The Official Blog of Illamasqua: Australian blogger Celeste's jewellery line for the S.O.P.H.I.E Lancaster Foundation

The lovely Christabel of Illamasqua’s Australian team has shared a great interview with Celeste from Becoming Beautiful with us to introduce her jewellery range, Little Waltz. All designs from the range are beautifully crafted by Celeste and all profits from the sale of the jewellery is to be donated to the S.O.P.H.I.E Lancaster Foundation.

1. Tell us about the Little Waltz range of jewellery. How do you design the pieces?

Little Waltz is a whimsical little brand of jewellery that leans towards the cute and quirky. Every single piece is designed by myself and lovingly handcrafted by myself. I try to limit each piece as well, as every piece has a backstory, a meaning and a little piece of history attached to it. It’s almost as though each piece of jewellery has a little bit of me in it.

The designs are usually inspired by what’s around me. I take great pleasure in taking walks in forests, national parks etc to get in touch with pure, raw nature once more in order to gain insights on how colours and textures goes together. To me, Mother Nature is the most brilliant artist of them all, and learning from her is one of the best way to go.

2. What prompted you to donate the profits from Little Waltz to the Sophie Lancaster foundation?

The Sophie Lancaster foundation was actually the first foundation I’ve come across that has really hit a note within me. What the foundation embodies is to stamp out prejudice, hatred and intolerance everywhere. And this really spoke to me because of the fact that I had been bullied and discriminated against since a very young age.

I became a teacher to do my bit in stopping the bullying cycle, and donating the profits from Little Waltz to Sophie Lancaster Foundation is just a very natural next step for me to take on my campaign against bullying.

3. Tell us a bit about your site, Becoming Beautiful.

It is important to note from the beginning that Becoming Beautiful is not just a beauty product review blog. More than that, the blog covers topics such as inner beauty, self confidence how-to, bullying awareness and so on.

Due to the constant bullying that I mentioned earlier, I grew up with a great lack of self-esteem. While I was able to overcome some of that and gained confidence in my abilities and capabilities, I was never able to quite believe in my own looks. You are able to measure ability via achievements, but looks are a totally different matter so it was really hard for me to come to terms with how I look especially because I was not beautiful in a stereotypical way.

Thus, Becoming Beautiful was born as a result of me trying to come to terms with my own looks. I am learning to appreciate myself, and my own looks; learning to draw out my inner beauty as well as outer beauty; learning that everybody is beautiful, and that it is just a matter of how that beauty is seen.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I decided to document my journey as I have come to realize that much like bullying, where one may feel very alone and isolated in one’s own misery, chances are you are not alone. There are many other girls (and perhaps even boys) who are out there who also feel that they are ugly and need help in seeing how beautiful they truly are. So hopefully they can learn through my mistakes and my journey and find their own way as well.

And luckily for me, make-up and beauty products plays a big role in this journey as well!

4. What do you think a charity like the Sophie Lancaster foundation could do in Australia to help with the very important issues of bullying and intolerance?

There is a lot of awareness going on about bullying in recent years, but there is never enough. So many parents are still insisting that their child is ‘too good’ and would never bully another child, so many children are still bullying without even realizing that they are bullying.

A charity such as Sophie Lancaster Foundation would bring people’s attention more to the cause. Bullying is an ugly topic, but it needs to be brought to people’s attention again and again precisely because it is ugly. People tend to hide away the ugly and concentrate only on the pretty.

Awareness for bullying also tends to be concentrated within schools. But you are kidding yourself if you think bullying only happens in schools. The beauty of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation is that it isn’t targeted at schools. It is targeted at everybody. Awareness needs to be injected into every single level of society for bullying to stop and I believe that is what the Sophie Lancaster Foundation is doing.

5. What are your favourite Illamasqua products?

The Precision Inks, hands down. The amount of control the Precision Ink allows is phenomenal. There are no designs too hard to draw with the Precision Ink!

The Cream Pigments are a close second. I love how creamy they feel and how lovely the colours turn out. Looking at some of the Cream Pigment colours in the pan, I tend to think that the colour won’t work. But it always does. Slightly annoying for the wallet, but absolutely lovely how it always works out.