Beauty blogger Catherine Martinez is an expert at contouring, highlighting and creating flawless brows but she is also a trailblazer among the deaf community. The 24-year-old Martinez uses sign language in her beauty tutorials to make them more inclusive and accessible for deaf and hearing-impaired individuals. Her extra-ordinarily inclusive online videos have earned her more than 35,000 loyal Instagram followers, which she keeps counting as they increase day by day.

The beauty buff was inspired to create sign language tutorials by her classmate at NYU – who happened to suffer from hearing impairment – where she recently earned a degree in Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Her classmate asked her for help interpreting a few online make-up tutorials, for she is able to not just watch the video but also hear its sound; and that is when Martinez realised that a lot of beauty videos on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram aren’t easily accessible for the hearing impaired, so she began posting ASL make-up and skin-care tutorials, hoping they would appeal to anyone who had ever felt excluded by audio-only beauty content.