Looser Lipsticks

On Color, Belonging, and Becoming an Original Blend

---

What if belonging was never a reward — but a birthright?

I came to this country with just my mother — no other family.

When my grandmother joined us, then we were three.

For many years, I didn't know what that life would look like. I didn't even know what I wanted to be when I grew up. What I didn't expect, in my wildest dreams, was that what I was going to do or who I was going to be didn't matter. What mattered was realizing I already had the potential to become, create, and build a beautiful life based on a beautiful dream.

I changed majors as often as I changed hairdos. I started in art therapy but had no desire to work with children — little knowing I'd later work with adults. I tried architecture, but math and laws stifled my imagination. I tried fashion design but disliked sewing. Then my mom found a new graphic design program.

That's how I ended up getting a Graphic Design degree — and found a glimmer of my future self, fittingly, in a gold tube of lipstick at an Estée Lauder counter.

Lipstick may be one of humanity's oldest color rituals.

In the cosmetic industry, I learned to trust that color ritual transformations could lead to real ones. When overstocked products didn't sell, I blended them with others, creating unique colors. These original shades made women feel interesting and beautiful — with colors I crafted. My color craft resulted in double sales. From there, I became a trainer, helping other women understand how color could transform not only how they looked, but also how they felt about themselves.

All because I knew what it was like to be that loser lipstick.

The one no one knew what to do with. A color that was slightly off or didn't quite fit in.

After my parents separated, my mother remarried and moved us to Puerto Rico, from Puerto Rico to Portland, Oregon — and the contrast was jarring. I never thought I would ever feel at home again.

Piece by piece, I felt less and less Puerto Rican and more and more Oregonian until I didn't fully fit in either world. If I couldn't fully be an Oregonian, I would then have to become an original blend.

As a child, I grew up riding around in the backseat of my father's Chevrolet Impala with red Nagahide seats, watching light transform the world through chrome-lined windows. A commute to my grandparents' house between sunrise and sunset — that's when I fell in love with color, beauty, and life itself.

Those early experiences became what I now call color baggage — the memories and emotional connections of harmony and beauty that we make through color from the moment we're born to the rest of our lives.

Light changes what we see.What we see changes how we feel.How we feel changes what becomes possible. Overnight.

This is how I learned about belonging.

Until my first daughter was born.

Ineeded to paint a baby's room. I picked up a bucket of paint, and everything changed. She was the homecoming I had been waiting for all my life. Soon after, her sister arrived, and motherhood transformed the way I saw beauty, belonging, and the world around me.

Suddenly, I had two little girls in the back seat with dreams and destinies of their own.

I turned my walls into giant canvases. I discovered that color could not only transform faces and spaces, but also how people felt about themselves, their homes, and their lives.

Most adults think of coloring as child's play and color as decorative. But color is actually one of the easiest physical exercises to practice self-actualization. Coloring is a life exercise that teaches you to belong, become, and build — teaching children they are kin to this world and have the cognitive, emotional, and physical potential to build a beautiful, colorful life that supports themselves and others.

This is why we teach them to color long before they understand why they're doing it.

I went from a Puerto Rican girl selling paint out of the trunk of her car in Oregon to a woman navigating her way to the top of a patriarchal paint industry with her own rainbow of colors — transforming millions of lives with a bucket of paint.

This bucket of paint replaced comparison with connection, FOMO with creativity, and helplessness with agency. This brand, which I created and named Devine Color, Color Therapy from the Northwest, became a beautiful dream that was later acquired by Sherwin-Williams.

In essence, this was my pitch to my color clients. I wasn't selling a bucket of paint. I wanted to teach them how to belong so that they could become and build a colorful life now, this moment.

Painting their world as their own, starting with their home, became an extraordinary experience that changed their lives and mine.

After selling Devine Color and stepping away under a five-year non-compete, I began asking a different question: Could I help people belong, become, and build shared dreams without a bucket of paint?

That question led me toward science, philosophy, language, care, and self-actualization itself. No wonder they call it the arts and sciences.

Art is how we communicate with the world.Science is how the world can communicate with us.

What began with color evolved into a deeper exploration of beauty, belonging, harmony, unmet needs, conflict, language, and care.

We are shaped by what we see. By what we repeat. By what we harmonize — and therefore magnetize.

Because in both the arts and the sciences, harmony is the invisible made visible.

A need to belong is not a weakness. It is our biology.

No one is a self-made man or woman. No one can outlast solitary confinement.

It takes at least two people to help us survive.

Belonging is how we learn to understand ourselves and the world. It is through helping others — and being helped in return — that we learn to survive, thrive, love, become, build, and share our beautiful dreams with one another.

All this in a span of 73.8 years.

Ask anyone over 65, and they will tell you that time flew by. When you ask them what they would have done with their extra time — had they had the confidence, skills, support, money, or wisdom they wanted — they would probably tell you they would have needed twice as long.

When people spend 73.8 years becoming and building without first belonging, they set themselves up to live in fear of abandonment, of never being fully known, of hiding their true selves while building someone else's dream.

Exactly what wasted time means.

When we skip belonging, we skip love. We become versions of ourselves that build shared nightmares. Might as well build something beautiful together. Even if you only start with two.

It wasn't until 2020, when I decided to write a book about my colorful path to self-actualization, that I realized: anyone could self-actualize a life of their own with just three people.

A can of paint taught me that our shared destiny is to realize our potential by building beautiful dreams together — and reinforcing in adults what we first reinforced in them as children.

A bucket of paint taught me how to become more than the sum of my parts by creating and building a beautiful dream.

Then I learned to do this without a bucket of paint.

Belonging is not where you end up. It's where everything begins.