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Giving
Seniors the Gift of Beauty
Reported By: Brenda Wood, 11 Alive News
It has been said that rarely do great beauty and great
virtue dwell together, but if Alison O’Neil has her way
great beauty and great virtue will become an everyday way of
life.
Forty residents at Lutheran Towers Senior Center in midtown
Atlanta got a day of beauty, courtesy of O’Neil.
O’Neil is the founder of Beauty Becomes You, a non-profit
group devoted to bringing beauty into the lives of seniors.
“I was just talking to a senior earlier who said, ‘Thank you
for doing this. You know we move into these retirement
communities and people forget about us. And they don’t think
we’re as important as we used to be and this is making me
feel really important today,’” said O’Neil.
O’Neil is a licensed aesthetician with her own private
practice who turned her focus to giving as she cared for her
dying father. One of the last things he said to her was,
“Beauty becomes you,” and those words cut deep.
“What it meant to me at that moment was the things I had
done for him really made me beautiful,” said O’Neil.
It was then that O’Neil decided to turn her knowledge of
making people beautiful into a living lesson.
So now, O’Neil gives away donated cosmetics and gathers
cosmetology professionals and students who volunteer to
wash, style, color, massage and soak away the mundane to
reveal often forgotten treasures.
“They can come back next year. Come back before Christmas.
Come in the spring,” said senior resident, Mary Brown.
“The smiles, the comments that we get, the graciousness of
the seniors that we’re able to help, its like getting the
best present you ever wanted,” said O’Neil.
O’Neil hopes the phrase, “Beauty becomes you”, will become
part of way of life.
“Regardless of how your appearance changes or the things you
can do in life change, you will always have a value,” said
O’Neil.
In its first 18 months, Beauty Becomes You has served 90
seniors in Atlanta and already, senior centers from around
the country have called to ask the program to come to them. |
