Burns Survivor Creates Half Make-Up Selfie To Share Empowering Message

Type the hashtag #ThePowerOfMakeup into Instagram and your feed will be flooded with images of women with half their face made up and the other half completely make-up free.

Indeed, earlier this year we featured the story of Maisie Beech who’d shared a half and half selfie to prove there was nothing shameful in enjoying putting on makeup.

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But now there’s another Instabeauty who’s joined the trend and her reason for taking up the challenge is the most inspiring yet.

Shalom Nchom, aka Shalom Blac on YouTube, is a 20-year-old beauty blogger from Nigeria, who has a hugely powerful reason for wanting to prove she loves herself both with and without makeup.

Aged just nine, Shalom was in an accident involving frying oil at her family’s store and suffered extreme burns to her head, face, and neck, leaving her with severe scarring and leading to the loss of her hair.

The drastic change to Shalom’s physical appearance caused her to become the victim of cruel taunts at school, which pushed her to the brink of unhappiness.

“Life after the accident wasn’t what I thought it would be,” she told BuzzFeed. “I was stared at by kids and older people whenever I stepped out. I felt like a living statue that people came to see. It pushed me to be rude towards anyone who stared at me. I cursed people out and cried on many occasions.”

Determined not to let the bullies destroy her self-esteem, when Shalom was 13, she started watching makeup tutorials on YouTube as a way to make herself feel more confident about her looks.

Shalom discovered she was really rather good at makeup, and soon the classroom taunts were replaced with requests for makeovers, for which she was able to charge $5 to $25 per person.

Fast forward seven years and now Shalom shares her incredible makeup tutorials on YouTube, including the empowering video where she made up half her face to show the power of makeup.

Shalom hopes that people watching her videos “can not only learn how to do makeup, but to learn to live and love themselves for who they truly are.”

And learning the value of self-worth no matter what you look like is a motto Shalom lives by.

“You should love yourself either way—makeup or no makeup,” she says in one of her tutorials. “Makeup is not the reason why I am happy. I’m happy because I love myself.”

Makeup artists, and indeed women, don’t come much more inspiring.