Armed with her esthetician equipment and bubbly charm, Felice Sloan wants to make you “besties” with your skin. The Houston lifestyle blogger—known by many as Swanky Maven and as one of Houston Matter's Full Menu personalities—opened her first brick and mortar business, Swanky Beauty Bar, a luxury skincare and facial bar for men and women, last month at 6467 Westheimer Rd.

The move came after Sloan was laid off from her regional sales manager job at Swatch Group in April due to the pandemic—she thought there's never a better time to take a leap of faith and start her business. “It just worked for me,” she says. “I was like, 'It’s the perfect time. I’m never going to have this opportunity again with a day job.'”

Sloan's been interested in beauty and transformation since she was a teenager. After a bout of eczema that her dermatologists and doctors couldn’t figure out how to help, she took it upon herself to start doing research and solve it on her own. She ended up deducing that her skin was flaring up due to an allergic reaction to her hair products.

“I was like, ‘That’s it? [My doctors] couldn’t figure that out?’ I thought about all the money that my mom had spent and then literally became obsessed with trying to ‘figure it out.’ That was when my love for skincare started.” 

This “obsession” with skincare and love of researching the best possible solutions and products led Sloan to become the amateur skincare specialist among her friends. She then became a certified esthetician earlier this year.

Now, aside from having the best possible name for a business, Sloan’s Swanky Beauty Bar offers a variety of services, including beard treatments, facials, lash lifts, acne treatment, chemical peels, skin analysis, and even “booty facials”—“It’s one of my most popular services,” Sloan says. Plus, her products and treatments are catered toward her multicultural clientele to ensure that her services can work for all skin tones.

“What someone [who] has very pale skin needs is different from what someone [who] has very dark skin needs,” Sloan says. “The thing that we have in common is that we all have skin, so I customize treatments and protocols per the client and what their skin needs.”

The bar also rocks a curated (and if you ask, customizable) playlist that changes every month, and Sloan will launch a new skincare line, Felice Simon, in the near future, so you can take that glowing look home with you.

“We all think we have bad skin, but let’s get to the root of that. I want to help people understand their skin, understand the couple of simple things that they may need to do and then have them want to maintain it at home. That’s my goal,” says Sloan. But it’s also just as likely you'll leave heeding her very simple mantra: “Put your ‘swank stank’ on the world!”

For more information, head to swankybeautybar.com.