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Spotlight: Harleen Grewal, Skyline Smiles
Spotlight: Harleen Grewal
Skyline Smiles
BY MICHAEL PICARELLA
Signal Staff Writer
Her parents wanted her to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. She said she liked the idea of being in the medical field.
Harleen Grewal, founder of Skyline Smiles on La Madrid Drive in Santa Clarita, started her business in connection with the adjoining Mind Body Infusion Med Spa, which she founded with her husband, Yuvyaj Grewal.
Unfortunately, as it happened to many others, as she was opening the doors, she ran head-on into the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I always take whatever comes and make the most out of it,” she said in a recent interview. “So, what we did is we started doing COVID testing because I had to make money … I just thought, ‘How can I help people and make money at the same time?’ You can make money doing the right thing, right?”
Grewal was born in England in 1983. When she was 10 years old, her parents moved the family to India because they wanted her and her brother to be raised in more of a “conservative, respectful society.”
“They sent me to a boarding school up in the Himalayas called the Sacred Heart School,” Grewal said. “It was in Dalhousie — a Catholic boarding school, run by nuns from Belgium and Ireland. So, I had a fun education,” she added sarcastically.
However, it was the allure of the American dream, which Grewal saw in movies as a kid, that ultimately brought her to the United States. Her dream was to create a successful business and help people at the same time; to be a doctor, but to be an artist. Her love of biology and art came together in the field of dentistry, she said.
“You have to be so specific when you’re contouring those teeth and making somebody’s new smile,” Grewal elaborated. “You’re shade-matching, and molding things, and making one tooth look like the other. It’s a very artistic process.”
Grewal learned dentistry in India. She went to dental school there between 2002 and 2008. Upon finishing, she did what she’d wanted to do for years and she came to America. But she couldn’t just become a dentist. She had to get American training, and so, she enrolled in USC’s School of Dentistry.
“I honestly think it’s the best dental school in the world,” she said. “Every day, when I practice, I still remember all the things that were taught to me at USC dental school, and I implement those, and that’s what I’ve carried on for the last 15 years.”
But Grewal said she wanted to challenge herself further. Upon completing her schooling in 2011 at USC, she decided she wanted to get into pediatric dentistry.
Grewal did her residency at the Lutheran Medical Center, which is now a New York University satellite location in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
In 2013, she finished, and for the next four years she got married, moved around a bit, worked with Pacific Dental Services, and in 2017, she and her husband made a home in Santa Clarita near her husband’s family.
“In 2017, we moved here and I was pregnant with my first child,” Grewal said. “I quit doing dentistry because I didn’t want to be around the laughing gas — nitrous oxide.
“And my husband started his private practice, which is Advanced Center for Neurology and Headache (in Valencia). But he needed some help to get that running because he’s not a businessman.”
Grewal helped him build his practice. Then she helped her father-in-law build his pain management practice and surgery center.
