Makeup Artist Joy Adenuga on Struggling to Go Mainstream and Remaining Resilient 1 Shares Too often, the best beauty stories go Untold, solely based on a person's skin color, religion, gender expression, disability, or socioeconomic status. Here, we're passing the mic to some of the most ambitious and talented voices in the industry so they can share, in their own words, the remarkable story of how they came to be — and how they're using beauty to change the world for the better. Up next: Joy Adenuga, makeup artist and founder of her beauty brand By Joy Adenuga. My journey started back home in Nigeria. I never enjoyed doing makeup on myself — which is why the YouTube thing was never for me — but I had a knack for makeup. Back then, anything related to makeup was either Avon or Mary Kay. My friends would hint, "You know what, you're actually quite good. Why don't you . . ." and I would say, "Are you for real? I should leave my job and go sell Mary Kay makeup? Absolutely not." That was all the industry had to offer back then.