When you meet model, blogger and advocate Mama Cax—Cax, for short—you’re not sure where to look first: at her gleaming brown skin and bald head, her sculpted features, whatever ridiculously sick ensemble she’s put together just to tool around town or her equally stylized prosthetic leg cover (one of 15 she owns)—a latticework of metal that simply looks like another piece of jewelry amid all the other regalia she’s giving you on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
The Haitian-born beauty, now represented by JAG Models, the New York agency democratizing the modeling industry, makes body positivity more than a catchphrase; it emanates from her entire being. At an age when most girls are beginning to experiment with makeup and boys, she was diagnosed with a rare cancer in her teens and forced to undergo an amputation of her right leg—along with painful subsequent treatments. Now in her 20s, Cax has made it her mission to live—transparently and fabulously—as she did the day she came to visit us at The Glow Up.