Mary Harcourt Featured on Bold Journey
Some of the best inventions come directly from frustration. For Mary Harcourt, founder and CEO of CosmoGlo, that frustration was lighting.
In this Bold Journey feature, Mary opens up about the years she spent running a top-rated lash spa in Hermosa Beach, California, where lighting was a constant battle. Lights overheated and turned the room into a sauna. Ring lights cast shadows that made precision lash work nearly impossible. Fixtures were either too dim on one side of a client's face or top-heavy enough to risk falling on a resting client. After exhausting every option on the market and finding nothing that worked, Mary sketched an idea on a napkin and built a prototype herself.
That prototype became CosmoGlo, now a patented lighting brand used by professionals across the beauty industry worldwide.
The interview also traces Mary's path before CosmoGlo, including more than two years of slow travel across dozens of countries, a stretch of time in Silicon Valley that shaped how she thinks about building something from the ground up, and the early, unglamorous years of running her own salon before she figured out how to make it profitable. She credits resourcefulness, adaptability, and grit as the three qualities that mattered most throughout that journey, and shares her own filter for whose advice is actually worth listening to.
She also talks candidly about what she is working through now: applying the lessons CosmoGlo learned in the lash industry to new verticals like tattoo, medical, nails, and makeup, where the lighting pain points are different and have to be understood from scratch.
Read the full interview on Bold Journey for Mary's complete story.