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Prados Beauty goes nationwide

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Growing up on a small farm in rural Arizona – “a little brown girl from the sticks” – Cece Meadows remembers telling her siblings, “One day I’m going to be famous. I’m going to do something really big.”

For the founder and CEO of Prados Beauty, the day has come.

Her unique beauty products are being introduced in JC Penny stores in Las Cruces and across the United States – more than 600 by the end of 2023 – and Meadows, whom the company calls a “beauty entrepreneur,” is one of the featured models in Penny’s new designer dress collection iMPOWER, “celebrating all women.”

“It was huge for me,” Meadows said about the collaboration, which comes through her partnership with 13 Lune, an online marketplace for beauty products created by black and brown business owners like Meadows, who identifies as Xicana (Chicana) and as Yoeme and Nʉmʉnʉ, Native Americans with homelands in Sonora, Mexico; New Mexico; Texas; and Arizona.

Meadows started Prados – which means “Meadows” in Spanish – in New York City in 2018. She moved the business to Las Cruces in 2020 when her husband, Daniel, a U.S. Army major, was transferred to White Sands Missile Range.

The couple had passed through Las Cruces four years earlier.

“I just fell in love,” she said. “I told Daniel, ‘If we ever get the chance, can we come back here?”
Meadows grew up on a farm in Arizona, doing 4H projects, riding horses, milking cows, making goat cheese and branding cattle.

“I’m a farm girl through and through,” she said.

After graduating from junior college in 2005, Meadows moved to California and began her career in finance.

“I started learning about money and how it works,” she said.

After a diagnosis of ovarian cancer at age 27, the breakup of her first marriage and surviving domestic violence, Meadows found herself unemployed – and, at one point, homeless – with two young children to care for.

During her battle with cancer, Meadows lost all of hair because of chemotherapy, and “felt like I had lost a part of my identity,” she said. Then some friends “came over to my house one evening and gave me a makeover. I just looked like a million dollars,” she said.

That was a defining moment for Meadows, who told herself, “You’re beautiful. Keep fighting.”

“I never ever lost sight of the possibilities of what the future could be,” she said.

Meadows dropped out of beauty school and began volunteering at Ronald McDonald House and other nonprofits, helping children and adults battling health issues to look their best. She also created eyelashes and patent-pending makeup brushes for people with skin sensitivity during chemotherapy who need gentler products for their faces.

That was the start of Prados Beauty – “just wanting to help people,” Meadows said.

With a storefront at 1323 E. Lohman Ave. – No. 6 in the mall just east of Solano Drive – and a warehouse nearby, Meadows and her staff sell her beauty products in person, and the Prados website makes her products available to a growing clientele across the country and around the world.

Meadows pairs her own Sagrado Collection with the creations of artist Steven Paul Judd (the Matriarch Collection) and other local entrepreneurs for a collection that includes eyeshadow, blush, lipstick and lip gloss, eye lashes, face pads, spa headbands, soaps, bath bombs, candles and more.

The products are for both men and women – her sons, ages 5 and 9, are product testers along with her 14-year-old daughter, Meadows said.

In addition to bringing “light and awareness to indigenous peoples, our stories, our true history, resiliency and beauty,” Meadows said Prados and the nonprofit Prados Life Foundation support the LBGTQ+ community, veterans, children with special needs, FYI+ of Las Cruces, Jardin de los Niños, the Salvation Army, local schools’ athletic teams and other nonprofits.

“Makeup is love,” Meadows said. “It brings people together.”

Prados Beauty is open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday. Call 575-288-1918.

Visit https://pradosbeauty.com/.

Girls Leveling Up Conference

Meadows will share “what it’s like to be a woman in business” and her love for Las Cruces as a presenter during “Girls Leveling Up,” a conference for middle- and high school girls that will be held Thursday, March 8, at New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, 4100 Dripping Springs Road. Her topic is “See Yourself in Me – How She Built an Indigenous-Inspired Beauty Business.”

Visit https://theassociationlc.net/ and www.facebook.com/theassociationlc.


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