How to Self-Care as a Makeup Artist: Cheri’s Story

Recently, we had the pleasure of speaking with Cheri Ladd – an Oklahoma-based makeup artist who draws from her incredible experience of survival to encourage others to be the very best version of themselves – both inside and out! 

Outspoken and honest, Cheri is passionate about exposing some of the hard truths that can be difficult to say out loud – especially for those who may be struggling with low self-esteem, body image issues, guilt, and shame. 

Read on to learn all about Cheri’s story including how she became a makeup artist, what drives her to do what she does, and her experience of working with a therapist. In honour of our International Weekend of Self Care campaign, she’s also opened up about her approach to self-care in her day-to-day life in the beauty industry. 

An Interview With Cheri 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you and what’s your story?

“My name is Cheri and I live in Cushing, Oklahoma. When I was 19, I moved away from home and married the father of my two oldest children. It’s funny, growing up, my own father was an alcoholic and he was very abusive and very mean. And then I went on to marry a man that was much, much like him.”

“Eventually, my then husband and I moved to St. Louis, Missouri and we lived there for a while. As a girl from a small town with only one stoplight – living in St Louis was a whole other world! I knew nothing about city life, but I fell in love with St. Louis and made some friends… but unfortunately my then husband became more and more abusive and more dependent on drugs and alcohol.” 

“From St. Louis, we moved to Ohio. And the further I got from home, the worse things were. The further I got from anyone that would speak truth to me, the more embedded in darkness I became. The more hidden I became.” 

“One Easter afternoon, I came back home to Drumright with my children to visit my mother. My son was sitting at the kitchen table drawing a picture, and when my mother asked him what he was drawing, he said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of dad hitting mom on the hardwood floor.’ My son was only five at the time.”

“At this moment, I had a mindshift. Right then, that day. I thought to myself, ‘Oh God, I’m doing it again. My son will live my life over.’”

“One very long story short – we got in the car, went back to Ohio, and the very next morning I packed up, withdrew the $900 dollars in my savings, and left with my two children.” 

“Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I had the guts to leave. I don’t know where it came from – it was something in the tone when my son was coloring; something in the normalcy of his voice when he said those words. And I thought to myself, ‘he will hit his wife one day.’ That really struck me, and so I left.”

“I then moved home and became a single mother. I had no practical work experience, but I got hired by an attorney who helped me through my divorce. I made pennies. I made maybe $9,000 a year and raised 2 children. I did not have a bed, I slept on the floor of my home. I was very proud of it though – because it was mine. I would “make” the floor by laying out my quilt and pillows to make them look beautiful. It was rough – but I was safe. And when I went to bed at night, I had peace.” 

“After working for the attorney, I knew that I wanted to do a different job where I could better support myself. So I called up one of my friends in St. Louis who was a makeup artist, and she offered to teach me everything she knew over the phone.” 

“Eventually, I interviewed with MAC cosmetics and got hired on a whim, literally the luck of the draw! When I worked there, I soaked up all the training I could get; staying late and showing up early to watch the artists. I wanted to know everything because I was in survival mode.” 

“One afternoon, it dawned on me that I never would have ended up in the situation I was in if I had just felt good about myself. And that’s what was driving me to learn everything that I could about being a makeup artist. It engulfed me. I wanted women to feel better about themselves, period. That was it. That was the goal.”

“But the more I dug into that, the more I realized that I’m going to have to feel better about myself before I can pour this out on others.”

“And so that was the start of my journey of self-exploration and wondering, ‘why did I end up in that situation? How could I not end up in it again? How can I teach other women to get out of it, or not get into it in the first place?’”

“This was all before I even started therapy – I was really just digging into things like self-help books, podcasts, things like that.”

“Then, a few years ago, I found myself struggling to cope with a family incident and I went to therapy. It took a very specific type of therapist to deal with me, though. I went into my first session with my arms folded. I had a very terrible, “better than” attitude when I walked in the room.”

“I remember my therapist said, ‘First, we need to discuss what days I can see you.’ And I said, “well, I work out in the mornings, and I work out in the evenings, so I don’t know when you have availability but I’m only available for a short time in the afternoon.’”

“And she said to me, ‘Okay, so we’re running from our problems all day long.’ And I thought to myself, ‘well that was rude’ – but in reality I needed that! I did not need things to be sugar coated at that moment, and I do not need things to be sugar coated in general. I needed her to be very blunt and forward with me. So immediately when she spoke to me like that, I thought, ‘I like her, I can trust her. She won’t tell me what I want to hear. She’ll tell me what I need to hear.’”

“For me, this experience with therapy was a game changer, and I’ve been working with this therapist for the last three years.”

“That being said, I’m the first to admit that I absolutely do not have it all figured out. I am a work in progress, and still, like many people, waste time on things like worrying and intrusive thoughts. Sometimes this can make me mean and insecure. The goal for me though is just to recognize it, work through it, and help others work through it, too.”

Reflecting on your own life and experiences, what does self-care mean to you?

“I’ve really thought about this question a lot. Because we live in such a culture of a hot bath, a candle, and a glass of wine – that absolutely doesn’t fix anything. So for me, self-care is definitely not about a bubble bath. That needs to be just a baseline. That doesn’t mean digging in.”

“Personally, self-care is going for a run when there are dishes in the sink. Taking a time out when everyone thinks you need to be time in. Self-care is a very strong, hard line of a boundary that I have drawn around myself. That is self-care to me.”

“It is about pushing away the guilt – the mom guilt, the woman guilt, the work guilt – whatever it is. Pushing it away and getting over it, and finding a way through it. Self-care is more about that to me than it is about a bubble bath.”

What are your personal self-care strategies?

“For me, my #1 strategy when it comes to self-care is making sure that I exercise, this is what works for me.”

“I have had millions of doctors prescribe me millions of pills, and I have tried some, but I just didn’t like the way that they made it feel. So whether it’s snowing, sunny, convenient, or not convenient – exercise is my mental break. It might only be for 25 minutes, but I make myself get out of my home, out of my head, and get some sort of activity each day.”

“This definitely helps the fog clear for me. It gives me some kind of clarity – sometimes it’s not a lot – but it does help.”

“I also have a very strategic playlist where I listen to songs about empowerment. I can definitely turn that on and feel in a different mindset. I know that it can help” 

“The hardest part of this journey is when my husband or children want me to do something with them. In these moments, I really have to draw a boundary and say, ‘we will do all the things… after I get this 20 minutes.’”

On the flipside of that, do you have any specific self-care activities that don’t work for you? 

“I’ve found a lot of things that don’t work.”

“Shopping – we think it works, but it doesn’t. Buying more makeup – doesn’t work. Putting more makeup on – doesn’t work. Dying my hair, getting bangs, not getting bangs, changing my style. All of the things that we think will empower us that we chase after, they don’t work.” 

“It’s a funny, slippery slope for me because I sell makeup for a living. But I try really hard to make sure that my clients are able to draw a hard line of: ‘I want this, but I do not have to have it and I don’t need it.’”

“I preach that a lot to the little girls who sit in my chair, too. I like to say, ‘Yea, putting on makeup is so fun don’t you feel so great? But remember, you are still the exact same little girl that you walked in here as today. And when you wash this off, you are the same. When you put it on, you are the same.’”  

Another thing that has not worked for me is bullying myself into doing things. So shaming myself into ‘you’ve gotta exercise because you’re too big’ and changing the language to (I know this is so cliche) but changing it to ‘I exercise because I love my body, not because I hate my body.’”  

As a makeup artist, how has your career in the beauty industry changed your own approach to self-care and the way you feel about yourself?

“The #1 reason why being a makeup artist has shaped my approach to self-care is because it’s made me realize that I am not alone.”

“We all sit in our homes, by ourselves, and live inside of our heads. This is where we live for 90% of the day, and we typically don’t discuss the things that happen inside of our heads.”

“But for me, sometimes I’ll have 300 women in a month sit in my makeup chair. And when you hear 300 women come in and say things like, ‘can you do this because I really don’t like the way this looks in pictures.’ or ‘can you fix this because my eyes are really hooded and they hang and I look so tired’ or ‘I hate the way my skin looks when my foundation breaks apart’ or ‘my skin is so oily and I hate that’ or ‘Cheri don’t put very much on me because I have so many wrinkles, and texture, and acne, and this pimple is showing…’ – you realize that there is actually so much going on in everyone else’s head, too.”

“Hearing these things has made it very hard for me to stay inside my own head; when I know for a fact that everyone else is struggling – just like me. So I guess being in the beauty industry changed my approach to self-care because I realized that I’m not in this by myself.” 

“It helps me to know this, but it also hurts me too. For example, it breaks my heart in a very genuine way to hear a woman ahead of her appointment with me say, ‘is anyone gonna be there when I get there, because I don’t want anyone to see me without my makeup on.’”  

“This crushes me, it stops me in my tracks.”

“But it also lets me know that I’m not in this fight alone – even though nobody has the guts to talk about it. And so I just think, well I’m just gonna talk about it. I’m going to say these things out loud. Noone else is saying them.”

“I know that the women walking through my door are hurting. I know that they are struggling, and it can be a very heavy burden to bear.” 

When people do speak negatively about their flaws, does it make you think about your own flaws in a similar way? How do you self-care in those moments? 

“Sure. Personally, I do that more with weight comments than I do with face comments. One of the main comments I hear so often is, ‘I’m gonna break your chair’ or ‘girl, are you sure this chair is gonna hold me’… and then I think to myself, well if she thinks that she can’t sit in that chair, I wonder where she thinks I can sit?”

“I do internalize some of it, especially when I have this vision of these women that sit in my chair. Immediately I’m like ‘ooh she’s got great brows’ or ‘look at those cheekbones’ or ‘wow, what a pretty smile – I know how to maximize that for her’… and then she’s like, ‘well I hate this or that.’”

“In these moments, I really try to give us something positive to focus on. Not a toxic positivity where I deny their feelings – I just try to help them maximize the good things.”

“This has been a journey, though. I’ve been recently diagnosed with some body dysmorphia in therapy along with some PTSD due to a history of major childhood trauma. I’m learning though that all of these things are connected.”

“What helps me the most is seeing my therapist, talking through those things, and trying to figure out where the string is attached.”

“And so when a woman says something negative about herself, and I internalize it on myself, I always think, ‘why do I have this vision of myself? Why do I have this reasoning inside of me that thinks that my body needs to be perfect? I am literally human. I will literally have texture on my skin. No matter what I do, the texture will get more and more. And the body will continue to fail me – as a humanity, we know this.’” 

“Maintaining this awareness helps. And if I hear something that affects me, I let it in, I do my work, and then I brush it off.”

What is one piece of advice that you wish you could give your teenage self?

“You do not have to carry the shame of who you were born as. You can just slough that off and be who you are. I would want her to believe that more than anything. The shame of your name, of your family, of the things that people in your family have done, of being married to a drug addict. You don’t have to carry all of that. You can literally rise up above that and be exactly who you want to be.”

“It took me a very, very long time to get that.”  

What advice would you give to someone with low self-esteem?

“I would definitely tell them to love themselves enough to press in to get some help. And who cares about the cliche of it all, and who cares about the opinion of others. They don’t live in your head with you, so do the things that you need to do to get the help.”

“I grew up in a home where the mentality was everyone has problems and nobody is concerned about your particular problems. But now, I tell people ‘I used to think therapy was crazy, too, but the fact is that there are thoughts and behaviors that you are experiencing that have been shaped by past things in your life. Get in there and get it worked out. Get the help that you need. Don’t let your mind bully you for another second.’”

“In therapy, you can say the hard things, and then when you say them out loud, if they are shameful, they die. Shame can’t live in the light. It only lives in the dark. So if you have things inside of your head that you’ve created and that you’re feeling shameful about, and you say them out loud, sometimes they don’t even make sense to you when you say them out loud. They will hold you hostage if kept inside – so just say them!”

This year’s #IWOSC theme is “Rethink Your Thoughts” – do you have any experience with intrusive or worrying thoughts? How do you work to maintain a healthy thought life? 

“100%, yes.” 

“When I started this journey – especially when I started putting myself out there on Facebook with my Tell the Truth Tuesday series, my intrusive thoughts were so bad. It was things like, ‘who do you think you are’, ‘what do you have to offer’ and then the best one was ‘yeah, tell them all of that and they’re gonna use it against you because you live in a small town.’”   

“And to be honest, I have experienced some of that. But I’ve had so many more people reach out to me to say things like ‘Cheri, I had no idea you dealt with that… and did know that I’m going through something similar…what would you suggest?’”

“Even though the words were swarming around and people were talking about me – it didn’t matter. Because I knew in my heart that there were some women that were truly being helped.”

“My therapist describes my thoughts like a train. If I get on a thought, it’s going all the way to devastation. It never just stays small. So if I jump on the train, I’ve got to stop the train – you can’t ride the train all the way out. To help, she’s given me questions I can ask myself that can help “stop” the train. Questions like, ‘is this thought true?’, ‘do you have any evidence to prove this?’, and ‘will worrying about it fix it?’” 

“I’ve also done some EMDR therapy to help with my intrusive thoughts. EDMR is a light bar therapy and it helps people recover from PTSD and major childhood trauma.”

“I’ll admit – sometimes it’s a bit weird. I’ve done it a lot with my therapist and sometimes we have no success, but then sometimes we’ve had major success. I’ve had some very real things uncovered with EMDR that I’ve been able to work through that have been able to help me in my daily life.”

About The Lily-Jo Project’s International Weekend of Self-Care

This blog article is a part of The Lily-Jo Project’s International Weekend of Self-Care campaign which takes place in August. To learn more about this campaign and access additional self-care resources, visit www.thelilyjoproject.com/internationalweekendofselfcare.

Further Resources on Self-Care

If you found this article helpful, check out the following resources on self-care:

• Article from The Lily-Jo Project, How to Self-Care as a Carer: Advice from Counsellor Natasha Page
• Article from The Lily-Jo Project, Let’s T.H.I.N.K. About Self-Care With Lily-Jo
• Article from The Lily-Jo Project, The Science of Self-Care + How to Build a Self-Care Routine
• Article from The Lily-Jo Project, How to Self-Care as a Seafarer: Lisa’s Story
• Article from The Lily-Jo Project, How to Self-Care When You Have Financial Struggles: Babs’ Story

About Cheri Ladd

Cheri Ladd is an Oklahoma-based wife, mother of three, and makeup artist. Drawing from her personal experiences with childhood trauma and PTSD, Cheri is passionate about using her position behind the makeup chair to empower women to feel better about themselves – both inside and out. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her children, having lunch with friends, and most of all – the excitement of expecting her very first grandchild. 

You can stay up to date with Cheri by giving her a follow on Facebook or Instagram.