Exclusive Interview - Nic Marilyn
Nic, welcome to spill the tea my lovely. Firstly, congratulations on getting on series three of the glow up what made you want to apply to be on the show?
Oh, good question. I started doing makeup actually at the beginning of lockdown after watching season two of Glow Up. My background is that I have a biodegradable glitter company. I work with makeup artists and I obviously work with makeup so it was kind of the natural progression to do during lockdown when things kind of got a little bit quieter in festival world and photoshoot world. I was just doing different looks every day for this rainbow challenge on Instagram, then on the last day I was like you know, I'm just gonna apply and see what happens and then somehow managed to get onto it, crazy.
What do you what do you love most about it make up?
I think the thing that I love most about doing makeup and the reason why I started doing glitter, its the way that it can make someone feel when you transform them, I did glitter for this night once on request and someone was like ‘oh can you bring some glitter with you'?’ and literally the reaction that I've got from people was ‘oh my god GLITTER!’ I've never had that from my work before so it was a crazy lightbulb moment, it's just a bit of glitter but people lose their minds over it.
“I think the thing that I love most about doing makeup and the reason why I started doing glitter was the way that it can make someone feel when you transform them”
No spoilers but what was one of your favourite memories from the Glow Up?
My favourite memory has got to be meeting everyone, I remember going into the house the first time and looking around at the place and everyone turning up on that day which is the most insane experience because no one knows what's gonna happen after this point but we're all in it together now, its such a shared experience, I feel I've just met my best mates, we're gonna be friends forever so that was definitely the best part of it.
Did you find it hard having someone filming or watching you closely when you were working on a challenge?
I think I didn’t find it hard being watched in the camera. I found it more crazy that it was Val Garland who's an icon being right there watching. I think the pressure came more from really caring about what Val thinks of me. Rather than the cameras.
Now we all know most gays like myself love us some glitter, which means we have to talk about your company Disco Dust (London). How did you come to set that up?
I was staying in this crazy guardianship it was a 56 bedroom mansion and I was paying 200 pounds a month, which is just unreal, for six months. Cheap rent combined with not know what I was doing at the time, I was kind of doing textiles and assisting a photographer and then I did a couple of events and it was just so nice to have a fun job on a weekend it does just make people so happy seeing glitter and then I was wanting to learn how to run a business anyway and then I realised I can get paid to party, so that’s how that kind of started. Then I did an event where I had an accident, they gave me some money to stop me going to the solicitors were I had a big burn on the back of my legs. That combined with having cheap rent and these crazy spaces, you know, a bit of a no brainer. I'm gonna try to learn how to run a business, I paid for a trade show and it kind of just tumbled from there.
Why was it important to you to make your glitter vegan, cruelty free, made in England and biodegradable?
It's important because I've actually been to China, I looked around factories there and I didn't trust a lot of the things that I was being told about the products, such as the credentials of the EU. It was really difficult to kind of match up, because they're just dealt with in quite different ways. I just felt when I found that I could do it in the way I do it was a bit of a no brainer. It took me a year or so to kind of find it, in the beginning I was figuring out what was the best products and how it could work. I feel if it’s possible then that's just how the world's gonna be in the future. So why not invest in that? I feel like, you know, no one's perfect, right? We can't live on a mountain in a hut, I tried to do as much as I could. Educating people is a huge part of it, being aware of what you're doing, because a lot of people didn't even realise that it wasn't eco friendly.
Any last shout out?
One of my best friends Kate Bones has been such a rock helping me over the last few months, she makes really cool gifs, there's a lot of fun things coming with that.
Shout out to like Val, Dom and Maya and all the people that I met on the show and obviously for all the other contestants. Because I just feel so blessed to have gotten the opportunity to meet them all. Also my mom and dad, my dog.
Glow Up Series 3 is streaming from Tuesday, 20th April with new episodes weekly on BBC Three/BBC iPlayer from 7PM.
Imagery and trailer courtesy of BBC - Wall to Wall / David Ellis / Sophie Wade
Note: Some of this interview has been edited from the original transcript.