Bernice Penton

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Bernice Penton before, left, and after her Style By Jury makeover.

What’s your first impression of Bernice Penton? The first thing our jury noticed was her large dark prescription sunglasses. She wears them because she hates the way she looks. But combined with her plain shapeless T-shirt and dowdy jeans, she isn’t doing herself any favours.

Bernice is 46-years-old with three kids. She loves her family but seems like she doesn’t love herself. She blames that on a 23-year marriage she recently ended after suffering years of emotional abuse and criticism. One of the few things that makes her happy is singing. Bernice sings to herself constantly … but only when she’s alone.

Our first goal with Bernice was to help her self-esteem, and we used her love of music as the therapy. Our performance coach, Edwin Coppard, helped her tap in to her pain and use it as a positive energy in her singing.

Our cosmetic dermatologist, Dr. Kucy Pon, checked under the dark glasses and improved Bernice’s look with Botox to smooth out her frown lines and Restylane injections to fill out the deep lines around her mouth.

The next challenge was her wardrobe. Our ace stylist, David Clemmer, checked out her closet and found it almost empty. Bernice says she gave up on clothes because she felt nothing would make her look good.

David knew otherwise and took her shopping to the Tzatz boutique. His advice for her: go monochromatic because it’s slimming. But that doesn’t mean it has to be drab. He put her in a flashy skirt and then picked up the background colour to carry upwards into the rest of the outfit.

Bernice’s glasses were the next thing to go … courtesy of laser eye surgery at the Herzig Eye Institute. Now she would have no more excuse for the dark glasses.

When it came to hair, our stylist, Johnny Cupello, took one look at her and declared, “She’s got hockey hair — a 1970s mullet!”

He says that even if you have short hair, a good stylist can still make you look great. For Bernice’s hair colour, he used a base layer to bring out her skin tone and highlights that complemented her beautiful blue eyes.

Her next stop was to see our dentists, Dr. Charkiw and Dr. Afsar. They replaced her missing teeth using two dental bridges and corrected the gaps and uneven teeth with 12 porcelain veneers.

Finally, it was off to see our makeup artist, Korby Banner. Bernice has light skin, which makes her face lack definition. But her eyes are her best feature and Korby worked on making them dazzle. He put concealer under the eye to add luminescence, shaded in her brows to give them depth, and applied a thin row of curled false eyelashes to make her eyes look bigger and more awake.

Then it was time for us to give Bernice another little surprise. Remember our performance coach, Edwin Coppard? He arranged for her to sing in front of an audience. This time there would be no dark glasses, nowhere to hide and everything to prove.

Could she pull it off?