn’t have the confidence and I wasn’t as skilled as I am now.
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Image Credits
Ari Williams IG: cedricbaconphotography Devon Moon