The beauty space would be nothing without queer and trans people that have remained the blueprint for creativity, innovation, and beauty standard inspiration. Meet Jade - a friend of MULTI's Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer AJ Addae - that embodies what it means to find joy through expression, queerness, and fluidity. Jade is a Black, genderfluid person and artist, and the founder of Rodeo, a Texas-based Black and queer skate collective.

Describe yourself.

I’m Jade, and I’m a Black, genderfluid human. I like to do different things that help people and make them feel good about themselves through hair, makeup, any form of design, and even at my job, serving tables.

How do your Black and queer identities inform your style?

Expression is the way that I learned how to cope with things going on around me when I was younger. Knowing that I could physically change things, whether it’s my own mood and how I looked, whether it’s an easy outlet. Now that I’ve moved out, I really turn everything into my own.  Putting myself into boxes stops me from being as expressive as I would want to be with how I feel. I definitely feel like I’m a walking representation of my emotions. You know what I’m going through with what my makeup looks like from what I look through that day. I think my expression being related to gender fluidity is because I have a desire to break the binary in every way possible, so that means being able to feel genderfluid on the inside and to translate that into what I’m wearing based off my own perception of how I see myself, versus what society expects for me to look like, or what patterns to go together, or what colors to wear together. I think it’s very queer to not give a fuck about traditional color theory or color patterns or anything like that. 

I’ve always done hair - my great aunt who I always stayed with during summers had a salon in Louisiana - I would wait for my grandmother to get off work and I subconsciously picked things up. But I never thought of professionally doing hair ever in my life, until lockdown in 2020. I realized I love making people feel completely different than they did before. I thought “this is what I want to do” and decided to go to school - a week later I was in cosmetology school. Hopefully I’ll have all my work and licensing done by 2023, and now I’m even thinking that I want to go back to school to study the science of cosmetology.

Let’s talk about Rodeo – Jade’s skate and art collective for Black queer and trans people. 

That basically came from me being inspired by froSkate, because they have their skate group and it’s mostly for queer black people. Seeing people that look like me needed other people to validate them just by skating once a week and how they can see themselves and how they interacted with other people too. Seeing those relations start to web. It’s important to have those spaces for Black queer people because honestly, we need them. 

What’s next?

I wanna stay in Dallas for the next 2 years, and really make a name for myself here. I wanna work with more local artists and I want to have my own collective and to pop off, I want to just do things that people can do for free.