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A 22-year-old girl named Katie sported a black feather boa, a pink tiara, newly trimmed and straightened hair, foundation, eye shadow, mascara and lip gloss Thursday, thanks to a program called Beautiful You.

Katie designed the look herself. She even gave it a name.

“Dramatic,” Katie said.

The D’Shaw Beauty School artists behind dramatic performed their magic for free thanks to Mrs. Treasure Valley, Joy Cameron.

“Yesterday,” Joy said, “I just couldn’t get the smile off my face.”

Joy suffers from Lupus. Doctors diagnosed her son with autism. Those battles led to the foundation of Beautiful You, which celebrates beauty from within for women and girls with developmental, mental and physical disabilities.

“I’m a princess,” Katie said.

Katie received her wash, haircut, blow-dry, flat-iron and makeover from D’Shaw students like Cheron Reed.

“They were just so happy to be pampered,” Reed said. “It’s giving me goose bumps. I’m going to cry. I don’t know if that’s good. It was just very, very rewarding.”

The three parties involved reaped those rewards in different ways: Joy watched six months of planning come to fruition, a class of aspiring beauticians recognized two days of hard work as important, and 40 young women found their reward in the mirror.

“There are a lot of girls out there who are pretty ugly,” Katie said, “and if you can feel beautiful even when you’re ugly, that makes you feel 10 times better.”

Blunt, honest and not exactly Joy’s mission statement, but Katie’s synopsis does make sense. The physical alterations performed Thursday wouldn't last, but Joy hoped the confidence the makeover provided would stick around for awhile—some perhaps a little more dramatically than others.