It’s as natural as you can get’
Popularity growing for Cape Breton made mineral makeup line
Amanda Wood launched her mineral makeup company, Blissful Beauty, two years ago and thanks to the growing success of her products, she’s setting goals for future expansion out of province.
“Blissful Beauty is all founded on the principle of natural beauty,” the Westmount native says.
“I wanted something that was like the high end products but without all the harsh chemicals and fillers and unnecessary things … basically a cleaner makeup.”
All Blissful Beauty products are free of parabens, talcs, silicones, chemical preservatives, lake ‘coal tar’ dyes and often use vegan waxes.
Wood left Cape Breton in 2011 to study makeup artistry in Halifax. In 2012, she began working in the field, doing make-up for film, television, print and weddings, but quickly found problems with the makeup she was working with.
“There’s really not a whole lot of options out there for people with allergies, rosacea, acne. There’s a lot of harmful chemicals and unnecessary fillers that are in the make-up you buy at stores that really agitates all those conditions,” Wood said.
“As a makeup artist I came across a ton of clients who had those issues. It was really hard to try and build a (makeup) kit that was not only flattering for everybody but that worked on everybody’s skin.”
Inspired by a passion to create a makeup that would be good for all skin types, Wood came up with the idea for Blissful Beauty in 2014. Coastal Business and the Self-Employment Assistance Program helped her turn the idea into reality and Blissful Beauty was launched on May 30, 2015.
“It’s as natural as you can possibly get it. Instead of using chemical preservatives I use naturally derived preservatives, which work just as well as the harsh chemical ones,” she said, pointing out that all make-up has some chemicals in it.
“Even the stuff that uses coconut oil, for example. It’s not straight out of a coconut. It’s Amanda Wood stands behind her booth at a craft fair where she was selling her mineral makeup line, Blissful Beauty.
fractionated and it’s purified. Everything has to go through a certain process to make it suitable for cosmetics and to be on a shelf and to be on people’s skin.”
Wood makes her products out of her home studio in Westmount and sells them online and at a couple of stores in Cape Breton and Dartmouth.
When it comes to buying ingredients, Wood tries to buy as much as she can from Canadian suppliers. What she can’t get from them, she buys from the U.S. and never buys anything from overseas suppliers.
While some of the ingredients in her makeup are found in traditional make-up, many of them aren’t.
Currently, she is the only staff working at Blissful Beauty and moonlights as a bartender, but hopes as demand for her products continues to grow, she will be able to hire staff and keep the office / studio in Cape Breton.
“Hopefully it’s something that is going to be viable here in Cape Breton,” she said.