I am vaguely considering beauty blogging as a side hustle. Don’t laugh; I actually really enjoyed taking fashion and design in school, and it’s a fun way to play with herbs and oils.  Besides, you could really summarize much of what I do  — the less gloomy side — as fashion and beauty blogging; the difference is that instead of putting a huge amount of emphasis on how a person already looks and how they are failing to conform to social norms of beauty, I am connecting consumers with products they may not already know exist, and probably not where to locate them.

Realistically, I doubt that most purchasers of products give much thought to how much effort went into the creation of the goods they are buying or how many people it took for a particular item to reach them.  This is actually to me one of the more interesting aspects of abolitionism; learning the story behind almost everything I interact with.  Its given me a lot more respect for “things.”

I learned for example that there are artisan companies that make cosmetic brushes out of vegan or eco-friendly goods.  I suppose for starters I would never even have THOUHT of such a particular consumer niche like five years ago.  Then again, five years ago I never would have bothered with makeup brushes in the first place.

There have recently been massive inroads made in the battle to combat trafficking in the sense of raids and successful prosecutions of people involved in it.  I am more interested in fighting it through the economic empowerment of vulnerable women and through business models which allow them to escape poverty through fair trade, technology, science, or coding.  Magdalene House, as I understand it, is part of an initiative to move towards an entirely fair trade city in Red Deer, which I think is really cool.