the power of origin stories📚

I was working on a post about origin stories when I couldn’t help noticing that Minneapolis is serving up a masterclass in the power and implications of origin stories—who gets to make them, who gets to define them, and how the rest of us are asked to live inside their narratives. 

My storytelling is largely overlooked by the beauty industry because I write about these moments of reckoning and upheaval that pose the questions of do we examine the stories that are being heaved upon us? What about the stories we’ve inherited? Do we look away from the stories that make us uncomfortable?

When I look at the beauty industry’s origins, I find something instructive. Many of its most influential founders—Estée Lauder, Annie T. Malone, Elizabeth Arden, Madam C. J. Walker, Eunice Johnson, Mary Kay Ash—built their companies during periods of social disruption, economic uncertainty, and cultural exclusion. 

Beauty, for them, was not escapism. It was agency. Survival. Visibility. A way to claim dignity in times that denied it.

That history asks something of us now. Do we treat beauty as distraction, or as truth-telling? Do we accept constructed, “pretty” beauty stories marketed to us, or do we take responsibility for shaping real stories worth passing on?

You can tell where I stand on this… We are always living inside an origin story. The question is whether we choose it consciously, courageously—or let some outside force choose it and define us.

In the simple but true lyrics of a popular song from 1970’s R&B group, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, sung by the sexy lead singer, Teddy Pendergrass:

Wake up, everybody
No more sleepin' in our beds
No more backward thinkin'
Time for thinkin' ahead
The world has changed so very much
From what it used to be
There is so much hatred
War and poverty

The chorus invites us to create a better world together, just you and me.