I came to England as a young woman after growing up in India surrounded by an abundance of natural ingredients that my family used in natural skincare. My initial training led me to qualify as a hairdresser, beautician and aromatherapist. From the age of 24, I started working in a salon in Mayfair, and from that time kept in contact with the owner of the business. When he retired in 1996 I eventually purchased his business. The premises were tired, the furniture and equipment was overdue for replacement, the client base predominantly consisted of ladies in their 60’s, and the business had not grown for many years. At that time it was predominantly a hair salon.
But I had a vision. The location had enormous potential, my challenge was to establish the business and make it my own. Rather than grasping a stagnating business, I went back to basics and started afresh.
Aside from the structural and cosmetic changes, I introduced a beauty salon in the downstairs basement, focussing on facials and toning body treatments. I put a lot of effort into marketing and networking, raising the salon profile by hosting parties, supporting charitable functions, providing hair dressing services to models at courtier launches
and doing photo-shoots of the latest hairstyles for magazines.
A lot of the salons’ success has come from the fact that I have a
long list of celebrity clients. I focus on this side of the business as everyone is obsessed by celebrity. Over the year’s I have taken care of the beauty needs of people like Elle McPherson, Caprice, Meera Syal, Sadie Frost, Preeya Kalidas as well as Shirley Bassey, Ivana Trump and Carol Vorderman.
I like infusing treatments with natural ingredients and think its great to see fabulous results on clients who book a course of treatments. I often refer back to the knowledge my mother passed to me about using natural ingredients in skincare and body care. It’s so simple to make a hair mask or face scrub from ingredients in your kitchen cupboard with maybe one or two additions from your local Asian supermarket. Many of these concepts are used in my salon treatments like the hair mask smoothie for dry and dull hair. This makes my salon treatment menu much more interesting and gives me a point of difference which I love. .
Working in a salon in this was has given me the privilege of appearing on This Morning, GMTV. I was also one of the star presenters for
Celebrity Scissorhands on the BBC for Children In Need.
More recently I have focussed on charity work. Last year this included the launch of my charity for single mums and their kids called Today and Tomorrow. Late last year I completed a charity climb of Ben Nevis to raise money and am currently in training to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for the charity.
In the afternoon we visited The Canada Olympic Park where Edie the Eagle took his jump. The park was so amazing, it’s so high. We saw some people doing a zip line from the top and down, awesome. I wanted to do it but never got around to it.
