Sammy Vanity: Behind Her New Beauty Brand, ‘True Soul Beauty’.
Beauty, glass skin, fashion and a fierce sense of humour - Sammy Vanity is serving them all! 💋 For this Dunedin native, content creation started with documenting her makeup looks. Now, she has an incredibly strong connection to her community, and is launching her own beauty brand! ☁️🫧
We sat down with Sammy to discuss everything True Soul Beauty from what the process was like, what inspired the collection and celebrating how far she has come… 👀
No Sad Cowboys: Congratulations on releasing your brand new beauty brand! What is True Soul Beauty all about and who is it for?
Sammy: True Soul Beauty is really about creating products that help you feel good in yourself and more connected to your truest self.
Beauty has always been such a huge part of my life, but I never wanted to create a brand that was about telling people they needed to change who they are.
NSC: You’re a beauty icon in Aotearoa with many fans who look up to you. What inspired you to start your own beauty brand?
Sammy: I have found my social media journey so fulfilling. Lots of the content I film these days is the stuff I needed at the start of my transition. The everyday content of living my best life or beauty hacks and secret tips or my transition experience - it’s all stuff I have people messaging me about and it feels so full circle and meaningful to me.
So, when the idea came about to bottle everything I’ve learned along the way into 3 gorgeous products tackling different issues for people (and issues I’ve dealt with too) felt like an absolute must!
I wanted to take everything I had learned through my own journey and turn it into something that could become part of other people’s beauty journeys too.
“Don’t wait until you feel completely ready to start something.” – Sammy
NSC: We know you’ve been working on this for a long time. What was the prototyping and production process like to navigate? Tell us everything!
Sammy: Oh my god, it has been a JOURNEY! I don’t think I could have understood how much goes into creating a beauty brand until I actually did it.
I was incredibly involved in every part of the process. The formulas went back and forth with my lab until they felt right. There were samples, testing, adjustments, more samples, packaging decisions, pumps, colours, finishes, boxes, freight, compliance, warehousing – literally everything you can imagine.
I’m such a perfectionist with this brand. There were things that probably would have been completely fine to somebody else, but if something didn’t feel right to me, I wanted to keep working on it.
Even the visual side took so much development. I had such a specific world in my head for True Soul Beauty. The pearl details on the packaging are probably one of my favourite examples of that. Each freshwater pearl is naturally unique, so no two are exactly the same – just like our souls.
I’ve learned SO much through the process, and I think actually being so involved has made me even more proud of what we’re launching.
NSC: If you could go back in time to tell your younger self that one day you’d be launching your own beauty brand, how would she react? How does it feel to be where you are today?
Sammy: Telling younger me that one day she’d not only be living that life, but would have built this amazing community online and then be launching her own beauty brand in New Zealand… I don’t think she’d even know what to say.
That’s probably what makes this launch so emotional for me. True Soul Beauty isn’t just a business I’ve been working on. It represents so many different chapters of my life and so much growth.
There have been plenty of times throughout my life when I haven’t known exactly how I was going to get to where I wanted to be in life, but I’ve always had this really strong belief that I was meant to create something of my own.
So, to finally be here and physically hold these products that used to just be ideas in my head is incredibly surreal. I think my younger self would be very proud and probably obsessed with the packaging!
“To finally hold products that used to be ideas in my head is incredibly surreal.” – Sammy
NSC: What are you most excited about for the launch?
Sammy: Seeing the products in other people’s hands!
I’ve been living and breathing these products for so long that they almost haven’t felt completely real yet. They’ve been samples on my bathroom counter, spreadsheets on my laptop, packaging scattered around my house and a million conversations behind the scenes.
So, seeing someone receive their True Soul Beauty box for the first time, open it, use the products and hopefully fall in love with them is going to be such a crazy moment.
I’m also really excited that we’ve been able to build giving back into the brand from the beginning. We’re donating $1 from every order placed on truesoulbeauty.com to InsideOUT Kōaro, a New Zealand charity working to ensure rainbow and takatāpui people are free to thrive in Aotearoa.
As a trans woman, that’s incredibly close to my heart. I love that as True Soul Beauty grows, our ability to make an impact can grow alongside it.
NSC: To wrap things up, what is the best piece of advice you can give to our readers?
Sammy: Don’t wait until you feel completely ready to start something, because I honestly don’t think that moment ever comes. Do something everyday towards your goal, even if it’s small because over time it builds.
So much of creating True Soul Beauty has involved doing something I’ve never done before, figuring it out, getting something wrong, learning from it and then moving on to the next thing.
I think we can put so much pressure on ourselves to have our entire lives figured out, especially when we’re comparing ourselves to what everyone else seems to be doing.
Trust yourself, and don’t be afraid of becoming a new version of yourself along the way. You don’t need to have everything figured out to start moving towards the life you want, xo.
