Starry Gladue builds beyond beauty studio

Beauty is the entry point here. But the real story is business-building — and who gets to define what a beauty business can become. Starry Gladue, the Edmonton founder behind Beauty on the Block, is using a makeup and brow studio as the base for something bigger: creative work, mentorship, and a community-facing brand shaped by Indigenous identity and ambition. That shift came into sharper view this week as new profiles traced how her studio has grown from a service business into a platform for wider entrepreneurship. ### Who is Starry Gladue? Gladue is an Indigenous entrepreneur from Beaver First Nation in northern Alberta. She left her community in 2009 to study makeup in Vancouver, then built a career in beauty that now stretches to 17 years. Along the way, she became known for makeup artistry and Powder Ombre Brows, picked up more than 15 certifications, and completed thousands of cosmetic tattoo procedures. ### What is Beauty on the Block now? It started as a beauty studio, but not in the small, narrow sense. Beauty on the Block is now her downtown Edmonton base for brow tattooing, brow lamination, and makeup artistry, inside the House of Snob in the brewery district. The studio’s own language makes the point pretty clearly — this is meant to be a safe, inclusive space for Indigenous and BIPOC women, not just a place to get a service and leave. ### So what changed this week? What changed is visibility. The new May 6 profile didn’t announce a funding round or a new storefront. Instead, it pulled the wider shape of Gladue’s business into focus: she is building beyond client appointments and treating the studio as the center of a broader creative career. That includes brand-building, community presence, and using beauty as a way to open doors for other Indigenous women. ### Why does the “beyond beauty” part matter? Because service businesses can trap founders in a treadmill — more clients, more hours, same ceiling. Gladue seems to be pushing against that. Her work now sits at the overlap of beauty, identity, and entrepreneurship, where the studio becomes both income source and proof of concept. Basically, she is showing that a beauty founder does not have to stay boxed inside appointments, treatments, and the usual salon ladder. ### How does Indigenous identity fit into the business? Not as decoration. More like the operating logic. The Alberta Indian Investment Corporation spotlight on Gladue frames her culture as part of her designs, techniques, and brand voice, and says her story is about resilience, innovation, and lifting up community. That matters because a lot of herself. ### Is she also building a pipeline for others? Yes — and this is probably the most important part. In 2024, Gladue launched Powder Ombre Brow training and mentorship programs aimed at uplifting the next generation of Indigenous artists. She talks openly about underrepresentation in the beauty industry, and the studio site says she wants students to take up more space with confidence. That turns ### What makes her story stand out? The mix of scale and intention. Plenty of founders have talent. Fewer have the technical depth Gladue has built over nearly two decades, and fewer still are trying to convert that into mentorship and community infrastructure. She was also recognized with an Indigenous Youth Role Model Award in 2016, which helps explain why the mentorship piece feels central rather than tacked on later. ### Bottom line? Gladue is not just running a beauty studio. She is using one to build a brand, a teaching lane, and a more visible path for Indigenous women in business. That is why this story lands now — it is less about beauty trends and more about what entrepreneurship looks like when the founder refuses to stay in the lane people expect.