Kudos to Sephora: Classes for Trans Confidence

There's a lot of challenges in beginning to present cross-gender. The clothes, the shoes, the accessories are an expense, and can be a significant expense so many people turn to Thrifting (as a verb) which is a common experience. But there are other factors - shoes (ugh!), and makeup / cosmetics.

multi-jillion corporation Sephora has initiated a series of Zoom makeup tutorials to continue to support the early Trans community (and build customers, to be honest) called Classes for Confidence. So I signed up for the class and was very impressed at their initiative.

Then I received an email suggesting I request a complimentary makeup kit to be used in conjunction with the Zoom class. Wow. Just wow. And it showed up two days later in discreet packaging. Double-wow. Smallish containers of about fourteen different potions and creams. It was really very nice of them (and an easy way to put a lot of sample product into the hands of an about to be customer-for-life.)

The Zoom class was very well organized. There was a corporate training - type person from Sephora to keep the process on track and sort of MC the class. There was a transgender Sephora employee who was giving the presentation and who spoke with great credibility to the audience. The audience, by the way, was about 20 people sitting in front of their Zoom stations with a variety of bottles and mini-pots and brushes.

The presenter / subject matter expert was excellent. Raised very specific issues, like how HRT makes your skin more sensitive, and how laser-treatments for hair removal makes your skin more photo-sensitive, and how ensuring that your cosmetics soultion includes sunscreen and avoids acid-based materials. Things that only a member of the community could identify.

There was direct instruction on grab this, do that, try to accomplish this, try to avoid that. I took notes.

The briefing was scheduled for an hour. At the hour mark, the corporate trainer came on and said, Hours up, if anybody needs to leave you're free to go, but we're going to continue until we cover the content. That was a great response.

At 90 minutes, we'd gone quickly through eye-shadow, eye-liner, and lipstick and I was approaching info-overload so I signed off.

There was a really great provision by a major company and i really appreciate PERSAD listing the opportunity on their facebook page.