Is Being an Esthetician a Good Career? The Honest Version

I have done this for more than forty years, so I am the wrong person to ask for a neutral answer. What I can give you is an honest one, including the parts that would put you off.

The short version

Yes, if you want to work with your hands, you are patient, and you are willing to build something slowly that belongs to you.

No, if you want a salary, a manager, regular hours, or money this year.

What the work is actually like

Not the brochure version. The Tuesday version.

• It is repetitive. You will treat the same chin twelve to eighteen times. Hair grows in cycles, so only a fraction is treatable on any given day. That is the physics, and it does not bend.
• It is close work. Hours at a time, inches from someone’s face, concentrating. Your back and your eyes will tell you about it.
• People arrive upset. Many of my clients have been refused, burned, or told there was nothing to be done. Some cry. You have to be steady while they are not.
• You will say no. To a treatment that is wrong for a skin type, to a client who needs a doctor first, to someone who wants it faster than is safe. Saying no costs you money and you do it anyway.

What is genuinely good about it

• The results are visible. The hair is gone or it is not. The mark faded or it did not. Very few jobs let you see whether you did well.
• Clients stay for years. This is not one transaction. A woman who trusts you comes back, and sends her sister.
• Nobody can fire you. There is no restructure, no acquisition, no manager deciding your role is redundant.
• It does not get automated. A machine cannot feel a follicle or read a face. That is not a slogan, it is why I still have a job.

The money, plainly

Electrolysis is $50 for fifteen minutes in my clinic — $200 an hour. A course of laser hair removal runs $3,000 to $5,000 per client, delivered across a year or more.

Practitioners I know working for themselves, once established, bill $70,000 to $120,000 a year, and some bill several times that. The first year is not that. The first year is slow and you should plan for it.

Where the real opportunity is

Not in being one more general esthetician. There are plenty.

It is in the skin almost nobody is taught to treat.

Most schools give Black and melanin-rich skin one page, call it the Fitzpatrick scale, and move on. In Georgia the law puts laser hair removal and intense pulsed light into a single regulatory category, so the schools teach them as the same thing — and they are not. IPL is broad-spectrum light that cannot be aimed at the hair, and on darker skin it burns. There is published medical literature describing second-degree burns from IPL on Fitzpatrick type IV, the lightest of the deeper tones.

Which is why women drive past a dozen clinics to reach mine. Not because I am the only practitioner. Because I am one of the few who was never going to reach for the wrong machine.

If you are going to do this at all, be the one they drive to.

See what is in the certification

Or call or text 305-864-3333 and ask me anything before you spend a dollar.

Eva Taub has treated Black and melanin-rich skin for more than forty years, in Miami and in Newnan, Georgia. Every treatment in her clinic is performed personally by her.