Beauty has allowed me to enter many different worlds.
I have worked as a makeup artist, licensed cosmetologist, educator, retail leader, and creator of beauty and personal-care education. I have stood behind counters, worked beside clients, trained teams, and helped beauty professionals understand products in an industry that is always introducing something new.
Throughout that journey, I was fortunate to learn directly from brands with completely different approaches to beauty.
Through my work with HeadKount, I received education from brands including Rare Beauty, Haus Labs, and Summer Fridays. During my time with Walgreens Boots Alliance, I supported beauty and personal-care education while learning from brands such as La Roche-Posay and Avène.
Earlier in my career, I was introduced to an even broader world of beauty through brands including Rilastil from Italy, Rodial from London, and Nuxe from France.
Each brand had its own philosophy.
Some began with dermatology and sensitive skin. Some were rooted in artistry and self-expression. Others led with botanical ingredients, clinical innovation, European pharmacy traditions, fragrance, or sensorial experience.
Learning from such a varied group of brands gave me far more than product knowledge. It taught me how differently beauty could be approached—and how important it is for a brand to understand exactly what it believes.
Every Brand Has a Point of View
The most memorable brands were not always the loudest or the most visible.
They were the ones with a clear point of view.
Their formulas, packaging, education, language, and customer experience all felt connected. Even when two brands offered similar products, the reason behind those products could be entirely different.
That distinction mattered to me.
A dermatological skincare brand might begin with tolerance, efficacy, and the needs of sensitive skin. A prestige cosmetics brand might begin with color, artistry, and personal expression. A botanical body-care brand might focus on texture, fragrance, heritage, and the emotional experience of using a product.
None of those perspectives is inherently better than another.
What matters is intention.
A brand should know why it exists, who it hopes to serve, and what it wants someone to feel when they experience it.
That lesson became essential when I began creating Ivy & Onyx. I did not want to design beautiful packaging first and build a philosophy around it afterward. I wanted every decision to grow from a clear belief about care, education, botanicals, science, and ritual.
Education Taught Me to Look Beyond the Claim
As an educator, I could not simply repeat the words printed on a package.
A product could promise hydration, radiance, smoother texture, stronger-looking skin, or visible renewal. Those claims might begin the conversation, but they could never be the entire conversation.
I wanted to understand what supported them.
Which ingredients were included, and what role did they play?
How should the product be used?
Who was it actually designed for?
What results were reasonable to expect?
How could I explain the formula without overwhelming someone with terminology—or promising more than the product could deliver?
Creating education taught me to slow down and study the details. It pushed me to look beyond a fashionable ingredient or a beautifully written claim and consider the complete formula, the application, the customer, and the purpose of the product.
It also taught me that expertise should never be used to make someone feel inadequate.
The role of an educator is not to perform knowledge. It is to make knowledge useful.
The best education gives people enough understanding to make a thoughtful decision for themselves.
Artistry Taught Me to Observe First
Working as a makeup artist taught me that technique begins before the first product is applied.
It begins with observation.
What is the texture of the skin?
How does the person normally see themselves?
What are they comfortable wearing?
Are they looking for transformation, refinement, reassurance, or simply a more polished version of themselves?
The most technically impressive makeup is not successful when it ignores the person wearing it.
A face is not an empty canvas waiting for an artist’s vision. It belongs to someone with preferences, habits, sensitivities, memories, and a life beyond the makeup chair.
Before creating, I had to listen.
That lesson followed me into education, product development, and eventually Ivy & Onyx.
The Products That Stayed With Me
Over the years, hundreds of products passed through my hands.
Some were exciting for a season. A smaller number stayed with me and quietly shaped what I believed beauty could be.
One of the cosmetics brands I loved was Vincent Longo. I especially appreciated its water-based complexion formulas and the way they allowed the skin to remain visible. They reflected the kind of makeup I have always been drawn to: products that refine and enhance without erasing everything that makes a face human.
But few brands influenced my vision of a complete botanical world as deeply as the original Le Couvent des Minimes.
Oh, did I love Le Couvent des Minimes.
The brand felt botanical without becoming predictable. Its products were beautifully fragranced, sensorial, and connected by a strong identity. I remember the rose-petal skincare, the body products, the botanical colognes, and especially the hand creams.
Each product felt as though it belonged to a house rather than simply occupying space on a shelf.
A hand cream could be practical and still feel transporting.
A fragrance could suggest a garden, a landscape, or a memory.
Skincare and body care could carry history and atmosphere without losing their purpose.
In January 2017, L’Occitane sold Le Couvent des Minimes to HLD Group and Didier Tabary. The house was later repositioned with fragrance at the center of its identity, and it continues today through its perfume collections.
I appreciate what the house has become, but I still miss the botanical skincare and body-care world I originally knew.
Ivy & Onyx is not an attempt to reproduce it. But that earlier version of Le Couvent set a standard in my mind. It showed me that botanicals, fragrance, skincare, body care, education, and a sense of place could exist together within one cohesive experience.
That feeling never left me.
Different Brands Taught Me to Ask Better Questions
Working with such a wide range of brands taught me not to search for one universal philosophy of beauty.
Different people need different things.
One person may want a fragrance-free formula and a simple routine designed around sensitive skin.
Another may consider fragrance the most meaningful part of caring for themselves.
Someone else may want targeted actives, visible results, and detailed education about every ingredient.
A person who loves expressive cosmetics may approach beauty differently from someone focused primarily on maintaining the health and comfort of their skin.
Good beauty does not insist that everyone care for themselves in the same way.
It creates thoughtful options and helps people understand which ones may be right for them.
The more brands I encountered, the more I learned to ask:
What is this product trying to accomplish?
Who was it created for?
Does the formula support the story being told?
Is the product meeting a real need, or simply responding to a moment of attention?
Those questions became more important than whether a product contained the ingredient everyone happened to be discussing that month.
Trends Move Faster Than Skin
During my career, I watched ingredients move from relative obscurity to the center of entire marketing campaigns.
Suddenly, everyone needed the same acid, peptide, extract, oil, or active ingredient.
Then the industry moved on to something else.
Innovation matters. Research matters. New ingredients and technologies can absolutely improve cosmetic formulas.
But the existence of a trending ingredient does not mean every person needs it. It also does not mean it belongs in every product.
Skin does not follow a content calendar.
It responds to climate, stress, sleep, health, age, environment, consistency, product combinations, and countless other factors that cannot be reduced to a single trend.
Sometimes the answer is not another product.
Sometimes it is a gentler cleanser, a simpler routine, greater consistency, or enough time to understand what the skin is communicating.
The question does not always need to be, “What should I add?”
Often, the better question is, “What is my skin trying to tell me?”
The Art of Listening
Of everything beauty has taught me, this is the lesson I return to most:
Listen before you act.
Listen to the client before recommending a product.
Listen to the person in your chair before deciding what beauty should look like on them.
Listen to the educator before reducing years of knowledge to one talking point.
Listen to the complete formula before becoming distracted by its trendiest ingredient.
Listen to your skin before adding another treatment.
Listen to your body before turning care into another obligation.
Slowing down gives us room to notice details.
Perhaps the skin does not need a stronger active. Perhaps it needs consistency and barrier support.
Perhaps a product is not failing. Perhaps it is being used in the wrong order or combined with too many other formulas.
Perhaps discomfort is not something to push through.
Perhaps the routine that works beautifully for someone else is not the routine you need.
Listening is not passive. It is a form of attention.
When we pause long enough to observe, we make better decisions.
Gentleness Is Not the Absence of Results
The beauty industry often celebrates intensity.
Stronger treatments. Faster transformations. Higher concentrations. More dramatic before-and-after images.
But more aggressive does not always mean more effective.
Some of the best results I have witnessed came from respecting the skin rather than constantly challenging it.
Gentleness may mean choosing a cleanser that does not leave the skin feeling depleted.
It may mean supporting the moisture barrier before introducing another active.
It may mean adding one product at a time instead of changing an entire routine overnight.
It may also mean stopping when the skin says enough.
There is a place for targeted treatments and performance-driven ingredients. Ivy & Onyx believes deeply in the value of modern cosmetic science.
But science should help us care for ourselves more intelligently—not punish ourselves more efficiently.
What These Lessons Mean for Ivy & Onyx
Everything I learned now shapes Ivy & Onyx.
Artistry taught me to value sensorial experience and individual expression.
Education taught me to make complex ideas understandable.
Retail taught me to listen to what customers genuinely need, not only what the industry wants to sell them.
Brand training showed me the power of a clear and consistent point of view.
European beauty introduced me to different traditions of pharmacy skincare, botanical care, fragrance, and formulation.
The products I loved showed me that a brand could create an entire world around an ordinary act of care.
Ivy & Onyx brings those lessons together.
It is not another reason to pursue perfection.
It is not a routine built around whatever happens to be trending.
It is a collection of thoughtful formulas, evocative fragrances, botanical stories, and intentional rituals designed to help people pay closer attention to themselves.
There Is Always More to Learn
More than ten years in beauty did not teach me that I had mastered it.
It taught me how much there will always be left to learn.
There is another ingredient to study, another perspective to consider, another artist to observe, another customer to hear, and another assumption worth questioning.
Experience should not make us less curious.
It should show us how valuable curiosity truly is.
The beauty industry will continue to move quickly.
I intend to keep learning slowly.
To examine the details.
To listen carefully.
And to build Ivy & Onyx with the understanding that meaningful care often begins by becoming quiet enough to notice what we truly need.
—
Robert Cole
Founder, Ivy & Onyx
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