Ophelia Margiasso on why it’s time we all started sharing our secrets more (yes, really).
One of the things I find most interesting about working in the beauty industry is the way a seat can make you reveal your deepest secrets. Ever notice how much you’ve shared with your barber, beautician or aesthetic practitioner? We have the word ‘therapist’ in our title for a reason!
My beauty bed has heard a LOT of secrets. Many of them have been exceedingly funny, some crude, several moving and quite a few sad. Laughs and tears have been shared in the four walls of my clinic at Bredon House. Of course, I won’t be sharing my clients’ and friends’ secrets with you - but what I can share is one big secret collectively we all carry on our shoulders…
I’ve always been fairly open with people about my mental health struggles. My customers, friends and family so commonly say “but you don’t ever seem like someone to suffer with that” and I guess, that’s true and that’s the main reason I want to speak about this.
I’m just like so many of my clients that walk through the clinic door who have all learnt to mask how they really feel. That’s what women have done for decades; we can hide our emotions and struggles to not be labelled “hormonal”, “crazy”, or “emotional”, but we are all carrying a lot and over the last few years I’ve seen an increase in mental health struggles with my clients collectively.
I think one of the worst parts about having to deal with these issues is how alone they can make you feel. So many of my clients feel so relieved to hear that I have similar struggles to them. These women are women I greatly admire; some are Mothers, Grandmothers, partners. They’re career-driven, kind, caring, funny and ambitious. I think sometimes we feel we can’t be those successful parts of ourselves when we have mental health issues, so we hide when we deal with them.
We spend time scrolling through social media and thinking “I wish I looked like that”, or “I wish I could be as confident as her”, or “How can he go to all these social events but sometimes I can’t leave the house?” Yet all these people we compare ourselves to have similar struggles, or maybe struggles that are completely different, but either way they’re dealing with something we don’t know about. Ironically, we continue this cycle of pretending everything is okay, leading others to look at our social media and believe that we don’t think these things either.
I want to break that stigma, and talk about our secret. There is incredible strength in vulnerability. Your mental health struggles are something you experience, but they’re not you. There is much more to you than that. You’re not “too much”, you’re not a burden and you’re definitely not alone.
Ophelia Margiasso is the Founder and Brow Artist at O.B. Brows, a high end provider of Beauty and Microblading treatments based in Tettenhall, Wolverhampton.
Find her at https://www.obbrows.co.uk/ or follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/obbrows/
