Dania Blanco spends her days running a boutique salon in Gilbert dedicated to beautifying women.
It is a stark contrast from an ugly past in which her father physically abused her mother and molested her, causing them to stay at times in shelters until her mother, upon learning of the sexual abuse, finally left her father for good.
“My dad was not a very good man,” Blanco said. “He probably still isn’t.”
But Blanco has overcome. She spent 18 and a half years working as a civilian investigator in the Gilbert Police Department in the sex crimes and missing persons unit.
And now her business, Cosmiix Beauty Labs, runs an annual “Be Beautiful” campaign in which she and the others at the salon offer makeup and haircut/styling services to women staying at different domestic violence shelters.
It is the ultimate triumph over a rugged past, one that Blanco is able to talk about almost casually.
“It did take a long time for me to talk freely about it, but overcoming trauma like that is key to living a somewhat normal life,” Blanco said. “I refuse to be a victim. I am not a victim. If I can inspire one young woman to be strong, valiant and take charge of their life, then my abuse was not endured in vain. Having a faithful foundation helps, too.”
Abusive childhood
Blanco was born in Costa Rica. She had an aunt who was adopted by a family in Mesa that were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Her aunt encouraged her mom to come to America to make her life. In 1973, when Blanco was 3 years old, her mom got a visa and came. Her dad joined them about a year later.
The family moved to California for a few years, but returned to Arizona when Blanco was 12. Her dad a lot of times “just abused my mother horribly.”
“We spent lots of time in shelters when I was a little girl, not knowing what it was,” she said. “I thought it was so cool because I remember thinking, ‘man, they have a lot of cool toys here,’ and my brother was a baby.”
She remembers being molested as early as age 3 or 4. It was her mother’s discovery of that that led her to finally break away for good in 1984 when Blanco was 14.
“I am quite healed,” she said. “From it, I went through a lot of counseling, and I think that I've persevered with the abuse. It's always a struggle, but I really feel that my success in raising my children and all the things that I've done in my life, I think that has helped heal whatever wounds I have.”
Into a career
Blanco said she herself did not always make good choices in her life. She got married and had children “very young” with a man who also was abusive. While he was away in Desert Storm, she returned from North Carolina, where they had moved, to home.
“I got out of that relationship, and I really didn't want my boys to grow up with abusing women or disrespecting women,” she said. “That's why when I learned that he was going to Desert Storm, I left and I said, ‘I'm just going to go home.’”
She got a job working the Lancome cosmetics counter at the Broadway Southwest, a now defunct department store. She said she always had a love of makeup, but working there allowed that to further develop and hone her skills.
But the retail schedule and lack of benefits was not good for her raising two boys and later a daughter from another relationship. Blanco got a job with a judge in Gilbert and worked in the courts for seven years. A friend she made in the police department pointed her toward the investigator job.
Blanco had no idea about the job, and it was only two days before the listing closed, but her friend encouraged her and told her she would be great at it, so she pulled together the paperwork to apply. She got the job.
“It's kind of like being a paralegal,” she said. “You do a bunch of grunt work.”
She was a jack of all trades. Blanco would take in the sex offender notifications, go through their files and determine their level of recidivism, interview them, figure out where they're going to be in the community, figure out if they were OK to live where they lived, and send out the notifications to the public.
Dania Blanco has gone from child abuse survivor to young wife and mother to department store employee to police investigator to film industry makeup artist to owning her own salon.
Independent Newsmedia/Tom Blodgett
She was also a court liaison, handling much paperwork back and forth with the Superior Court. She also worked with the runaway missing persons investigations.
And Blanco assisted detectives at crime scenes and with search warrants. As the town grew, she got more opportunities, assisting undercover officers, conducting interviews in Spanish because she was one of the few people in the department who spoke the language. She also got a lot a forensic certification through Childhelp to assist on child abuse cases.
Blanco said she is forever grateful for the opportunities the department gave her and found the experience therapeutic in some measure.
“I feel like in my own way, I was helping other people, whether it was interviewing a victim or a suspect who didn't speak English, helping with wires or whatever,” she said. “I think it was a little therapeutic, and I found I had a different view of things, so I don't know, I think that helps the detectives, too.”
Back to makeup
Blanco said she started to think about wanting to do a little more, some kind of outlet, and the economy during the Great Recession also had her thinking.
“My kids were growing up, we were in the middle of a recession, and I thought, man, if I get canned, I need a backup,” she said.
So she returned to her love of makeup, taking out a loan and going to night school. Before Blanco even graduated, the head of the school helped her make connections with a film director. That got her started working in the industry as a side gig.
“I did a lot of special effects stuff because I know what real dead people look like, and that was a huge niche for me,” Blanco said. “When people found out, ‘she really does know what dead people look like, so she needs to do this film.’”
She was burning through her vacation and leave time at the police department until finally she had no more go use. Blanco had planned to take an early retirement and pursue makeup in the entertainment industry more when her daughter, Alexa, went off to Arizona State University. But being denied leave brought her to a fork in the road.
“I thought, ‘I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it,’” she said. “And I turned in my resignation, and I probably should have done it a little differently now looking back, but it was good. I didn't look back. I just kept going.”
Turns out, though, that the independent film industry in Arizona is not that profitable and made it hard for her to make ends meet. She got certified to do lashes and then started into permanent makeup and soon moved out of working from home to working from small studios.
She hired an esthetician, Sirena Barba, and they were working from a small space at Val Vista and Baseline. Her experience looking into renting at one of the salons taught her those suites are too expensive and Blanco started thinking about getting her own space.
“I thought, ‘I'm going to open a spot where other women can come and work and can afford it,” she said. “I want to open opportunities for other women to come and do what they love to do.”
Blanco was drawn to a space in a plaza at 1170 N. Gilbert Road, and she brought her husband, a Gilbert police detective, to look at it. He found it to be a cool space but wondered what she would do with 1700 square feet.
“I said, ‘I don't know, but I want to have a hair person,’” she said. “’I definitely want to have a nurse, an injector. I want to have somebody else. I want to have the opportunity. I want to open the opportunity up for other people to be creative, to come and do their thing and not have to pay an arm and the leg for rent.’ Well, so then I did it. I bit the bullet, and I signed the paper.”
The space that Cosmiix Beauty Labs occupies is large enough for a lobby leading back to several workspaces.
Independent Newsmedia/Tom Blodgett
Since Cosmiix opened in January, she has built a team of women who she says are a good fit with one another.
“This might be cheesy, but I always pray for the right people to cross my path,” Blanco said. “So I've prayed for that. And the women that work here, we are all a team.
“I love women who empower other women but are just hustlers. I love hustlers. I love people who work hard. And because I work hard, and I want people to work harder than me. If you're a harder worker than I am, if you're more of a hustler than I am, I love that because that's what I want. And I want to work with women who can love one another.”
And thus far, Blanco says they are making rent and getting stronger month to month.
‘Be Beautiful’ campaign
Though Blanco’s days as a child abuse survivor and a police investigator are behind her, she has not forgotten those roots.
“I remember my mom crying all the time, and I couldn't understand why she was crying,” Blanco said. “She felt defeated and helpless and all the things, and I didn't understand it until I was older. So I have been afforded so many great things in my life and how can I not give back?”
A few years ago, she started doing her “Be Beautiful” campaign, volunteering her professional expertise at domestic violence shelters every October, which is domestic violence awareness month.
“When you're in a shelter, you don't feel beautiful and you're defeated,” Blanco said. “You feel stupid. You were made to feel worthless. And if I can go in there and help them feel beautiful, do their makeup while someone does their hair and make them feel like they're special, there's somebody who cares about me to help me feel like this.”
The women also bring little swag bags filled with lotions or makeup. They buy things on clearance when they get the chance, and others donate items when they find out Blanco and her coworkers are up to.
Blanco said it even helps them as the volunteers. The women get excited about the reactions they get from the women in the shelter.
“If they feel beautiful, that's huge,” she said. “And that can be super empowering. That little tiny thing of just looking a certain way can help any woman feel empowered.”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on X. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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