‘For You’ has been a passion project that has been sitting in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, and I would describe it as being multifaceted.

The ‘For You’ idea first first came about one afternoon during my fourth pregnancy when I was thinking about what I could be doing with my life and professional skills that would have more purpose. Part of my background is working as a makeup artist, and I enjoyed my career not only for the creative aspect, but also because of its ability to make people feel incredible and raise their confidence levels and so on. I had also had a conversation with a woman that I didn’t know very well on the subject of her postpartum depression and the lack of support that she had had in Hong Kong. She had felt far away from her family, very alone, coupled with the fact that she didn’t feel that there was any obvious or affordable support in Hong Kong.

It was this that made me want to make a difference.

So my idea was born. My mission was to bring together a group of wonderful, diverse women who were happy to share their stories to firstly raise awareness amongst others who may be suffering in silence, and secondly, to connect them all together and build a supportive community. I would do their makeup, make them feel amazing, and hopefully provide them with some form of healing, whilst giving them a voice and a presence to convey their individual stories for the benefit of other women. Once you have children, it often becomes just about them (or at least it feels that way), and so I wanted this project to be just about the mothers - the participants – making it just ‘For You’.

Working alongside a creative director and a portrait photographer, we would take photographs of these amazing and courageous women and simultaneously share their stories. If we were able to help just one other person through them seeing the campaign, then we would have achieved something.

What I didn’t realise is that the universe was going to send me in the direction of Matt Jacob, the photographer who actually turned this project from a great idea into reality, and that we would have a project that we could share across the globe, thus hopefully encouraging people to pay attention to the very difficult and complex issue of postpartum. The idea was also to educate, inform, and provide guidance on things that might help them to gain support from their partners.

Initially, I saw the project as a large-scale exhibition that we would stage first in Hong Kong, with the additional support of care providers, medical professionals, the participants themselves, their family members, the media…you name it - anyone that could further help to raise awareness or make some changes in their own practices to enable more people to speak out, seek help, or even prepare women in advance, whilst at the same time viewing these portraits of the courageous participants and reading their honest, true and unadulterated stories. However, with the continuing effects of the pandemic, things haven’t been able to happen as planned, so we are now aiming higher and broadening the reach of the project through the online community, and hopefully in the near future, we will be able to progress the campaign further by doing the same thing with other women across the globe.

It is my strong belief that there can never be enough awareness as far as mental health is concerned, and in this case, the mental health of mothers everywhere.