Staff Writer

Jessie Larochelle-Howard said she’s using her childhood experience with cancer to help women feel beautiful.

Larochelle-Howard, 32, has created her own line of makeup using natural ingredients with a focus on protecting the skin with a beauty product she believes are safe for everyone.

“It’s extremely important to me (to protect the skin). What a cool way to get women to wear sunscreen,” she said.

The makeup line started in the halls of Pennsylvania State University, where Larochelle-Howard enrolled as a pre-med student. But after college Larochelle-Howard realized she didn’t really want to be a doctor.

“It’s a lot to ask a kid what they want to do for the rest of their lives,” Larochelle-Howard said.

She said because she had melanoma cancer when she was 13, people often told her she would be a good pediatric oncologist.

“I just couldn’t do it,” she said.

So she moved back to her family’s summer home in Kennebunk and thought about what she really wanted to do for the rest of her life. She decided to take a leap of faith.

“I never really thought about it before, I mean in high school my friends always asked me to do their makeup for prom,” Larochelle-Howard said.

Larochelle-Howard liked working with makeup and enrolled in Headhunters, a cosmetology school in Portland.

She soon discovered Headhunters focused more on the hair side of cosmetology, but with her parents’ support at age 22, Larochelle-Howard headed to London to study at the renowned makeup school Esthetique.

While there, Larochelle-Howard met with different international makeup artists every day and learned make-up tricks while working on some famous faces she declined to name.

“There was a table full of foundation, another huge table full of lipsticks and eye shadow. I was able to try everything,” she said.

But at the end of the course, Larochelle-Howard was left without a favorite brand to work with.

“I remember at the end of the course there were some things I loved about this and some things I loved about that and I wished there was a way to combine the two,” she said.

Already Larochelle-Howard could see a correlation between her studies in pre-med and her new career as a makeup artist. She said through pre-med courses she already had an understanding of the face and skin, the body’s largest organ.

For the last 10 years, Larochelle-Howard has been looking at ingredients in makeup and researching how they would react to skin.

Surprisingly Larochelle-Howard found some of the biggest name brand products had harmful ingredients, such as small amounts of arsenic.

“I’m not saying there is a direct correlation between make-up and cancer but skin sensitivity is on the rise. There may be something between what’s going into products and skin sensitivity,” she said.

After years of research, Larochelle-Howard invested $1,000 and bought natural and safe ingredients such as beeswax and zinc oxide along with other natural ingredients to create her new line of make-up.

Because most of her materials are natural minerals, Larochelle-Howard does not go into her studio with steaming beakers of odd-colored liquids – she can mix together the minerals and test the finished product, which the mother of two young boys greatly enjoys.

“(At the spa) I get to play with makeup and nails. Then I go home and play with Legos and trucks,” Larochelle-Howard said.

Her first line of makeup is available at her salon, All Seasons Day Spa for $15 to $30. Customers have a choice between three foundations, blushes and lip liners along with two eyeliners and a variety of earth-tone eye shadows.

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.