VE Cosmetics is in The Guardian! 🖤⚽

Well. This is slightly surreal.

VE Cosmetics has been featured in The Guardian.

And no, I haven't suddenly swapped black lipstick for football boots. The Guardian recently spoke to small business owners supporting women's and girls' grassroots football, and that included me, talking about VE Cosmetics and our sponsorship of the girls' football team at Humberston Academy.

So… what does a goth makeup brand have to do with girls' football?

More than you'd think, actually. When the opportunity came up through Starling Bank for small businesses to support grassroots girls' football, I loved the idea of VE being involved. VE has always been about individuality. It's about questioning the idea that there's a particular way you're supposed to look, behave or exist in the world. It's about giving people the freedom to be unapologetically themselves.

And while football and cosmetics might look like completely different worlds, girls and women in sport have spent a very long time challenging expectations too. That felt like something worth getting behind.

Small businesses can make a difference

One of the things I spoke about with The Guardian was the idea that you don't need to be a massive company with an enormous marketing budget to support your community.VE is an independent business. There's no giant corporation hiding behind us. There's me, an alarming quantity of makeup, a laptop, occasional chaos and probably a cat somewhere it shouldn't be. But small businesses collectively have an enormous impact.

If an opportunity comes along to support something you believe in, don't automatically assume you're too small to make a difference. Sometimes showing up is enough.

And now we're in The Guardian…

Seeing VE Cosmetics described by The Guardian as an alternative beauty brand known for its unusual colours and individuality was a pretty lovely moment.Because that's exactly what I want VE to be.We're never going to be conventional.We make black lipstick. We make white foundation. We make gloriously weird colours for people who don't want their makeup( or themselves ) to blend quietly into the background And now we also sponsor girls' football.

Alternative beauty 🤝 grassroots sport.

Didn't have that one on the bingo card when I started VE back in 2015. But I'm incredibly proud that we're able to do it. And if you'd like to read the article that caused me to stare at my phone thinking “bloody hell, that's actually us”, you can read The Guardian's feature on entrepreneurs supporting women's and girls' grassroots football here.

🖤

Lynsey

Founder, VE Cosmetics