Prados Beauty inspired by color and culture

Indigenous-owned cosmetics company joins with visual artists as products go national

Rainbow palettes in colors of the sunset and sky come together with a pop of contemporary art in the vibrant Indigenous-owned cosmetics company, Prados Beauty, a growing enterprise that is drawing national recognition.

The New Mexico-based brand has been selected to appear in more than 600 JCPenney stores across the United States by the end of 2023, and the national retailer has dubbed owner Cece Meadows, Xicana, Yaqui and Comanche, a “beauty entrepreneur.”

Prados is currently the #1 selling beauty brand in the chain’s color category. The word “prados” means meadows in Portuguese.

Its products were also featured in several fashion shows during Santa Fe’s Indian Market this year, and the company has hosted several pop-ups across the country.

And after collaborating creatively with artist/filmmaker Steven Paul Judd, Choctaw, Meadows is broadening her reach with a new collaboration with Blackfeet fashion designer Lauren Good Day.

“I feel like we offer a different experience that a lot of beauty brands don’t get, and I’m so thankful for that opportunity because it’s hard to be in retail,” Meadows told ICT. “I feel a responsibility to represent and to make sure that our stories are told accurately, not just for myself but for my friends and Native tribes, who we are as people, our issues and the things that are important to us. Our products have a depth and a story.”

The products are vegan, cruelty-free, gluten-free and highly pigmented. A generous 50 percent of the profits go to Meadows’ foundation, Prados Promise, and are dispersed to Indigenous communities, people in need, veterans, single parents, and children with special needs. 

The colorful collections are named Matriarch, Sagrado, Grand Entry and Sun Fire.

Specially made for Native people

The cosmetics company developed after Meadows realized she didn’t see Indigenous makeup anywhere during a cancer scare that found her creating makeup for those who had lost hair due to cancer treatments.

“I started this company in my daughter’s nursery,” Meadows told ICT. “I grew up in Yuma, Arizona, but we were living in New York. My husband was teaching engineering and I was a stay-at-home mom and wife. It was really hard for me being away from my family, but I was into makeup, so I decided that I should become an influencer.”

She began doing reviews and makeup in New York, and then attended the New York Makeup Academy. After graduating, she was invited to be the first Native makeup artist at New York Fashion Week.

“I was so excited, but I saw there was a complete marginalization of Indigenous and Native people in that space and I thought ‘This needs to change,’” she said.

After losing her hair during a life-changing bout with cancer and treatment, she turned to bright, colorful makeup as her new identity.

“As a cancer survivor, I had been volunteering at units at hospitals for patients and was doing makeup on cancer patients, and I understood the need to have tools that were for our face,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know that it becomes painful on your skin from losing your hair as the hair follicles open. I was already designing makeup brushes that cancer patients and people with skin sensitivities could use, and then I designed lashes that looked very natural.”

After years of designing, she attended a makeup convention where she connected with a manufacturer to copyright and trademark her work.

She launched the brand in 2019 with eyelashes, eyeshadow and makeup brushes.

“I initially had a five-or ten-year plan, but the brand grew and took off,” she said. “I’m a huge fan of other creatives, so I connected with Steven Paul Judd to collaborate. My kids love his artwork. He is the perfect example of someone who was Indigenizing modern images and creating a space for us to see ourselves.”

She sent him a message on Instagram with her vision.

“I had a very vivid dream about what our collection would look like,” she said. “He liked the idea. Now we’ve come up with three collaborations together, where he designed the artwork on the packaging using real Indigenous people and the color palette inspired by his artwork.”

Judd came up with brightly colored, mosaic-like pop art portraits of Arapaho Chief Pretty Nose who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, and of Dakota Chief Stampede based on a picture from 1900.

Looking ahead

In recent years, Meadows and her company have been on the move, opening a new freestanding store in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 2021 and adding a 3,000-square-foot warehouse for distribution to the JCPenney locations.

But she wants to make sure the company also gives back to the community. By donating 50 percent of sales, the company was not profitable for the first three years of business, she said.

‘We were giving away 50 percent of the sales to Indigenous and Native communities that were hit really hard by Covid,” Meadows said. “We showed proof online of what the money was going toward, sending big, huge boxes and shipments to the Navajo Nation, to North and South Dakota and Arizona and New Mexico, Mexico, Canada. Posted all over social media that we were actually doing what we were saying.

“I think that solidified us as a beauty brand that does what they say. We were actually giving back to our communities.”

The newest collaboration with designer Good Day also started on social media.

“Like me, she’s a mother and an entrepreneur, a businesswoman,” Meadows said. “I was watching her on Instagram live doing her ledger art, and she saw that I was on there and messaged me, saying ‘I’m proud of you! We need a Lauren Good Day collection.’ So it was her idea.’”

Good Day sent Meadows a huge ledger piece to shrink down and put on boxes to create a whole color story.

“It was a long process,” Meadows said. “I was cutting out shapes, creating packaging from scratch of what I wanted it to look like and what I wanted the color stories to be like. Lauren got to pick the eyeshadow colors and play with formulations. It was a whole different process for Lauren to be able to see what goes into cosmetics. But I wanted her to feel like she was a part of it every single step of the way and not just someone who created the art.”

The latest effort goes beyond retail sales, Meadows said.

“I love her art, her fashion, and her clothing,” Meadows said. “We needed to create a partnership that was transparent and healthy, about artists maybe not being compensated. We wanted to set an example with open contracts, visibility, what the numbers are, what the sales are, and what it all really costs to make a collaboration.

“It’s not about us just creating generational wealth for myself, for my family or my employees, but it’s also about the artists and community.”

Sandra Hale Schulman, Cherokee Nation descent, has been writing about Native issues since 1994. The recipient of a Woody Guthrie Fellowship, she is the author of four books, has contributed to shows at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, The Grammy Museum, The Museum of Modern Art NYC, and has produced four films on Native musicians.ICT, formerly Indian Country Today, is a nonprofit news organization that covers the Indigenous world with a daily digital platform and weekday broadcast with international viewership.