I’ve just finished reading Busy Philipps’ autobiography in which she explains her ‘sparkly people’ theory. Simply put, it characterises people in the world who sparkle from the inside out, people who radiate positivity in a way that the world opens up to them. This is Sara Shakeel.

Dreamer, idealist, innovator and Instagram treasure, Sara Shakeel is known to her one million followers as The Queen of Crystals. The Pakistani artist that you’ve undoubtedly seen on social media has an eye to rival a magpie, and has become so accomplished she’s now counts La Mer, Emirates Airline, Swarovski, Amazon, Lancôme, Huda Beauty and Browns (to name a few) as her clients. Sara has a pedigree bristling with accomplishments, and yet perhaps her biggest accomplishment is the emotional affect that her art has had on the world, particularly in times as troubled as these.

Her page has been a place of happiness and healing to hundreds of thousands of young girls – so much so, she has launched a second IG, @GlitterStretchMarks, a captivating account that celebrates women’s bodies in all their imperfectly perfect forms -, and counts celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Coco Rocha as her fans.

“Sarah Jessica Parker was the first celebrity to comment on one of my images,” Sara told Cosmo ME. “She liked, like, 15 of my images and her comment was like, ‘I hope everyone gets to see your images, and I hope that someday you’re a huge artist.’ That was the biggest interaction for me at that time, and I was like, wow, she was so genuine in her comment, and from there onwards, I never had to look back.”

Sara has created art from her most powerful emotions. She has built an entire business and legacy from taking under-whelming and mundane photos and turning them into something so viscerally sublime. But who is the woman conquering the web one crystal at a time?

“Three years ago, I was in the process of becoming a dentist, but my teacher failed me when I was in my final year – and not once, not even twice, but sixteen times for two years straight. I did not have a laptop; I had nothing. I just had a very old Samsung Note 3 and the only thing I knew how to do was create collages using different mediums.”

“So, out of boredom, I started creating pictures of these artworks and I started posting them on Instagram. To be honest, the process of creating those images was so therapeutic and so fulfilling that I started creating, like, 10 images a day. In the beginning I was only getting about 20 to 25 likes on each image.” (Spoiler alert: she now gets about 45,000…)

It was an image of a set of Mac lipsticks coated in crystals that became the first of three to go viral and catapult Sara’s career to dizzying, fabulous and unimaginable heights.

“I came across this crystal wallpaper and I was like, ‘this is very nice, let’s just blend it out with some lipsticks’. I posted them on my profile and I captioned it something like, ‘Up for crystal lipsticks?’ Then I went to bed and the next day I woke up and overnight I’d gone from 3,000 followers to 17,000 followers. My mailbox was totally bombarded, too. I got emails from Cosmopolitan, from Elle, from all these magazine messaging me and asking me ‘are these for real?’, ‘where can we buy them?’ and I had to tell them that they were fake,” she laughs.

The second viral image, of course, was the unforgettable diamond-adorned Emirates Airline A380.

And third is the snap of a woman washing her hands under a faucet of sparkly water, an image that has found its way to all every corner of the internet as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the world.

Amidst news posts and infographics imbued with COVID-19 updates lies a treasure-trove of glittery graphics – Sara’s glittery graphics. “I’m so happy that during the current times, my work is a source of happiness and positivity for a lot of people and that’s what I always wanted,” she says, humbled, entranced and vulnerable.

In just two years, Sara’s following has grown significantly, her work is recognised by millions and she is now flown all over the world, winning awards and creating her art on a global scale, but what’s striking is how over the course of our near hour-long phone call, she consistently she remains herself. Sara is bursting with humility; the personality traits that define her IG page – happy, confident, and sparkly – continue to define her offline presence. But it hasn’t always been that way.

“I don’t come from a very rich or influential background,” she begins. “I come from an underdeveloped country, but I came out of that and created something from absolutely nothing. I hope people know that if you continue to create and believe in yourself, anything can happen.”

Sara has struggled with body-image issues, too, and was especially troubled by things like cellulite and stretch marks. But her art became a means of not letting society’s beauty standards dull her sparkle. “I have never felt this powerful and proud of my art and proud of embracing my flaws,” she says.

One of the most immediate results of Instagram’s routine cycling – and recycling – of images is the thoroughly murky game of determining originality and assigning ownership of designs. She now has a laundry list of copy-cat accounts that so too are trying to brighten up social media.

“Initially, it would be a lie to say that I was not [frustrated],” Sara explains about the copy-cat culture she has become so privy to. “We are human and we have that emotional attachment to this we create. I hope that in some ways, they find their own light and inspiration and that’s the best I can offer them.” And if that doesn’t sum up the modesty and humbleness that is Sara Shakeel, a woman whose outlook on life is as bright as her work, then I don’t know what does.