Zhanna Vishnevetskaya moved to Brisbane from Moscow four years ago.
As a teenager, she loved black clothes and heavy metal music. She says her childhood friends would never believe what she does now.
Here in Australia, while undergoing psychotherapy, Zhanna realized that she had “missed a whole phase of being a girl” in her life. She wanted light dresses and pink sequins.
One day, she spent all her monthly allowance on glitter and other ingredients to create her own line of cosmetics. At the time, she didn't know she was going through an episode of mania, a condition in which a person with bipolar disorder “feels like God's hand is patting them from heaven.”
But even after the mania passed, the idea remained attractive. Zhanna started a business. At first, she wanted to name it Polar Sparkle after the aurora in her native city Murmansk. But the diagnosis made after that very episode gave her cosmetics a new name.
