Out Of Love: The Lash Bar's Melissa Watts on What's Important

Melissa Watts started The Lash Bar, offering services for lashes, brows, hair, and tanning, in order to fund her passion for charity, and to uplift and empower women locally and internationally. The Lash Bar has now allowed her to travel with over a dozen different humanitarian organizations all over the world. When Melissa was a kid, she sent money to a girl in Kenya. People told her she was wasting the money, and the organizations kept it, but Melissa felt that she was doing her best to do good. “I’ve always believed in doing things out of love, not fear.” Melissa doesn’t wait until she has extra money to make a difference, and puts 100% of the proceeds from her product line, Hello Darling Beauty, and a portion of The Lash Bar’s proceeds, towards her charitable passions right away. 

One of the organizations closest to Melissa’s heart is I Am Zambia, which she helps feed over 200 kids a day. On her first visit to Zambia, she turned a room at a school into a hair salon to provide a salon education, and noticed the kids were coming to school hungry. They’d not learn much because they couldn’t focus, then they’d go home at lunchtime and their parents wouldn’t let them go back to school, asking them to fetch water or watch their younger siblings. Melissa wanted to set up a program to provide food for schoolchildren, but the school board was worried providing food at school would create problems, like the kids only coming to school for food and not staying for lessons. Eventually, they called Melissa and let her know that they were supportive of her proposed program if she funded it. Now, almost three years into the program, the kids are paying better attention, staying in school, and getting double the education by staying at school for lunch. 

Melissa went to Ghana in November with Hart Africa, a medical mission she’s been traveling with every other year since 2015. They do surgeries for people with eye diseases, restoring eyesight within 24 hours. “It’s amazing and reminds me what’s important in life.” In October 2019, Melissa and The Lash Bar employees traveled to Mexico and were able to sponsor a house build and help construct homes for two deserving families. Melissa’s goal is always to “give a hand up, not a handout.”, evidenced by the team funding a brick-making machine so the orphanage they were volunteering at in Mexico could sell bricks and generate income instead of just relying on donations, and a chicken coop for eggs because their biggest expense was food.

Melissa’s motto is ‘life is short, change the world’. She’s traveled with different organizations to countries including Mexico, Belize, Cambodia, Colombia, and Ethiopia. Her goal is to fund programs that last. In the future, she’s interested in consulting with organizations to make a bigger impact with their resources, and to help recipients be self-sufficient.

Melissa hopes people will recognize that they could shop some of the same things elsewhere, but if they shop at The Lash Bar’s clothing boutique, their money will be making a difference. The Lash Bar is also the highest rated lash salon in Utah, so clients are getting great lashes, while supporting great causes. “I think people like knowing that when they shop at Lash Bar, part of their money is helping others. I used to not talk about it, but now I hear from women who saw pictures of me in Africa and started their own organizations. That’s the best part—the ripple effect.”

If you have any questions about any of the organizations Melissa and the team at The Lash Bar are currently working with, would like more information on getting involved, or have an opportunity for them to get involved with, reach out to Melissa at melissa@lashbarutah.com.