Every career needs a beginning, just like every blog needs a beginning.
So I suppose this is the best place to start.
...Okay maybe we went a little too far back. (I'm sure cute though!)
I guess we should start at beauty school. High school was rough for me because I was too ambitious. I was not grounded or focused and thought way too much about the future instead of what I was working on at the time. All I could focus on was my "career" in theatre and the bullshit high school drama.
I ended up dropping out of high school in March of my senior year.
I spent the following summer working at IHOP for a chauvinist owner who liked to comment on how the waitresses like myself would make more money wearing bikinis under our aprons--total skeeve, right?
Fun fact: I never actually quit that job, nor was I fired. My best friend Jess (she was a separate person, I'm not calling myself my own best friend) walked in and quit one day, and said chauvinist assumed I would walk with her. He took me off the schedule without a word or call or anything and suddenly I didn't work there anymore.
I decided to go back to high school to get my diploma, and continue on with my family tradition of graduating from Ferguson High School, the local alternative high school. My mom and uncle both graduated from Ferguson and I considered it an honor to graduate from there as well.
Fun fact #2: I'm in two separate Ferguson High School yearbooks, one from 1990 with my mom and one from 2009.
So I finally graduated high school.
My mom told me I needed to do something, something that would pay my bills and maybe give myself time to pursue theatre as well. My mom had always wanted to go to beauty school and since most of the kids were older my mom finally had the time to do it. She suggested I go to beauty school as well, as a means to either put myself through university later or continue pursuing theatre professionally.
Beauty School
I entered beauty school one month after my mom, so she was a class ahead of me all through school, but we ended up in most of our classes together. I started in Basic Color Theory and I was astounded because it actually made sense. Color theory was actually my jam! And then suddenly I was in Basic Perming and Styling, and it turned out I was a wizard with a marcel curling iron. Basic Cutting kicked my butt a little bit though, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't have at least one panic attack a week during cutting class.
I continued through beauty school, going through skin care and learning facials and microdermabrasion and makeup (although let's be real, everything I really needed to know about makeup I learned from theatre and drag queens). After skin care was nails--which I straight up hated. Graduating was a long, drawn out process...but that is a blog post for another day. My grandma joined us in beauty school for esthetics and that was the beginning of Generations.
The Work Begins
After receiving my license, I went to work at Smart Style in Fort Collins.I worked there for about a year and decided to go to barber school while I was working there. I learned a lot about the work environment I did not want. I learned that I wanted to create art and control my own schedule in a high end environment, something that Smart Style just couldn't offer me.
I moved to Las Vegas with my boyfriend at the time with lofty dreams of success in a high end salon in Vegas. Unfortunately, I did not do enough research. Nevada does not offer licensure reciprocity and I was unable to obtain my license without shelling out $350+. I worked at Clark County School District as a temp, and learned that I did not want to work in an office ever again, no matter how funny The Office is.
This realization brought me back to Colorado and into Generations Salon and Spa. Days of sitting in the basement of a municipal building playing cards and watching Netflix, until one day we noticed a few things were off in the salon...okay, we had been broken into. That was the last straw for us. We started actively looking for a new location and we found it in our little salon that we called home for seven years.
Still so proud of that little spot.
I decided early on in my transition into full ownership that I needed a change. That "little salon" simply felt like too much for just me to handle. I was not ready to manage employees, and I craved something that was mine. I packed everything up, sold a bunch of it, and moved to a small studio suite in Fort Collins, which is where I decided to change my life.
We'll get more into the details on that in the next post.
Spoiler alert: It's fucking awesome.
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