What does it MEAN?!

Ever since I started Beleza Artistica, I've only heard a hand full of people actually say the name of it, lol. But none the less when people see the name they automatically see it as unique.

When I decided that I wanted to start selling my work and doing henna as a service, I wanted to pick a name that I could grow with. A name that was unique and captured the essence of what I do in two words. At first I thought "This shouldn't be hard". Needless to say, I was wrong lol. I would write down a whole list of names, only to find that someone had already took it. It was so frustrating, day after day, coming up with names, but to no avail. So after trying English names, I started looking into different languages to find my name. Spanish, Swahili, and Portuguese.

I decided to go with Portuguese, since one of my grandmothers had a lot to do with my love of art. She was of Portuguese decent. I remembered her tell me about how she grew up only learning a few words of Portuguese, because her father was made fun of for speaking his language, as a young lad when he first came to America. He didn't want his children to be made fun of (like he was) so he never taught her or her siblings the language. So, I thought it be a good way to pay homage to that part of my heritage, by choosing a Portuguese name. 

So then I started trying to find words that sounded pleasant to the ear and ones that captured the essence of what I do. That took me a few more days on Google translate (lol) and also doing more research on the words as well. I didn't want to rely solely on Google translate, cause I've seen it be wrong before lol, so I check it with other resources as well. Portuguese is a very interesting language. It sounds like Italian mixed with Spanish and I had also found, in my studies a while back, that there are over 1,000 Arabic and Arabic inspired word in the Portuguese language. Then after a couple weeks, I had found it! I had found Beleza Artistica! There are also 2 pronunciations of Beleza. The Brazilians pronounce it a little bit different than the Portuguese, but only slightly.

So go ahead and say it lol! It has a truly beautiful meaning behind it... Beleza Artistica means Artistic Beauty. And those are the 2 words that sum up what I do, what I hope to convey, and how, I hope, others will perceive my work. I hope that others enjoy my work as much as I do, cause it is truly my passion. And I want to thank all those people out there for reading. Til next time...

:)