Education/training | Making Connections | Personal Advancement | Self-employment | Career Options

Career Planning

The beauty business is looking good

Layla Bandali's next stop is Dubai in the Persian Gulf in September. She and her chiropractor husband are heading there for a couple of weeks to scout the potential for a new branch of Layla's Aesthetics, her beauty salon in Richmond Hill.

DAVID CHILTON -- Special to the Toronto Sun

Send to a friend

Sisters Anastasia, Stela and Reveka Paliougkas graduated from the Canadian Aesthetics Academy at the same time and now own their own business, RAS Mobile Salon and Spa.

Moving is nothing new to Bandali. She left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of that country, stopping in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Montreal and finally Toronto, where she landed in 1983 as a seven-year-old. Bandali, talking about her Dubai venture, says her language skills will come in useful if she decides to open up shop there. After all, her native language is Dari -- sometimes called Afghan Persian -- and she also speaks Farsi (the main language of Iran), Urdu, Hindi, French and English.

You could also say Bandali speaks aesthetics. She spent one year doing business studies at Centennial College and two more years there studying cosmetology, graduating in 1994. She then eventually moved on the Canadian Aesthetics Academy for a further nine months, taking advanced aesthetics and graduating in 1997.

Bandali chose the Canadian Aesthetics Academy because of the quality of its teachers. She says she found they were all experienced in the aesthetics industry rather than being recent grads hired to teach at the school they had just left. "Nella (Lanzellotti, the academy's director) is definitely selective about the teachers she hires," Bandali says.

CAREER CHANGE

Recent graduate Reveka Paliougkas also did some travelling before landing at the Canadian Aesthetics Academy. Unlike Bandali, however, Paliougkas's itinerary was rather less wide-ranging. She went from Scarborough, where she grew up, to Windsor, Ont., where she earned a degree in psychology from that city's university in 2002. She then went to work for her family's window and door company before deciding she wanted to do something different.

As different as her career choice was - so, too, was her enrollment. Paliougkas and her sisters, Anastasia and Stela, enrolled and graduated at the same time. All three women studied hairstyling and makeup artistry at the academy, spending 18 months on the former and a further four months on the latter. Their studies included learning about various types of makeup, including day-to-day, runway/glamour and bridal. Day-to-day makeup, Reveka notes, takes about 10 to 15 minutes, but making up a bride can take as much as two hours.

Even though both Bandali and Paliougkas now run their own businesses, not every new academy graduate wants to strike out on their own right away -- indeed Bandali herself spent six years working for Merle Norman in Richmond Hill before taking the plunge. So for those grads the academy maintains an admirable job placement record. Or as Bandali says, "When you leave the school they don't shut the door behind you."

Paliougkas, who says she gets along "great" with her sisters, also runs a business with them, RAS Mobile Salon and Spa.

The spa services are offered in the client's home rather than the client coming to them. However, Paliougkas and her sisters don't expect to be on the road forever. At some point they will open a salon and spa in Scarborough, back in their own neck of the woods.