From the beginning of my career 30 years ago, I have loved touching human skin. Like many of my fellow-professionals, I have worked in many full-service salon environments where skin care was, in fact, not the main event. Generally, these salons focused on hair care, as many do today. Nail care has more recently emerged as a huge and wildly creative industry, but skin has…

How well do you really know your clients skin? Are you one of those aestheticians who view all skin equally for remedy options? How would you rate your professional savvy selecting the exact product formula or clinical treatment for your client's skin type?In today's rapidly shifting skin care market, no room exists for lazy aestheticians arbitrarily advising inaccurate products based on marketing hype or uneducated…

Skin analysis may seem pretty rudimentary at first glance. In fact, speaking as a skin care therapist myself, one of my concerns about our profession is that not everyone takes it seriously enough. Clients may think they "know" all about their own skin, and the skin therapist may lack the expertise to offer deeper insight. It's my passionate belief that the skin analysis is the…

OK, let’s get right down to it – your skin care products may contain ingredients that are actually classified as OTC’s. OTC stands for “over-the-counter” and refers specifically to non-prescription drugs. This isn’t necessarily a problem, although any skin care product containing an over-the-counter drug needs to be labeled as such. This may be a bit of a “gray area”, as you’ll see.