Message from the CEO and
Founder Aryn Quinn
The question I hear most often is, “Why did you start Beauty Cares?” Until recently, my answer was, “Because I wanted to give back to the community.”
While preparing to film our first public service announcement Make Under, I was asked by the art director to review photos of victims of domestic violence for the video’s makeup. As I scanned through them I suddenly felt an enormous knot in my throat—my eyes smarted with tears and a terrible childhood memory came crashing through.
I suddenly flashed to holding my little sister’s hand, and holding my breath, as my mother was screaming on the other side of my bedroom door “ Stay inside! Don’ t open the door, don’t come out!” On the other side, my father was beating her so badly that her front teeth would need to be replaced. Staring at those photos, I began to cry as I realized I was looking at my own mother. I couldn’ t save her, my sister or myself.
It is time to break the awful silence and shame that allows this national epidemic to thrive. My mother is a survivor of domestic violence, and so am I. In a classic representation of how domestic violence is a cycle, I too have been trapped in successive abusive relationships marked with isolation, insults, shoving, slapping, financial abuse, stalking and threats against my life. I buried the memories, and have been too embarrassed to admit this for fear of what people would think of me. “What’s wrong with her?” “Is she an idiot?”
An early childhood history of domestic violence is a powerful determinant for a young woman to be drawn into an abusive relationship. It’s unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of children are trapped as helpless witnesses and victims.
The fact is that long before the first physical act of violence, women feel trapped. As my mother shared with me, some of the reasons that women remain are “I thought I could help him” or “I felt like a terrible person for wanting to leave” and “He really needed me.” We need to address chronic patterns such as the need to please, to help or to rescue, which have common – and curable – roots.
With our Breakthrough Experience program, Beauty Cares provides women with a positive, uplifting experience beyond anything their past has taught them to believe they deserve. Our focus is on helping survivors break through the old way of seeing themselves and begin to remember that first and foremost, they are loveable. Many women report that this experience was the first time in their lives that they felt they deserved to be treated well.
At the end of the Breakthrough Experience we witness our participants transformed inside and out from distrustful and anxious to smiling with soft, open faces – and I know that we have made a real difference.
By changing the way women see themselves, we change their world. And we change the world for their children. Will you please join us?
Aryn Quinn
