Yeah, yeah, yeah, they want to know.

Hello, hello, it's Brooke Vard and you're listening to the Naked Beauty

podcast. I'm grateful to be back talking with you all for another episode. It's been a really challenging couple of weeks. People are wondering how to show up for one another, how to help when you feel helpless, how to wade through misinformation, how to educate yourself, how to show up for your friends and also how to advocate for people. I don't have any specific pearl of wisdom or solution for that, but I will encourage you to take care of yourself because that is what I have been trying to do these past couple of weeks, taking breaks as needed, educating myself, having conversations with friends, either friends that know a lot about the region or have family there or live there themselves. The digital world is a difficult place to navigate and that's why real life connection feels so good and so affirming to me right now.

And I had an incredible experience this past Saturday

going to Sipp and Slay, LA, it's an event that Nana,

you all have heard on the podcast.

She hosts these gatherings of black women in media and entertainment

and creative fields.

She has really incredible people come on stage and share their story. She has opportunities for networking. It just felt like a really great safe space like a warm hug the moment you walked in. I walked into the bar and immediately saw these two young women putting on their makeup and taking pictures and they were like, oh my gosh, Brooke, naked beauty be listening to me like I mean that was the first thing I saw when I walked and I was like, oh my gosh, people are really out here,

here in LA and saying hello and introducing themselves. So it was so great to just meet more

listeners in person. And I was also very excited about doing my first live recording since I've been in Los Angeles being able to have a podcast discussion in front of a live audience,

takes on an entirely different dimension.

And this was a very juicy, juicy topic.

We knew that we wanted to talk about beauty.

But if you've got creators having a conversation about beauty, how do you make it interesting? How do you make it stand out? And one of the things that as we were kind of developing the angle for this that came up was that as a black woman who participates in beauty who is a beauty creator and maybe works in beauty anyone any black woman that is beauty adjacent has a very unique experience of kind of being the blueprint in a lot of senses and when you are the blueprint when you are the originator of many trends you get copied that is something that happens and I think for all creatives, anyone with the career they're going to experience disappointment that just comes with the territory. But as you're on your creative journey, how do you let that disappointment fuel you to create bigger and bolder and more authentic? How do you use the fact that sometimes you don't get the recognition you deserve or sometimes your original ideas are copied and past it and brought elsewhere to hone in on your voice and your skill set.

And something really honestly divine happened

before I went on stage.

I met an incredible creator, her name is Michaela,

I met her in the bathroom and someone said you actually know her and you're going to see what you know her from and I was like this is perfect. I am going to call on you when I'm on stage and we're going to have this conversation about the influence black women have on culture. So you guys are going to hear that in the podcast. Give her a follow as well. Her Instagram handle is at Michaela did. I'll put it in the show

notes as well. But Michaela is someone who has 44,000 followers. I'm looking at her

Instagram profile right now, but the influence reaches the hundreds of millions.

And that was another thing that I was really eager to tackle.

...