How Anastasia Soare’s Built a Beverly Hills Brow Empire as an Immigrant (Exclusive)

After over 25 years as the beauty industry’s brow expert, Anastasia Soare knew it was time to tell her story.

In her memoir, Raising Brows: My Story of Building a Billion Dollar Beauty Empire, the 67-year-old Anastasia Beverly Hills founder goes back to the beginning, recounting her escape from communist Romania to seek refuge in the United States. A single mother and esthetician, Soare learned English by watching The Oprah Winfrey Show and eventually went on to open up her own beauty salon, Anastasia Beverly Hills Salon, in 1997.

“The book is for the immigrants and anyone who is willing to build something, and they have a dream and they want to achieve it,” Soare tells PEOPLE. “(I wanted to) share my experience, share my story with other people, and they could believe that if they have a dream, they should work hard and fulfill that dream.”

Raising Brows doesn’t romanticize the difficulties of being an immigrant in America. Soare details her harrowing journey to the US with her one-year-old daughter Claudia, traveling with not even one cent of American money in her pocket.

“I was scared down to my bones: an overwhelming, visceral, sweat-inducing fear,” she writes. “What if we were rejected and sent back to Romania, after all that we had gone through to get here?”

In America, Soare began working in salons and eventually decided to open her own business. She needed a better way to support her family after her husband Victor lost his job, so she decided to take a chance on her dream. Victor discouraged her ambitions and the couple eventually divorced, but Soare pressed on.

Building up her client list took time and monumental effort, but until she decided to write her memoir, Soare truly never paused to take stock of her achievements.

“Since I came here, I worked so hard,” she tells PEOPLE. “I never sit down to think about it, to go back and look at my life… it was like running a marathon, and I couldn’t stop, because that was the game.”

She continues, “Coming from a family of immigrants, I watched them going through the same thing I went through here. I feel like it was kind of easier for me because I’ve seen the hardship, I’ve seen the hard moments of their life, and during the communist regime, it was really bad, and they were still able to surpass those moments.”

Soare also acknowledges that it’s not just her family that motivates her — it’s her unrelenting passion for beauty and the community it creates.

“I think the reason why I was able to achieve what I achieved was that I was very authentic, and it was out of love,” the founder explains. “Everything I did was because I wanted to give something. I wanted to empower people.”

Soare’s compassionate nature and extensive beauty knowledge is what eventually drew a roster of A-list clients to her business (her first was Cindy Crawford in the ’90s). Over the years, she’s worked with the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham and Naomi Campbell.

“They validated my work, they supported me, they were the ones that gave me that power to never give up,” Soare says of her celebrity clients. “They will come back for their service even before we became friends, and that gave me confidence in myself. If they believe in me, when they had access to the best of the best, then I’m doing something.”

Soare’s memoir comes at a crucial time in America, with the conversation around immigration as pertinent as ever. She hopes that the book will serve as inspiration for immigrants and reassure them that “the American dream is still alive.”

“It’s going to take hard work and determination and resilience, but they will still get where they want, if they believe in themselves,” she says. “I hope my book will give them some tools that will make it easier for them to go through that.”

Raising Brows: My Story of Building a Billion Dollar Beauty Empire is available on Oct. 28.