Chapter 3 - The Fifty-Dollar Miracle
We spent the next three days refining the formula, producing fifty small glass sample jars in the basement laboratory.
Mrs. Kim raided her pantry for empty amber cosmetic pots she had saved from her laboratory days, while I hand-lettered fifty labels: Luxe Universal Skin Veil.
On Friday morning, I used five dollars of Brooke's money to ride the metro bus down to the University of Cincinnati campus.
I set up a cardboard tray on the concrete steps outside the student union, wearing clean jeans and a plain black sweater.
Beside the tray sat a small hand mirror and a sign written in black marker: The Foundation That Matches Every Face. Free Trials Today.
At first, college girls walked past, glancing skeptically at the handmade display with polite disinterest.
Then, a girl named Maya stopped, adjusting her heavy backpack.
Maya had deep espresso skin with rich red undertones, and her cheeks were dotted with active acne flare-ups.
"Is this another one of those 'universal' creams that turns gray on dark skin?" Maya asked, crossing her arms with justified cynicism.
"I’ve spent hundreds of dollars at Sephora, and everything makes me look like an ashen ghost."
"Give me thirty seconds, Maya," I said gently, offering her the clean mirror. "If you don't like it, you can tell every girl on campus I'm a fraud."
Maya hesitated, then stepped closer, tilting her chin up.
I pumped a tiny pea-sized drop of the pearl-white lotion onto the back of my hand and used a clean makeup sponge to blend it across her jawline.
The white lotion melted on contact, releasing its micro-encapsulated pigments.
Within three strokes of the sponge, the white cream vanished completely.
In its place was a flawless, radiant layer of rich mahogany pigment that matched her neck to the exact decimal shade, blurring her blemishes without a trace of ashiness.
Maya gasped, dropping her backpack onto the concrete steps.
She snatched the mirror, holding it two inches from her face in the bright morning sunlight.
"What is this?!" Maya shrieked, turning her head from side to side in utter shock.
"Where are the pores?! Where did the redness go?!"
"It's micro-encapsulated mineral pigments," I smiled, feeling my heart swell to double its size. "It adapts to your natural lipid temperature."
"How much do you want for this jar?!" Maya demanded, pulling a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from her pocket.
"It's just a sample," I replied. "It's free if you leave a review."
"No way," Maya said, shoving the twenty into my palm and grabbing the jar. "You're taking my money, and I'm filming this for my TikTok right now."
Maya pulled out her smartphone, prop it against her water bottle, and hit record.
She blended the cream across the other side of her face in real time, screaming with genuine, unfiltered joy as her camera captured the transformation.
"Y'all need to see this!" Maya yelled into her screen. "This girl outside the student union just created witchcraft in a jar!"
Within forty minutes, a line of thirty college students snaked down the steps of the union.
Girls with porcelain skin, olive skin, deep ebony skin, and freckled complexions crowded around my cardboard tray.
The white cream adapted to every single one of them with effortless, undetectable precision.
By two o'clock in the afternoon, all fifty sample jars were gone.
May you like
In my pocket sat four hundred and eighty dollars in crumpled bills.
And on Maya's TikTok page, a thirty-second video of a white cream turning into flawless skin had already accumulated two hundred thousand views.
