The South Philly-native is a Cape Verdean-Italian-Irish model who boldly challenges the idea of beauty with super-short chrome-colored hair and an edgy, futuristic look that harkens back to the days of 80s films like “Blade Runner” and “Robo Cop”.

In an interview with Complex Magazine, Rose admitted to having an an eclectic style growing up, looking up to Slash for fashion inspiration. “I had every single poster of Slash in my room,” she shares.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director award. Meanwhile, Sandra Bullock pulled off an unlikely twofer, winning the Best Actress Oscar for “The Blind Side” a day after she took home the Razzie for Worst Actress for her work in “All About Steve.”

Another historical win: Geoffrey Fletcher became the first African-American to win a writing award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”

In her brief acceptance speech, Best Supporting Actress winner Mo’Nique thanked her husband, Sidney Hicks, for encouraging her to work on “Precious,” a film about an abusive, dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship that hardly seemed like the typical box-office hit-maker when it was released last year.

Her husband pushed her, she said, by stressing that “sometimes, you have to forgo doing what is popular in order to do what’s right. Baby, you were so right.”

While Nancy, Ife and Ellyn, the three heroines in my nonfiction story, belong to racial minorities my story is intimately tied to theirs. At the heart of all our stories is the importance of family and tradition. Family and traditions have helped the women overcome many challenges in their lives. I didn’t grow up with a strong sense of family or tradition. I was raised, for the most part, as an only child. My siblings were significantly older than me and left home when I was a toddler. Their was little other family, besides my parents and siblings. For these reasons, I never developed a strong connection to family that is until I had my own, but as my sons grew older, became more independent, that connection began to unravel. When my parents died I became more disconnected. Then my sons left home for college. All sense of family felt as if it had evaporated. I decided I needed to search for a definition of meaning of family, and that’s the story behind my book.

I have learned that while there are things I cannot change; for example, I could not choose the family I was into, I have the freedom to create my own family and to adopt my own traditions. I also realize that it is possible to find support and inspiration from women who may on the surface seem very different than me. This is what ultimately lies at the heart of my book and my blog.

There is no need for anyone to feel lost, to feel isolated. There is a world of people from whom we can find guidance, inspiration, even love, if we recognize that we are all one family.