On Her First Job In Beauty — and Why She Switched Paths
I worked as a nail tech in a small hair salon in my hometown for eight months, and while I was there, they took us to an international spa conference where there was a hair side and an aesthetics side. Because it was a hair salon, I distinctly remember being on the hair side. Nail techs were kind of scattered in between both because the industry wasn't that big yet. I went over to the spa side, and it was all calm and this pretty baby blue colour. The nail side was loud and crazy. People were doing all these crazy designs and there were barbers on stage, and there was hair, and lights flashing, and pink! It just had a completely different energy and I was like, "These are my people."
I distinctly remember gravitating to them. From then, I figured I would probably go back to school for aesthetics, but I wasn't sure yet. I moved up from the small, local hair salon to a really big spa in my area, and I worked in the nail room. Being there, I felt like the aestheticians were the core of the spa. They were the ones that people came for. I loved how they made people feel and the things that they learned. They would have product knowledge going on in the back room and I would always put my ear to the door to hear what they were saying. It was just so interesting, the science of everything.
I noticed a lot of Black women didn't come into the spa for facials. I always felt that there was a big gap in the industry for that reason.
I also noticed that a lot of Black women didn't come into the spa for facials — they'd come in for nails or massages, but never facials. I always felt that there was a big gap in the industry for that reason. Even while I was in aesthetics school, I was the only Black girl in the class, and I was one of the few Black girls who had ever even gone to the school. I just realised that there was a huge gap between what my friends, peers, and all the Black people that I knew knew about skin and cared about in regard to skin and what the industry was saying about skin. The girls in my class even had a better base knowledge of skin care than a lot of my Black peers. I really wanted to close the gap.
On Realising That the Skin Care Industry Needed Her Point of View
When I started in skin care five or six years ago, it wasn't as big of an industry at all. Now it's huge, but it wasn't then. No one really cared, even when I was tweeting about skin care. I also didn't see a lot of Black women. I know that would discourage some people, but for me, I was like, "This lane is wide open. I'm valuable in this space because I'm different."
There's the huge myth that Black doesn't crack and that Black people don't really have to do much to their skin, but I think that attitude is slowly changing because that's obviously not true. Black girls have acne, women of all ages do have anti-ageing concerns, and there's just a lot of misinformation out there and a lack of access. The skin-care industry has always been notoriously advertised as a luxury thing for upper middle class white women with ageing concerns. They even cover that in school — that's the target market for the skin-care industry, it's in books. That's who skin-care brands and aestheticians were talking to. It completely ignored a market of people, and it's just recently happened that the industry has become more inclusive.