Being beautiful inside and out

Makeup brand launches mental health campaign

A MAKEUP brand is aiming to make you beautiful inside and out with a new website containing a directory of mental health professionals to help you achieve your best self. After all, doesn’t beauty start from the inside?

To celebrate its ninth anniversary in the Philippines, BYS launched a new campaign called “Break Your Stigma” (playing on the brand’s initials), anchored on a website, www.breakyourstigma.com. The website contains resources for people to connect with over 100 mental health professionals and organizations to seek help. The brand itself was founded in 2004 in Melbourne as a brand of GFA Australia.

Angie Goyena, President of iFace, Inc., the local distributor for BYS, said during a press conference on Oct. 21, “This is not the grand party you were expecting. It is the kind of anniversary we feel is relevant and necessary right now.”

While the campaign is currently only operating in the Philippines right now, the principals from Australia are certainly supportive of it. “The Philippines is such an important market for us. It’s always been at the forefront in terms of innovation and trends. It’s no surprise that they’re tacking this important issue today of mental health,” said Amanda Aitken, Managing Director of GFA Australia. “The need to support everyone’s mental health is such a pressing concern. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It’s all over the globe.”

Ms. Goyena made it clear that the brand’s initials actually stand for the phrase “Be yourself.” However, “It’s really hard to ‘Be Yourself’ if you don’t love yourself, of if your current self is going through something extremely painful or difficult.”

“It is only when we break our stigma that you can truly be yourself,” she said. “Our goal is to give everyone a safe and secure platform where you can get help on your own terms and help others find help too.”

It’s an important cause to take up today, seeing as how the world rages against multiple global crises, the pandemic and its accompanying hardships taking up the top spot for our concerns. But what exactly does makeup have to do with mental health? Ms. Goyena says, “We believe that beauty should be total. It should be overall, not just on the surface,” she said. “Being beautiful on the inside has to do with having good mental health.”

Dr. Honey Carandang, Clinical Psychologist and founder of Mindfulness, Love, and Compassion Institute for Psychosocial Services, Inc., said that taking care of your skin and your looks is part of self-care: a facet of mental health usually skipped over due to our culture. “When you take care of yourself, you are labeled as being selfish: especially with women who were conditioned to raise or take care of others. I think we should reverse that,” she said. “I don’t think we can take care of others if we don’t care of ourselves in all ways.”

Ms. Goyena said, “If we can talk about our skin or our makeup not being perfect, we can normalize talking about our mental health not being perfect as well.”

Visit www.breakyourstigma.com or check out updates about BYS on BYS Cosmetics Philippines on Facebook. — Joseph L. Garcia