Are you considering a career in permanent make-up?
Are you considering a career in permanent make-up? If so you need to read this article carefully.
PCPMS supplied the following article for your information regarding a career in permanent make-up.
The author, Kate Ciampi, CPCP currently serves the SPCP (Society for Permanent Cosmetic Professionals) as the Executive Director. She has been in the permanent cosmetic industry since 1991 and owns a tattoo studio, Perfection Dermagraphics, in a Chicago suburb.
Understanding the true facts of a situation is paramount as a small business owner. But how does this relate to achieving excellence?
Many of us have come from less than optimal beginnings in our permanent cosmetics career. When one starts with only two days of training and is told micro pigmentation is not tattooing, it raised many questions and caused many of us to jump from one training program to the next. Not to necessarily become successful; to achieve excellence; but to obtain what we needed just to get started. There are actually people still working like that today. With only two to five days of education behind them, no networking with their peers, no continuing education.
So where are we now? Have we done all that we can to learn all that we need to? I hope your answer is no. I never stop learning. There is not a convention or conference that I have attended where I have not learned something.
Examine how important permanent cosmetics are to you as a career. I state career, not a hobby; career. It must be a career choice or we may be doing a great disservice to out clients. How hard is it to get new clients? How much advertising are you doing? If most of your clientele comes from advertising rather than word of mouth, you may be in trouble.
In addition to loving your work, make your clients love you personally. This has many benefits – they are more inclined to have other procedures and they are more inclined to help you grow your business when they like you.
Besides liking you, make them trust you. They need to understand that you get it about the fact that they are in essence, trusting a stranger with their face – you will ensure their final outcome is going to be something you are both proud of, and that you will be there for them in years to come for touch ups. When they really like you and trust you, and if things are not going as planned in the beginning, they will come back to you for any adjustments, etc., rather than jumping ship, and running to another technician right away.
Just recently someone sent several eyebrow procedure photos to me. She has been viewing a lot of online examples of beautiful young clients with thick eyebrows tattooed in hair stroke and has been trying to change her technique accordingly.
While this style fits these woman today, what about twenty years from now? How can you adjust that when the eyebrows are tattooed big? Also, the trend is to bring them in closer…actually MUCH closer than we were always taught. How is that going to work for them twenty years from now when it starts to make the client look harsh, cross; the client understand why you make the choices you do with your work.
The New Yorker magazine journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, speaks in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, that he examines high-achievers to discover what makes these people exceptional. Some of their success comes from natural talent. We need to have excellent fine motor skill, artistic ability and a sound knowledge in facial morphology. This is fine for our foundation, but to achieve excellence, I agree with Gladwell in that you have to put in the hours. A LOT of hours.
Gladwell feels those who are true masters have logged at least 10,000 hours of practice in their field before hitting the big time. For example: “The Beatles had a musical gift, but what made them the Beatles was a random invitation to play in Hamburg…where they performed live as much as five hours a night, seven days a week. Talented? Absolutely, but they also simply put in more hours than anyone else.”
If you took those 10,000 hours and let’s say you work 48 weeks out of a year; you do permanent cosmetics 4 days and are actually physically doing procedures – 5 hours a day, it would mean it takes nearly 10 ½ years to have honoured your skill to the 10,000 hour mark.
Please don’t stop with today and feel you have arrived and you are beyond learning – that you have no need for continuing education because you, yourself, are a provider of continuing education programs. Be humble. Ask for and accept critique. Only with the knowledge of continuing education, networking and study, we can improve our skills and ability.
“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance and determines your destiny.”
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