When Nura Afia began looking at beauty videos five years ago while nursing her infant daughter, she had no clue where simply watching YouTube would take her.
Fast forward to this month and the Denver-based Muslim beauty blogger is being featured in a national CoverGirl campaign for mascara. It’s the first time the cosmetics company has shown a woman in a hijab advertising its products.
Afia is among a new wave of beauty ambassadors CoverGirl has chosen to demonstrate the diversity of people who use its products. The company last month named James Charles, a 17-year-old makeup artist, as its first male spokesmodel.
Charles and Afia join such entertainers as Katy Perry and Sofia Vergara in ads for its new So Lashy! BlastPro mascara that include a billboard in Manhattan’s Times Square as well as a TV commercial and other promotions for a year.
“We’ve always stood for inclusive beauty that supports any and all types – from skin types to lash types,” CoverGirl said on Instagram.
While Afia has worked with other major brands, including Revlon and Anastasia Beverly Hills, the CoverGirl spot is a breakthrough because of its national scope and the media buzz it is generating. And the 24-year-old, who grew up in Aurora and went to Smoky Hill High School, is reeling from all the attention.
“Just since the CoverGirl announcement yesterday I’ve had 20 emails from media like NBC,” she said in an interview.
The outpouring of support from the media and fans has been gratifying. And even before the CoverGirl announcement, Afia had 213,000 YouTube followers and 13 million views of her makeup tutorials, as well as a big following on such sites as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat (you’ll find her at Nuralailalov on Instagram and Babylailalov on YouTube). Expect those numbers to go up.
The mission goes beyond selling makeup, Afia says.
“I feel like it shows girls that whatever you believe in, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Muslim or an Orthodox Jew, you can stick to your beliefs and pursue your dreams,” she said. “I think it is so important that all different types of religions and races out there are represented.”
Afia’s parents raised her and her five siblings with traditional Muslim values, but it wasn’t always easy going in their Aurora household. Nura’s mother Anne was born in Lebanon to Swiss-Lebanese parents who moved to the United States when she was a child. Anne converted from Christianity to the Islamic faith before she got married, and her mother wasn’t happy about it. Nura recalls being criticized by her grandmother for wearing a hijab.
It was also uncomfortable to wear the traditional head scarf starting at age 13 when none of the other school girls aside from her twin sister wore one, and there were few cultural norms supporting it. “Growing up, I felt it would hold me back,” she said. “You never saw women in magazines wearing one.”
Afia said she struggled with academics in school and didn’t want to even try to go to college. Creative subjects interested her, like art.
She wanted to get married, and that’s what she and Asef Noorzai did she was 18 and he was 22. “I had a big crush on him,” she said, recalling she first met him when she was about 6 years old. “Our families were friends, and I’d see him at the mosque.”
Her Muslim faith deepened in marriage. Growing up, she said, she was told to wear a hijab and dress modestly, but never given reasons why. “Asef showed me the beauty of it in ways I was never taught. It’s my identity and how I am respected,” she said.
When the couple had their daughter Laila five years ago, Afia recalled, “I had a lot of downtime while breastfeeding her so I watched YouTube videos. I saw a couple of women wearing hijabs and thought that maybe I could do these videos somehow, too.” The videos focused on fashion and how to dress, but few addressed the subject of cosmetics.
Afia stepped in to fill the void with her own tutorials, demonstrating how to apply lipstick and eye makeup, using a camera and laptop borrowed from her in-laws. She admits the first efforts were pretty raw. “I was very amateur,” she said.
She soon got a job at Sephora in Park Meadows (where she still works one day a week) and “it made me perfect my skills,” she said.
Even before the makeup videos gained traction, she got notice from working with hijab brands and websites like hijab-ista.com and began doing photo shoots and going to events where she met other bloggers and brands advertising modest fashion. “It was a small community at that time,” she says.
Among the first mainstream beauty communities she worked with were Tarte Cosmetics and Anastasia Beverly Hills. It has been nonstop ever since, she said.
Afia has been able to make a living off her videos and Instagram posts for the past three years. Her plans for the future include continuing with makeup company promotions and perhaps creating her own modest clothing line that is “less girly and more street style.”
The makeup artist acknowledges that some traditionalists, particularly those from the Middle East, don’t think it’s appropriate for Muslim women to draw attention to themselves by wearing cosmetics, but she doesn’t agree. For her it’s an art form and a way for a woman to transform her image.
“I love how dramatic it can be when it is done well,” she said. She is her own best advertisement, and her photos — more than 1,300 posts on Instagram alone — are often close-ups of her brown eyes accented with lush lashes, sparkly eyeshadow and liner worn above and below the lids, all framed with thick, dark brows.
“For me it’s the artistic approach to it that’s interesting,” Afia says. “I’m very confident without makeup, and on Snapchat, I don’t often wear it. But I love the transformation and got good at it. I never dreamed it would get that big, but I started getting a following and realized there are other women like that, others girls in my position who could relate to me.”
The photos show her in the type of makeup you associate with fancy formal events and attire and are unlike what Afia says is her normal fashion mode: sporty and casual. “I love sneakers,” she says.
Afia credits her family, and especially her husband, with her recent success. “Honestly, I wouldn’t have gotten to the place where I am without his support,” she says. “He’s Super Dad. He holds down the house when I’m gone.”
