Welcome to our Maryland Innovators series! Since innovation is the centerpiece for our current Museum on Main Street tour, we’re shining the spotlight on innovators in regions where the the touring exhibition travels.
Joy A. Johnson’s mom, a former model and flight attendant, loved an extensive beauty regimen. Johnson remembers her mom applying “lotions and potions” and can still picture her mom getting ready for the day. Johnson then describes a contrasting image, when later in her mom’s life, she received treatment for cancer and had trouble applying ChapStick.
Johnson calls these memories “that little seed” that inspired her work with accessibility in the beauty space. With Nails and Faces of Joy, she provides in-home spa services (like manicures, pedicures, and shampoos). She focuses on those who are diabetic and immunocompromised. Her clientele has a wide variety of disabilities and illnesses.
Someone with limited mobility might normally opt out of a professional shampoo, because “everyone can’t bend over a sink forward or back over in a chair,” Johnson says. “We have different apparatuses that we use to help shampoo the hair.” She also discusses a client who couldn’t gauge the temperature of water. To ensure it wasn’t too hot, Johnson implemented the elbow test, sometimes used on infants, to ensure the temperature was appropriate for that client.
According to Johnson, adaptability remains key. “Being flexible and willing to accommodate and adjust and overall, just being sensitive to figuring out how to make it work for the client’s comfort.”
Johnson’s commitment to service could stem from her grandmother, who raised Joy and her siblings after their mother died (from a car crash, Johnson clarifies). With her siblings, Johnson took care of her grandmother, who died this February.
“She was my North Star on Earth,” Johnson says. “Spiritually, everyone has their own path and what they believe,” she says.
“I believe in God and it’s great to have that part of my life, but it’s nothing better than having someone in flesh and blood that you can go to, that has wisdom, that has experience, that does things a particular way.”
Johnson talks of her grandmother checking out a book from Maryland author Emily Post, a.k.a. Miss Manners, when Johnson got engaged.
“Until the day she passed, she was still saying thank you,” Johnson says. While not a businesswoman, Johnson has taken her grandma’s cues to the customer service portion of her work. “I usually think about what would she do? What would she expect? And that usually puts me on the right path in terms of making the right decision.”
Living with her grandma for so long also pushed Johnson into considering different needs for disabled and/or elderly folks. “There are so many elderly or people, like you mentioned, who have invisible [dis]abilities that can’t do things that they would like to do to be able to receive certain services. So, the combination of my mother and my grandmother made me sensitive to those conversations that aren’t really had.”
This thought process also helps drive Johnson’s product line, Joy of Beauty. “We wanted to focus on this kind of sensitive community of people that are oftentimes left out when thinking about personal care products and ingredients and what they can and cannot use on their skin or their body.”
Beauty products themselves can harm people with diabetes, or who are immunocompromised. Usually, sugar or salt serves as the exfoliating ingredient in body scrubs.
“Sugar and salt, when under a microscope are extremely jagged, they can cause little fissures or micro cuts or micro tears in the skin and so that’s counterproductive,” Johnson says. Where a cut or tear on someone’s skin may not have a significant impact, the impact can endanger an immunocompromised person.
In 2022, the Cosmoprof Beauty Trade Show honored Johnson with an Innovation Award for her body scrub. The exfoliating factor? Poppy seeds.
“That poppy seed being a round sphere, it can’t in any way puncture the skin or cause a cut or a tear within the skin. But it still is able to gently remove the dry, rough skin, which most people are trying to alleviate, which could be a result of the medication or it could be a result of the disease itself.” Customers have told Johnson that her pedicures didn’t give them pain on their feet like past pedicures they received.
Johnson emphasizes “protecting the skin barrier” and gives me the example of a rock in someone’s shoe. “They don’t have the ability to heal and scab up as quickly as a non-diabetic because the blood flow is much slower and the conversation within the body—of the body telling it what it needs to do to heal— happens at a much slower pace,” she says. “So that cut at the bottom of a foot can turn into an infection, which if left untreated can become an ulcer, which continuing to be untreated can lead to the extreme need of amputation.”
In 2023, the Small Business Association named Joy of Beauty the Maryland Woman-Owned Small Business of the Year. Johnson works in Waldorf, where she lives and attends church. She expresses gratitude for her “church family” at Free Gospel Church-Bryans Road, which she has attended since childhood.
She talks about support from the Small Business Development Center at the College of Southern Maryland. She has also taught at the school, and taken advantage of its Makerspace in the Velocity Center, one of Maryland Humanities’ first host partners for the Museum on Main Street tour of Spark! The Smithsonian touring exhibition, now on view at the Velocity Center through June 29, highlights innovation in rural communities.
“The Velocity Center saved my life,” Johnson says.
Preparing for a trade show in Dubai, Johnson wanted to print waterproof labels in both English and Arabic. “Most of my suppliers required a 100-label quantity minimum or 500-quantity minimum and so that would have led to a lot of waste and additional expense for me.”
The Velocity Center “really saved the day because the trip to Dubai was very expensive. And so I was trying to conserve as much as possible, and so that was extremely helpful.”
Before caring for her grandma, Johnson appreciates Life Journeys Writers Guild (LJWG)— Maryland Humanities’ other Southern Maryland host partner for the Museum on Main Street tour — for helping her business and giving her a sense of fulfillment outside of work. (LJWG’s companion exhibit centers on innovative partnerships in healthcare and the arts and humanities.) The writing group helped Johnson process her feelings during divorce.
The mother of a teenage daughter and a nine-year-old son says family remains a major source of inspiration, in addition to her mom and grandma.
“They’re extremely important to me. If I can’t help them figure out what they want to do in life, at least helping them figure out what they don’t want to do in life,” she says, “process of elimination, you know, will lead you to where you’ve got to go” While her work has given her a lot of flexibility with her kids, she considers balance to be a false notion, something she learned when caring for her grandmother.
“I don’t use the word balance. That is not in my vocabulary,” she says, reflecting on that time. “I don’t believe in balance because balance means that there has to be an even distribution of weight or effort. And I don’t think, as humans, it’s possible to truly balance things. I think we truly juggle them. Sometimes you juggle two balls. Sometimes you juggle four balls. But it literally is a juggle. And so there would be times where my efforts were all about my grandmother…there were days that I couldn’t do things relating to business or my entrepreneurial responsibilities. I had to just focus on my family and I had to focus on my grandmother.”
Johnson’s grandma was very active until she died at age 94. “If I can get close to that, that would be great. So I got to start now with the movement,” she says.
Since her grandmother’s passing, Johnson has started taking weekly walks with a friend. If a friend invites her to lunch or dinner out, Johnson proposes a walk instead.
“That way we’re at least talking, we’re catching up, but I’m also, my body and trying to work on being healthier in terms of focusing on my health and just feeling good is the biggest thing,” she says.
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Spark! runs now June 29, 2025 at the College of Southern Maryland Velocity Center, located at 4465 Indian Head Highway in Indian Head. The exhibition will be on view Mondays through Thursdays, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Fridays, 10:00 a.m.–1:30 p.m.; and Saturdays, 10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. (The exhibition will be closed for holidays on May 24, May 26, and June 19.)
Life Journeys Writers Guild hosts companion exhibits at University of Maryland Charles Regional Medical Center, the Waldorf Senior and Recreational Center, and the St. Charles Towne Mall.
Learn more on Maryland Humanities’ website. For more information, contact Robert Forloney, Program Officer, Partnerships, at Maryland Humanities at rforloney@mdhumanities.org or (410) 463-2293.