Mona Lee (12) owns 50 lipsticks. But she only puts any of them on after lunch.

She fills in her eyebrows by 9:30 a.m., in passing period, in class or in the car, for five minutes. Winged eyeliner occasionally gets looped in after her first class of the day. Next comes lip balm in the late morning, and finally, after eating, her signature lipstick. Eyeshadow makes infrequent appearances, but when it does feature, it typically snags a slot in her morning car commute.

“I started doing my eyebrows at the tail end of my sophomore year and that was where I started figuring out that what people think doesn’t really matter all that much,” Mona said. “And for senior portraits, I went pretty all-out with my makeup, and then I was like, ‘okay, I am content with this appearance. I am happy.’ I remember someone was like, ‘why are you wearing so much makeup,’ and I was like, ‘whatever, I don’t care.’ That moment was the first time that I was able to say, ‘I do not care what you think of me.’”

Mona considers makeup a form of pure self-expression, one that’s been freeing in helping her both push past others’ opinions and reinforce her own confidence.

“A lot of people were saying ‘why are you wearing so much makeup for school?’” Mona said. “Why not? I like red lipstick. It makes me happy.”

In the last two years, much of what Mona has learned about makeup comes from YouTube tutorials, particularly from the channel From Head to Toe, which helps her blend Korean and Western makeup styles for features similar to Mona’s own.

“The boldness that comes from the West and the sense of subtlety and sense of quaint and petite and delicate from the Eastern beauty standard––I’m trying that blend in between, where it’s bold but not too bold,” she said. “It’s just enough where I feel happy with myself, but not so bold that I do not feel comfortable going out in public like this.”

Mona’s friends have noticed her confidence develop throughout high school.

“She’s definitely arrived at a point where she’s able to express herself confidently and without too much consideration for what other people think of her,” Emily Chen (12) said. “Mona is always very vocally expressive about things that she values, people that she values and relationships that she values. It’s rare to see someone who is so defiant of the expectation that people should be more blasé and nonchalant about things that they care about. Mona is someone who openly advocates for what she views as important, and that’s something I really love and respect her for.”

That advocacy, care and valuation extends into academics in a way that makes other students––and Mona herself––define her as “extra,” the kind of “extra” that leads Mona to create extensive, color-coordinated class notes and concept summaries and to leave her notes online, open-source.

“Mona is the screaming id that we all have of the eternal panic and lack of chill over academics, personified,” Serena Lu (12) said.

“A lot of people would fall into the cliche of [describing Mona via] her multicolored pens or the notebooks that have the backup notebooks––that’s not me,” Mona’s college counselor Martin Walsh said. “What makes Mona spectacular is her dogged pursuit to make her senior year more than just about academics.”

And Mona has done that––via a first semester spent playing foosball during her free periods, the care she puts into spending time with friends and through her mentoring of middle school girls in robotics.

Mona herself has done VEX robotics since middle school, and her team has won multiple awards at World Championships.

After last year’s Championships, a robotics forum post asserted that Mona’s team won because they’re girls, and the judges are trying to support girls in robotics.

“There’s enough discrimination in this world as it is; I don’t need this to be starting in this robotics competition for high schoolers and middle schoolers,” she said. “You don’t need children thinking their successes aren’t valid just because they are girls.”

So Mona took it upon herself to actually support younger girls in robotics,

“Once you get to a place where you have a platform, you have to use that platform,” she said. “People around here know who I am, they respect me, [and] they respect my accomplishments, so why won’t they respect other girls like me? And then I was like, ‘I can’t really change them.’ I tried, but I feel like there’s only so much you can do just by telling them something; you need to show them.

“Then there was this idea of helping these [girl scout robotics] teams get to a place where they are strong in this competition to show other people that they deserve to be here and we deserve to be here.”