A gentle note before you read or listen: this conversation touches on childhood trauma, grief and mental health. Please look after yourself, and there are some support details at the bottom.
Most of my guests come from the world of renovation and design. Hilary Holmes doesn't, and that's exactly why I wanted her on. Hilary's a truth teller in an industry that hasn't always been honest with women, the founder of beauty brand Holme Beauty, and one of the most open people I know. This one's less about houses and more about the person living inside one.
Hilary's a makeup artist of more than fifteen years and the founder of Holme Beauty, a brand built around a radical idea, that every woman deserves to feel seen. She's a mum of two, a fierce advocate for women, and a fellow Williamstown local.
She's candid that her appetite for risk was forged in a childhood marked by abuse, neglect and abandonment. For years that trauma was her fuel, and the work she's doing now is learning that life doesn't have to be a fight, that good things can come easily, and that she doesn't have to earn her worth by running herself into the ground. A lot of that has been about presence. Not waiting for the next hill where the grass looks greener, but coming back, again and again, to right now.
Holme Beauty exists because Hilary spent years watching women walk into beauty spaces hoping to feel supported and leave feeling like they weren't good enough. She built the opposite. Her people are the ones no one speaks to, often over thirty, forty, fifty, whose faces and lives have changed and who've been left to wing it. Her difference is education. She doesn't sell a look, she teaches women how they want to feel, then builds it around them. And it works, because she won't sell anyone anything she doesn't believe in.
The most moving stretch was Hilary talking about her mum, a deeply complicated relationship shaped by a great deal of pain. In her mum's final year she started visiting, full of rage at first, and slowly softened, not for her mum's sake but for her own. By the end she was brushing her hair and painting her nails. "All the best bits of me are my mum." It's not a tidy ending, because real life rarely gives you those, but it's a choice to lead with softness rather than let the hardness win.
There's so much more in the full episode, how she launched a brand mid pandemic, why community and the small acts matter so much to her, and what it really costs to build something while being unapologetically yourself.
Listen to the full episode
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Show notes and links
If anything in this episode brought things up for you, please reach out for support. In Australia you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, both available 24 hours a day. You are not alone.
Conversations Under Construction is the podcast from By R.A., where we open up honest conversations about the lives we want to create. Subscribe to follow along.
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