Basma Hameed grew up in Iraq, where, at two-years-old, a kitchen accident resulted in third-degree burns across her face.
So you were a makeup prodigy of sorts. Were you already noticing potential areas of product improvement? When I was 14, I asked my plastic surgeon how to improve the look of my scars. He told me to take my money and go on vacation, because there was nothing he could do. But I’d been mixing pigments and putting them on top of scar tissue, so I thought, what if I injected them into it instead? My doctors all said it wouldn’t work. So I became my own first client. I mixed pigments made for permanent cosmetics and used needles to implant them into my scars.