As beauty enthusiasts and a blend of Indian and Black, Moore Beauty’s mandate is to help women embrace their individuality while being happy and confident in their own skin.

To do so, they harness the power of B & B — beauty and brains: Tracey is a Marketing major with her Bachelor of Commerce from Ryerson University and Raquel is pursuing a Master’s degree in Nursing, while building the Moore Beauty brand.

How did your YouTube and blogger career start?

During University, we both had beauty-related part-time jobs — Raquel was a makeup consultant at a Clinique counter, and I was a Sales Associate at a local beauty supply store. We were always asked for beauty advice at work and outside of work. We noticed that women of colour were asking because trusted skincare or beauty advice [was hard to find] anywhere else. It just seemed natural to move into YouTube and blogging because it was the wave at the time, and so we started a channel and moorebeautyblog.com as a way to share beauty tutorials and provide a different face to the standard image of beauty.

What are your channel and blog about and what was the inspiration for them?

Our channel and blog are about encouraging women to feel beautiful both inside and out. We love the outer beauty part, but focusing on that can become superficial. If you don’t take care of yourself on the inside, everything else is just a mask. We believe that you can wear all the makeup in the world, but if you don’t feel good about who you truly are, it’s all a waste. There needs to be a balance.

YouTube and blogging is all about creating engaging content to keep people interested. So, how do you manage finding inspiration to keep your audience engaged?

Believe it or not, our followers just want us to take them back to the basics. There are so many crazy tutorials that involve so many colours and products — realistically, our followers don’t have all those products, and they don’t have the time to do all the extra stuff. They want to know the simple “how-tos”, breaking each step down and explaining in detail. We want our followers to be able to watch a tutorial and say, “Okay, I’m going to go try that.” The tutorials are educational, more than they are entertainment. It’s also important to have a relationship with our audience — we always answer their comments, and in doing so we find out exactly what it is they want to see.

You advocate for living fearlessly. What does this mean to you?

Living fearlessly means aspiring for a life that is outside of the norm. We know that we don’t fit into the prescribed life that society has laid out for us. Magic happens when we get out of our comfort zone and dare to believe that we can be more than is expected of us. So many of us miss out on our purpose because we think in accordance to our family or friends — we don’t stop to think, What are my unique gifts? What if my place in life isn’t created yet? When you get the courage to think like this, you can begin to live fearlessly. It’s important because we all have a purpose, and we need to discover it as quickly as possible so that we can begin to live it out.

How does it feel to know that you reach so many young women and women of colour who can relate to you?

It’s an amazing feeling because there are so few of us out there in the forefront. Through our conversations with women of colour, we’re discovering that these women don’t see themselves in the media as the image of beauty. Quite often we’re portrayed as the opposite. That is so damaging for our self-esteem. If you subconsciously internalize the absence of our image in the media’s description of beauty, it can cause you to be less confident in your relationships, at work, at school, etc. This is so much more than beauty. What happens to the young women who don’t have anyone to tell them they’re beautiful? We want to be there in the case that no one else is.

What lessons have you learned since starting the Moore Beauty brand?

There have been so many, particularly about social media and branding. The biggest lesson was learning how to be authentic and have an authentic brand voice. That’s what followers connect to most, and not the tutorials. They can watch anyone’s tutorials, but the reason they watch ours is because of our effort to be ourselves on camera and in our writing. We weren’t always that way — we were shy to talk on camera. But a friend of ours mastered the art of being authentic on screen, so we learned from her. We tried less to be “picture perfect” and our followers could sense the authenticity coming through. We’re really happy we learned that lesson early on.

What advice do you have for those looking to build their own brand?

Be yourself. Being yourself is the new cool. It doesn’t matter what you’re interested in, you can find a way to make it your own in a way no one can imitate. Also, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. There are so many people who want to start their own brand or blog, but are afraid of what people think. That’s a dangerous place to grow from, because other people’s opinion will always alter your creative process, your ideas, and ultimately whether you take off or not. You can’t be afraid to start or to promote your content. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just focus on getting better.

What are some beauty products you cannot live without?

Right now we’re loving Morphe’s 350 Palette, Kylie Jenner’s Lip Kit in True Brown K, Sacha’s Buttercup Setting Powder, and Kat Von D’s Everlasting Liquid Lipsticks in Lolita and Lolita II.

Watch out for this notable duo at moorebeautyblog.com and on their Youtube channel, MooreBeauty.