Ep 1 Don't Get Me Started

Andrea Chatham shares her journey into the beauty industry, specifically in aesthetics and skincare. She started with hair and beauty courses after a breakup, eventually specializing in electrolysis. She then learned about laser treatments and invested in a hair removal system. Andrea emphasizes the importance of continuous research and improvement in the industry. She also discusses the training and qualifications required to enter this field. Andrea encourages finding a niche and becoming the best in that area while prioritizing client care and safety. She advises aspiring professionals to be people-oriented, committed, and passionate about their work. Overall, Andrea highlights the ever-evolving nature of the beauty industry and the potential for a fulfilling career. Welcome to The Skin You're In. I'm Andrea Chatham and if you want to know more about your skin I'm sure I can help with my weekly skin topics. Get to know your skin better and love the skin you're in. Welcome to the episode Don't Get Me Started. Over the years I've had many clients ask how do you get into this industry? This industry being aesthetics, skincare, electrolysis, laser treatments, all those sorts of things. In fact the beauty industry. Let me tell you how I got into the industry. It's a bit of a funny story really. I had a boyfriend who ran off with a hairdresser. I was working in an office at the time and I thought if you can't beat them join them. So I enrolled on a course to do hair and beauty. It didn't get my boyfriend back but I found a career that would last me my entire lifetime. So my background is beauty but my passion was electrolysis and for those who don't know electrolysis is the means of removing a hair by use of an electric current. So you use a little needle and I use that term very loosely. It's actually a piece of wire about the size of an eyelash that heats up on the tip and what you do is slide it down the side of the hair in the follicle and use that heat to damage the roots at the bottom of the follicle. The idea is that when that hair grows back it either doesn't grow back or it grows back finer as you've done so much damage to the roots. In the 90s I had many clients asking about this new laser treatment they'd heard about. With electrolysis you're only removing one hair at a time but with a laser you could remove hairs on block, you could do big areas, legs, underarms, bikinis. It opened up a whole new avenue of treatments. I didn't think it was going to take off to be honest. I have had to eat my words since but I thought I should do my research and look into it. So I went to London to look at what I call an IPL system which is very similar to a laser and the principle behind them is the same. Unfortunately this laser was and we're talking mid-90s was around £100,000. Now that was a heck of a lot of money. It is today so can you imagine how much that was in the 90s. I think they realised that most people couldn't afford this. This was way out of most people's league. So a couple of years later they approached me about taking on a franchise using a system that was probably about half the size of the one I'd seen but it served its purpose. It was a really really good hair removal system. So that's what we did. We launched this system and people were queuing around the block on the very first day to get their legs treated, their underarms treated and I've never looked back since. A few years later I got the chance to take over another clinic. They were already doing tattoo removal so that was how I got into that side of things. The machine we had right then, we used to call it the beast and it was called that for a reason. This was huge. This was aggressive. This could take your skin off. This could cause scarring. This could cause bleeding. All the things that we don't really want today. The machines today are just so much more refined. They're so much gentler on the skin. They are so much more improved. There is so much research and development gone into these systems that we should never have to go back to that. The only thing is that these machines again are quite expensive. If you want a really good laser you have to pay for it and that can put the costs up for the treatments but people do get what they pay for. So if this is an industry that you want to get into, how do you do it? Well you need either a medical qualification or at least a level three beauty qualification. It's about 45 years since I did my training and things have changed since. Nowadays, I think the colleges prefer to train people as apprentices so it means finding a clinic or a salon that would take you on to do your training and then do the rest of it in the college. Now there's two paths. The first one that you have to do is a level two beauty. These are the basic treatments like facials and manicures but it also gives you a good grounding so you learn about health, safety, hygiene, consultation techniques, client care. This also gives you a taster to see if this is an area that you would like to go into. If this is something that you're enjoying and you feel that this is for you then the next year you would go on to level three. This is much more in-depth and you learn about much more advanced treatments such as electrical facials, electrical treatments and electrical science, learning about the systems, learning how the machines work. There's also anatomy and physiology for the face and body and this can be really in-depth. This borders on the medical. This is not just beautician, this is beauty therapist. There is a difference and there is a lot of training goes into being a beauty therapist. A lot of intense training that people don't often realise. From here you can progress to level four. This covers the laser and light therapies such as laser and IPL for hair reduction, skin rejuvenation and tattoo removal. Many insurance companies though would prefer you to have at least a year's experience using a laser before you actually move on to tattoo removal. Beauty is a great job to be in mainly because it constantly evolves. There's always something new. Okay some things may have been done before and just rehashed but there's always something interesting about it and there's so many ways, so many avenues, so many paths that you can go down. I'm a great believer that there's nobody can be good at everything so what you need to do is find what you really enjoy and be the best, the very best that you can be by working your way through the different levels. Level two, level three beauty, up to level four. You can actually progress on to the other levels after that where there's aesthetics and all sorts of different things but that's the thing, that's the beauty about this industry. Like I said it's finding what you really want to do and learning to be the very best and all I can say is when you find that niche, practice, practice, practice. Be the best but never take risks with your client's skin. You also have to be a people person. You're going to be around them a long time. You're going to, you know, you're dealing with people every day. You've got to be a good listener. You want to know why people are there. Why are they visiting you? What do they want from you? You really need to understand your clients. You need to be committed. You need to support them through their decisions and make sure that you always give them the best advice. Most importantly, you've got to love what you do because, you know, like me I've been, I've been doing this job now for over 40 years. I've been in business for over 40 years. I just feel so lucky that I found a job that I wanted to do so early on in my life that I could spend so long doing it and so many years doing it. I hope you could be as lucky too. It may sound like you have to train for several years but if you want to be really good then this is kind of what you have to do. Why not ask your local colleges and see if they have any other beauty courses that you could hop on to and see how you feel about it. Who knows where this could lead? Thank you for listening to today's episode. To find out more go to info at antriatatman.co.uk or subscribe here. See you next time!