After leaving school, Christina Campbell spent a year working at home before flying the nest to the Nautical college in Glasgow to study an HND course in Beauty. She spent two years on that course while also working in a salon. After she finished this course she had another short stint back home before her wings took her off again, this time to Inverness.

‘I ended up in Aviemore in the spa, and then I went to a salon in Inverness and after a year, I was the manager there. I was there for five years and then I moved home nine years ago.’

Although, at the time Christina’s industry wasn’t so prevalent in Uist, she always had her gaze pointed towards Uist. 

‘I’ve always wanted to come home. Well, we wanted to come home and build a house and I also wanted to have my own business, so it was the goal all along, but obviously I needed to do everything else first, so I was wanting to go self employed in Inverness. But, when I asked, my boss took too long to get back to me, so I just moved home.

It was good to be away and gain the experience, but now I’m where I want to be. I have a new cabin, which we built about two and a half years ago.

 

After initially moving home, Christina had a few other jobs and then decided to take the plunge and work on her business full-time.

 

‘When I qualified, I never thought that I would be able to work full time here in beauty. But it’s all changed now. Maybe when I was training it wasn’t a popular thing. There’s lots of us here doing beauty now and we all help each other out.

I’ve got a wide range of people coming to me. I’ve got people from North Uist and a wide range of customers of different ages and I offer quite a lot of different things. 

When I was in college, you had to do a big range of treatments. But there’s parts I liked and parts I didn’t like, so I just focused on the bits that I enjoy and throughout the years I’ve gone away to do new courses. Treatments are updated and they change all the time.’

As they say, life is for learning, and Christina hasn’t stopped in gaining new knowledge. Her latest course within the industry has been in oncology massage. In recent times she has been working with the Western Isles Cancer Care Initiative to help cancer patients.

 

‘I’ve been working with WICCI for probably about a year and a half and I think I was the first one here to do it for them. There’s a few of us now, though.

WICCI had a day not that long ago, with myself, Màiri and Sheila and we each had a room. It was nice all of us just being there together. We were chatting and doing the same sort of thing and everyone worked well together. 

Christina, at the moment, works her business around her family. Her business has had to run on a smaller scale since she is having child care issues. In Uist, this is a big problem for many families with children of preschool age and Christina is having to balance her work while raising her family.

You can check her social media and website for her availability when she’s not playing peek-a-boo with her new young son. Since she began, Christina has had local support from the Stòras Uibhist Community Fund which allowed her to buy new equipment for her cabin as well as a carpark for her customers.

While asking Christina how she would encourage others to join her industry, she advised:

‘Do the proper course, to not just go off and do a course here and there. Do the HND with college and it’ll give you a good aspect of the job and your full qualification. You can then decide what you prefer doing because there are loads of different aspects to it. 

There is help available to start a new business. Stòras helped me a lot with funding. I was a bit older in starting so I missed out on other grants but there are others out there to help young people like Business Gateway and many others.

But, you know, I just love it.

To book an appointment with Christina, look her up online on this link