It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog and that’s because I’ve been so busy with Calm, my treatment rooms in Kilgetty but I am also involved in a really exciting project at Pembrokeshire College.

I was asked to be a judge for the beauty departments first round of the World Skills Competition, this amazing competition is open to all sorts of students all over the world and can be such a wonderful learning process for those that take part. I took part in some competitions when I trained at the College and we had such a great time and really learnt so much!!

I went along to the College where five very nervous students were ready to start, they have to perform a half leg wax, manicure with one hand’s nails painted red and one French manicured (the hardest colours to use) they then have to do a facial and day make-up look, the whole thing is strictly to time and I was to observe and ask the therapists lots of questions. I was joined in judging by Emma Morris and Sammy Ward, we had worked together in a spa and have all gone onto really amazing things in the last two years, we also had the therapist’s tutor Ceri Hewitson-Jones with us and together we discussed each therapist’s treatments and answers to questions that we’d asked.

We picked our winner, Jakita Roach who will now go on to represent Pembrokeshire at the next round in May. We gave all the girls that took part, constructive feedback about how it had gone and what they could do to improve for the future. I am really passionate about colleges training the therapists to be salon/spa ready, what I mean by this is start by helping them with their CV, interview and trade test (they would have to do usually 3 treatments on a senior staff member) making them aware of their body language and tone of voice when speaking to clients and preparing them for what each area of beauty they might want to go into entails, such as spa, salon, hotel, ship, working from home or mobile maybe. I think doing beauty therapy can be a easy choice for girls who don’t really know what they want to do in their future, but to be a successful therapist you have to love what you do and really strive to be the best therapist you can. I have been very lucky to work with a lot of these wonderful therapists and I feel that Jakita could be another future star therapist.

So between the four of us we made the decision to mentor Jakita to give her support and training so that she feels confident going to the next round of the competition, I have been meeting with her every week for a training session, we have covered make-up and manicure, Emma has also met with Jakita and done massage training for the facial section and Ceri has been working on Jakita’s theory and waxing. So we are all spending lots of time with her in the hope that she will be good enough to win in May and go on to the UK finals and hopefully represent the UK in the World Wide event.

I will of course, keep you up to date with how Jakita gets on, fingers crossed everyone!!!