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DERMAL
NAILING YOUR CLIENT’S
SKIN JOURNEY By Robyn McAlpine
We all know there’s no such thing as a single miracle beauty treatment- if there was, we’d all be millionaires by now! So why do we try and shortcut our way to results? When a client comes to us with a skin goal in mind, we can see where they are starting, their skin is often in a state of trauma and we understand the results they are trying to achieve, but how to we get them there? Our clients expect results overnight. And that’s kind of our fault. Our wider industry has promised zits zapped and acne cleared in three days, pigmentation vanishing overnight, aged skin, miraculously reversed all with the swipe of a finger to reveal the before and after picture, but we’ve failed to educate in the caption sitting beneath the image. We’ve not always admitted that results sometimes took longer than expected. We’ve squeezed the timeline. We haven’t shown the highs and lows of the journey, instead we’ve given the impression that we are wizards at skin correction and our clients arrive expecting us to wave our magic wands and ‘Hey Presto’, flawless skin! But we all know that one facial isn’t going to cut it when restoring healthy function to skin. So why are we so nervous to lay out a thorough and 32
Beauty Biz Year 14 Issue 6
often lengthy plan for our clients? Why does the fear of their rejection of the long game, pressure us into trying to shortcut our way to skin victory? With the competition to survive in a very saturated industry, we have all seen the shift towards faster, cheaper, more active, more invasive, more accessible as a marketing strategy. It undermines our industry and it’s actually just plain offensive to skin biology! Imagine the audacity to speed up a cell lifecycle as though there’s something wrong with nature? Have we ever stopped to think that cells take their time for a reason? Why are we in such a hurry to exfoliate them off? Do we think there’s something better under there? It’s like ripping the wrapper off your Christmas presents and accidentally destroying the gift in the process. So how do we create a plan and better still, how to we change the narrative to long term and sustainable instead of “wham bam, thank you ma’am?” The new narrative is about creating a journey that works alongside cellular lifecycles and recognising our starting place and mapping out a skin journey from there
Over years of practice (and sometimes trial and error) I’ve developed a pathway that I take my clients through in order to get the healthiest skin possible and I’ve noticed there are certain patterns that occur. I have built my skin therapy business on this and created four transition phases that a client must pass through if they are ready to get off the internet merry-go-round and begin to really transform their skin.
PHASE 1:
When a client first arrives, often times they’ve used their face as a science experiment, trialling every flashy brand with the most convincing sponsored post on the internet. (Those who have the biggest marketing budget -not the best product- are usually who wins!) By the time I meet a new client, our first step is barrier repair and cell signalling. If our cells are a scramble and our skin barrier is nowhere to be seen, no amount of peeling, poking and prodding is going to help. We need to first get the skin back to base line health. This regularly involves cutting back on the actives, simplifying their “eleventy hundred” step routine and banning them from exfoliation.
