Welcome to The Holistic Skin Guru, where what's on the surface is

just as important as what's underneath. I'm your host, Aamena.

Let's dive deep into the world of holistic skincare. Welcome

back today. We've got a really exciting episode about the

importance of a skin consultation So many

of us just skim over this when we come into treatments We

don't even give it a second thought but it is one of

the most important elements of your skin treatment and

it gives us the ability to see what's going on

with your skin so that we can give you the best possible

recommendations and give you the best outcomes for your

treatment. But did you know you can actually have a

skin consultation on its own? And most

salons, not all salons, but most salons will give this to

you basically free of charge. Some salons

will charge for it because they take a little bit more time.

But generally speaking, it's a very small amount and

you get a lot of value from it. So

what is a skin consultation then? Well, a skin consultation is

when you come in and have a professional look

at your skin, either by using some kind of

diagnostic tool, and they will also ask

you a series of questions about your

lifestyle, about your diet, about

your hormones, and about your skin care. So

it's a very, very thorough, in-depth information

session, if you like, where we as professionals get

to put our knowledge into practice. When we ask

you these questions, we're not just being nosy. What we

really need to know is what you're putting your skin through

on a daily basis. That way, when we look at

your skin, we can understand why we're seeing certain things.

For example, you know, a client will come in and say,

I've been breaking out recently and I'm not sure why

this is happening. When we delve into asking you

some lifestyle questions, it then becomes blatantly

obvious for us why this is happening. Sometimes

it can be things like, excessive alcohol consumption

on the weekends leads to a mini breakout by

Tuesday or Wednesday. And just by simply eliminating that

excessive alcohol consumption and that sugar will

actually get rid of that activity in

the skin. So as you can see, a skin consultation is

very important if you are serious about getting

results for your skin. Many people come in and

they haven't had a treatment for months, sometimes even

years, and your skin changes from season

to season through all the hormonal activity and

imbalances that we go through as women and

as men at times. We need to be able to understand what

is happening in our skin and everybody's skin changes

with the seasons and with hormonal activity and what we

actually put our skin through. So one of the biggest factors

that we look at when we're trying to determine what

treatments are going to suit what kind of client is

We look at your skin's Fitzpatrick. Now,

this is a technical term and it actually gives us the opportunity to

look at where you fit in the spectrum of, you

know, skin. So we can ascertain

which treatments are going to work better than others because some Fitzpatricks

don't suit certain treatments. For example, a

person with a Fitzpatrick 1 is usually someone who's incredibly fair,

burns very easily, usually has either blonde or

very red hair. These kind of clients, we

want to make sure that they are wearing

their sunscreen religiously because they burn very easily. So

when we use a Skin Fitzpatrick to determine what treatments are

best for you, sometimes people with certain Skin

Fitzpatricks cannot do certain treatments. For

example, If you have, say, a Fitzpatrick 5, which

is a very dark complexion, which is usually seen in people with

African descent, with very, very large

amounts of melanin in their skin, these

kind of clients hyperpigment very easily. So we

have to be very careful when we're doing treatments on

clients with a high level of melanin, which

we then in the industry will call a Fitzpatrick 4 or 5. So

this is something technical that we as

skin therapists use on a daily basis to help us determine what

is right for each person. So this

is very important because if you're going in and you're self-prescribing, you're

going in to a website or looking at a

menu of services and you're just booking a treatment online, you

may just be booking the incorrect treatment for your

skin. And so a skin consultation is important to

get this right. If you've had a skin consultation before, you'll

know exactly what I'm talking about. But if you've never had one,

don't be afraid to go and get one done because this is

really gonna help you moving forward to make the right decisions.

Make sure when you go in for a skin consultation, you

get the right information. There are

a lot of therapists out there that are very young who are

just starting out in the industry and they may need help from

senior therapists to give you the correct information. So

try to find a place or come to us and

we will be able to determine what is going

on with your skin because we do a deep dive into the

skin consultation and it may seem like a

lot of questions but it's there for a reason. A

lot of times you'll come into salons and they've got fancy diagnostic tools,

you know, the ones that take photographs of your skin on all different

levels. And you may be thinking to yourself, oh, that's pretty fancy and

that's something that, you know, I'm interested in doing. It sounds pretty

cool. And it is cool and it is exciting. But

at the end of the day, a good therapist does not need

that. She will be able to look at your skin and

ascertain what is going on just as well without

one of those fancy gadgets. So you don't really

need it. Those gadgets are there more for you. So

you've got something to take home and it's more to present something

to you so you can understand it because we have the

skin knowledge and we already can see a lot of that stuff. but

when it's presented to you in the form of a photograph it kind

of makes sense a little bit more for you because we forget we live

in beauty world and this is our bread and butter and this is what we

see day in and day out and so these tools are

designed more with you in mind to make it

easier for you to make decisions about how you're going

to look after your skin moving forward. So when you

come in for a skin diagnosis or skin consultation that

you're paying for, what are you actually paying for? Some

people think you know, this should be something that

happens for free. And like I said, there are a lot

of salons that do offer it at no cost. But

for someone like us, where we are actually charging for

this service, we do that because our

therapists have had a lot of training in

our modalities and in our ingredient technology. and

they are keeping abreast of what's happening in

the industry as well. And all of that means that

there's extra training, there's a lot of learning going on

behind the scenes, and then they're bringing that into the

consultation with you to be able to give you the

best information they can. And it's kind of

like, you know, you're going to the doctor, and the doctor

is prescribing some medication for you, the

doctor has to have some knowledge about that prescriptive

or that drug to be able to prescribe it for you. And

so in the same manner, we have a lot of information that

we carry around and a lot of research that we do that we're

bringing in from our experience and

our knowledge base to guide you the best way forward.

So that's what you're paying for. You're paying for our knowledge and our level of

skill and our experience, our expertise. So

how is this going to save you money moving forward? Well, it's pretty

simple. All you need to think about is the fact that once

you've had a skin consultation and a diagnosis, you

end up with a roadmap. And that roadmap is gonna take

you through your skin journey and it's gonna help you make some very

informed decisions. So nobody can pull the wool over your eyes

and mislead you into thinking or completing a

treatment that's actually not gonna do anything for you. There's

a lot of fluff in our industry. There's a lot of

treatments that have been moved around in

such a way that you think you're getting something and then you're getting

something else. And there'll be podcasts about that as well. And

we really, by understanding our skin, we're gonna have the ability

to make these informed decisions. So, what

are the take-homes? Well, you're going to have your little

roadmap, you're going to be able to ask questions to

any beauty professional about your skin, and

you're going to be able to make informed decisions about what

treatments you take. But over and above all of this,

you will not need to self-prescribe any longer because

now you have the actual definition of

what's going on in your skin and you're not guessing anymore.

So you will now be able to make decisions about what

products you take home and use that actually makes sense

for you and your skin and your skin's journey. If

you enjoyed this episode, give us a five-star review on

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don't forget to leave a comment below and you can ask

any question or if you have a topic that you think you

would like us to talk about, please leave it in the comments below and

we'd love to answer those questions in another episode. If

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