Local beauty editor impacting community through Beauty Holiday event

A local beauty editor turned beauty elf is using her event for the better.

Wink news anchor Lindsey Sablan talked to Lindsay Peragallo, founder of Beauty Holiday.

With brands such as Mac and CoverGirl, table after table was packed with self-care items at the Beauty Holiday event. It was like the elves quit the toy business and moved into beauty.

“We were able to create over 388 bags that we delivered to over five different local charities,” said Peragallo.

Peragallo is the brains behind the beauty, or Beauty Holiday, a one-day event where 40 women filtered into the Ritz Carlton and carefully curated bags for women battling life-threatening diseases like cancer or domestic abuse.

“The products were so much more than just beauty products; they were a beacon of hope for these women,” she said.

As we caught up with Peragallo in the “leftovers closet” days later, we reminisced about how this had started.

Fourteen years ago, in her NYC apartment, she was a young working woman at Allure Magazine.

“We were reviewing 6,000 products,” she said.

With all that extra product, she called over friends.

“I dumped hundreds of products on the middle of my carpet, and I made some food, and I said, ‘Bring your own bag, and the number one rule is, everything has to go,'” she said.

Year after year, she purged her closet and gifted cosmetics to friends.

Then, Hurricane Ian hit, and Peragallo asked major brands to donate items so she could gift them to women who lost everything.

“It was so impactful and powerful that the following year, around Christmas time, I hosted my annual party, and I kind of did the same ask out to the industry,” Peragallo said.

In two quick years, the event blew up.

“Do you have any sense of the dollar amount that was donated that you were able to hand back out to the community?” Sablan asked.

“Yes, oh, man, I’m so excited to even share with you. It was over $126,000 worth of product,” Peragallo said.

The bag-building day is fun, but her favorite part is drop day, where she gets in her merry mama elf gear and delivers the bags to Avow Hospice.

“This is the first time they’re going through this journey, and they may be having chemo where they’re losing their hair or their eyebrows or their eyelashes, or some patients gain weight, some patients lose weight, and it is defeating to them, especially around the holidays, when there’s parties, and we tell them to live their best life, but if you’re not feeling good and you don’t feel you look good, it’s impossible to do that,” said Dawn Kolderman with Avow.

Kolderman said these couldn’t come at a better time. Since October, they’ve seen an uptick in younger women battling breast cancer cancer.

“There is just nothing like making someone smile, especially a woman in need, and igniting that self-love, that self-worth,” Peragallo said.

For Peragallo, what started as a dream career morphed into fueling dreams for fellow women. She wants to turn a one-day event into a year-round pampering.

She just launched her non-profit and is hoping to create beauty days for different organizations where she can bring the products and services to them.

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