Okay so here we go… my first blog!!! I’m not sure if I’m having a quarter life crisis or if this is something that is going to stick, but either way, I’m giving it a whirl! It’s currently 11:30pm, I’m in bed and my mind is running 100mph, which if your reading this means your more thank likely in the beauty industry, you will understand!! One of the reasons I wanted to start a blog on my website is to get these thoughts OUT, the thoughts that come at 12pm when you should be sleeping. And yes I probably could write them in a journal and keep them to myself but more often than not the thoughts are of business, beauty, life and everything in between and I kind of think some of them should be shared! The idea of a beauty blog has been on my mind for a while, I absolutely love my job and daily have new thoughts and opinions on the industry and everything in it. It’s probably nerdy and definitely annoying to people who have to listen to me go on, so I thought I may as well put it somewhere where MAYBE someone would be interested. Is the cool thing and probably best way to do that these days in tik toks? Yes, but this just feels more me. So before all that stuff starts… I better explain who the hell I am and why I’m sat here, at now 12pm, on a Friday night writing my first blog.
My journey in the beauty industry has been a wild ride to say the least. It started with me, sat at home on the couch thinking about returning to work after having my son. I was currently a care assistant working 13 hour shifts on minimum wage and the thoughts of going back to that after having my boy, was hell. Me and my very imaginative brain googled, ‘self employed jobs’, and a beauty therapist popped up. And that’s it. No stories of painting my nails at 6 years old playing salons, I just simply didn’t want to wipe asses for a living anymore. In fact when I rang my mum and told her I had enrolled onto my course, she said ‘what the fuck you can’t even paint your own nails’. She wasn’t wrong. Love you mum.
So that was it, I was enrolled and I suppose, excited? I was 21, a new mum, just passed my driving test, in my first car, driving to wilmslow twice a week for 12 weeks to learn my new craft. It was the most exhilarating feeling and the most excited and independent I’d felt in a long time. I bloody loved it, even though my training was a solid 4/10. I completed my level 2 & 3 in beauty therapy, worked from home for a while and then got my first job self employed in a salon! All of this whilst tackling and working my way around being a new mum, which by the way, is HARD ( that’s a whole other blog) and if I’m honest I probably never fully committed to my job. It started on a whim and it was a few times nearly thrown away on a whim too. I was so up and down over the years of loving and hating my job and never really knowing if this was for me? Was it a mistake that day to book that course? Was it the hormones? Should I pursue my original plan of going back to university to do nursing? I just didn’t know, so for a good few years I can shamefully say, I half assed it. But in my defence ,when going through the most turbulent years of your life, I think half assing your job is allowed, be nice.
So after years of the half assing and changing my mind every month of wether to quit, I found my self finally taking the plunge and going to university to pursue my dream of becoming a mental health nurse. Without going into too much detail ( if your here for tea than too bad) the first few years of my sons life were tough for me mentally, so the thought of helping people with their mental health was something I was and still am very passionate about. I felt certain on my decision ( coming from the girl who changes her mind every day), did a year at college to get onto my course and completed my first year at university as a student nurse in 2022. So how the HELL do I now have my own salon, work and teach beauty full time and am currently sat writing a beauty blog? When I said it was a wild ride, I meant it!!
I don’t think I ever realised how lucky I was to be self employed until I wasn’t. The luxury of not starting work till after the school run doesn’t hit you until your dropping your son off to your mums at 6am in his pyjamas to get to placement to work a 12 hour unpaid shift. I just didn’t fucking know how easy I had it. I absolutely loved working in mental health, I did and still do to some extent think that that’s the role I thrive in the most and where my heart belongs. But my heart belongs completely to my boy, and anything that takes me further away from him, is a no go for me. Along side the regular struggles of being a student nurse and in the mean time doing a LOT of work on myself ( shout out to my therapist ) I started to fall in LOVE with doing brows and beauty again. I was still doing beauty 1-2 days a week when I could around placements to keep me going. In this time my whole mind shift changed, I changed, and I was able to really enjoy my job. I was getting busier and busier again, I’d found my niche and I was torn on what the hell to do. I was depressed and anxious and I knew that my degree was doing this to me.
So I made a decision ( not my strong point). A decision to give myself a year. A year off from university, and if i don’t make it work or make something of my self and business in that year, I’ll go back and finish my degree. And two years later, I’m not a mental health nurse, but I do have my own dream salon working with the best team, I absolutely love my job and honestly am the happiest I’ve ever been in my career. It took a long time, a lot of thought, hard work, support from those around me and work on myself but I finally got to where I never thought I would be. I do not regret anything about how I got here, yes even the 2 years out at uni and the student loans lol, because it got me exactly here. I am one of those people who thinks that very thing happens for a reason and all the ups and downs and hard times only make me love and appreciate it even more now.
So yeah. That’s me and that’s how I’ve got here. There are so so many other things that have happened in between all that and that are happening NOW that I just want to get out and talk about and share. I promised myself that this year I would do things that scare me and just do what I want to do, and with the year nearly up I thought now’s the perfect time. If anyone has even bothered enough to make it to the end to read this, THANK YOU! I don’t actually think I’m interesting enough that anyone will want to take the time to read this, this is more an itch I need to scratch and a tick off the old bucket list ( like I said quarter life crisis).
So for now I’ll be posting my beauty related thoughts / ideas and opinions here! And who knows by next week knowing me I may be over the idea of doing a blog and onto the next thing! We will see… Lydia Lee x