Andrew Sotomayor

I am not cool enough to have a tattoo. Well, to clarify, I am not cool enough to already have a tattoo. I’m cool enough to want tattoos, but not cool enough to have gotten them the day I turned 18. Or 30.

I received a reply to the email I sent to a Maybelline representative on June 10th. Below is my next open letter response. Thanks for the additional information. You said that after I was asked for referrals to trans women willing to do social media work for freem that the concept changed, talent appearing in the “non-editorial content” for Pride last year were paid. What about talent appearing in branded "editorial" content? You also said that the Maybelline Pride initiatives would be rolling out. It's now June 15th.

Like many of us, in the wake of coronavirus pandemic, I've spent the last three months getting emails from Verizon, Chase Bank, and almost every company I've ever shopped with online. It's always sentiments about what a difficult time Americans are experiencing, words about how much they care, and usually very little about what they actually do.

In the second webisode of “Lip Service” I talk about why being “popular” is all about what other people want, and why being “likable” is all about what you want. If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now thinking about competition, social media, and your relationships, click the link in my bio to watch 👏 this 👏 video 👏. As the world is changing around us, it couldn’t be more important to find one word at a time to carve your path to what’s next.

Confidence is highly overrated. For real. Hear me out. I've been a makeup artist for seventeen years. It has been a roller coaster. Some big choices along the way. Some crazy awesome opportunities that I'll always be grateful for. Some experiences I'd rather forget. But along this journey, I've learned a lot about what it means to pursue a creative life. So now, it's my time to give some things back.

Author’s note: A previous version of this piece was published on The Huffington Post in 2017. With so many significant changes to the fight against HIV/AIDS in terms of the success of PrEP, new information about what it means to be undetectable, a dizzying array of political issues, the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, and through it all an additional 2 million new HIV cases globally, I felt that now more than ever, this piece needed to be updated and reshared. While cases of sexually transmitted infections have most likely fallen temporarily as social distancing have been put in place to drastically varying degrees depending on location, it is to be expected they will return along with previous social norms.