Why I Chose the Beauty Industry
I was a creative kid, always had been, so naturally my first thought was to be an artist. Simple, right? No. Seventeen year old me was not ready for the chaos of university on an arts campus, and I wasn’t ready to keep studying after barely staying afloat through high school. Bullying, depression, and anxiety had taken a lot out of me and I needed to breathe. So I did O-week, attended my first week of classes, and walked away. I spent the next two to three years working in retail, craving some kind of structure, and at one point applied for the Air Force. I was knocked back for medical reasons and found myself being asked the same questions my careers advisor had been asking five years earlier. Where do you want to be?
The answer came from somewhere I hadn't expected. My own skin.
I hit puberty early, we’re talking around nine years old, so acne became an insecurity of mine from a really young age. My mum tried everything to help me. Tissue salts, Proactiv, tea tree wash from Body Shop, Clearasil, Phisophex. You name it, we tried it. One day at the doctor for something unrelated, he asked whether we had considered medication. Mum was firm about not wanting me on Roaccutane after hearing about the hormonal and psychological side effects, so I was prescribed Doxycycline instead.
Within a week my skin was starting to respond. My head, however, was not.
Daily headaches started. I’d go to school and end up in the sick bay waiting for Mum to collect me. She put it down to the headphones I was always wearing, very Mum, very fair. And then my eye turned inward. Doctor visit after doctor visit and nobody had answers. I was off school, either in bed sleeping or just lying there in low light, nauseous, exhausted, dealing with double vision.
My mum had an appointment with her acupuncturist, a man who had previously worked as a GP. While he was treating her, she mentioned what was going on with me. Headaches, the eye turning inward, nausea, double vision. I wasn’t even his patient, but his care extended well beyond what he needed to do that day. He stayed back that evening going through medical textbooks and called us to say he thought he knew what it was. He had booked us in with an ophthalmologist for the following morning.
I arrived tired, sore, and completely over it. The ophthalmologist looked into the back of my eye and, to my genuine confusion as a thirteen year old, seemed excited. He asked if he could bring in another doctor because they didn’t see this very often. I sat there thinking, am I dying?
It was Benign Intracranial Hypertension, a severe adverse reaction to Doxycycline. An MRI confirmed it. The solution was straightforward: take me off the medication.
Which meant my acne came back. I was thirteen or fourteen, my skin was now cystic, and I felt awful about it. We were referred to a local plastic surgeon and skin clinic where I had a series of peels and laser treatments, alongside a skincare routine that was probably far too expensive for a teenager but genuinely changed things for me. That experience, sitting in that clinic, seeing what was possible, was the moment I knew where I wanted to go. I wanted to take what I had been through and use it to help other people.
TAFE was gruelling, and it’s only nine months. But between learning, practising, socialising, and working, I got through it. My driver the whole time was helping other people with their skin. After graduation, a lot of my peers had already secured jobs through work experience placements they’d done during school holidays. I felt behind. Those same holidays I had been recovering from double jaw surgery. I nearly turned around and went back into retail.
And then I found a job at a day spa.
My first day started with a text message: “I’m so sorry to do this but we’ve had a staff member call in sick, would you be able to start today?” The next twelve months under that contract felt about as chaotic as that first morning. Two weeks in, we hit Covid and went into lockdown. I tried to keep my drive alive during that time. We were on JobKeeper and came into the salon one or two days a week to do the things a spa that closes one day a year never gets around to. Repainting, reorganising, updating procedures, finding ways to stay connected with our following. We even ran a live makeup course on Instagram across a week or so.