Beauty Changes Lives.

The American Association of Cosmetology Schools is a network of more than 900 schools dedicated to providing excellence in beauty education and to champion a message of “Beauty Changes Lives.”Being a single mother of two is a job in and of itself, but with the additions of beauty school and a full-time job, Miranda Todd of Fort Smith, Arkansas, went from feeling lost to becoming a superhuman stylist-mom hybrid. Read how beauty changed her life.

As a child, I was a hardcore athlete. I wanted nothing more to be a boy and play football. I even went as far as getting a bowl cut with the infamous Nike swoosh. 

When I got into my teenage years, I was very awkward. I wore a back brace, glasses and had braces. I looked at the “mean girls” in school and wondered how they looked flawless. Their makeup and hair was always in perfect place, and they had incredible clothing.

I tried everything from the horrid blue eye shadow and two-tone platinum blonde hair with black underneath to the horrible perm. I always knew I wanted to be like the girls on TV but just didn’t know how.

It wasn’t until I had my second child that I really got a grasp on it. Trial and error, as they say. I was no longer an awkward girl but instead a well-dressed woman with her makeup always on-point. I was the girl people asked for beauty advice. At first it became a hobby—how cute can I look at the club tonight? How many cute selfies can I take with all my new makeup? Then I realized this was my calling. This was it. I, of all people, was born to do this. It was me and who I was supposed to be. I had found me!

So I took a chance, and as a single mom of two, that’s not easy to do. I quit my fulltime job with benefits to enroll in cosmetology school. I worked a few part-time gigs but wasn’t making enough money to support my kids, house and myself. Feeling discouraged, I wanted to quit and give up, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I decided to keep looking for a job, and I found the one.

Now a year later, I am almost finished with school while I work a full-time job at night, manage two kids and a household. If I can do it, anyone can do it! Beauty changed my life because I never saw myself as someone who could change lives or someone who people trusted when it came to looks or fashion, and now I do. I see myself as someone who has the ability to go far. I am a tomboy glam girl about to take on the world with a confi dence I never had before.

Talk about a transformation.