SKILLING HANDS, empowering lives

After having led the salon industry in India since its inception, industry veteran nalini naegamvala continues to inspire hairdressers and entrepreneurs with her social endeavours. Read on to know more about her efforts in making beauty education accessible to all those who are eager to learn, as she narrates her inspiring story.

Istarted “ my salon about 50 years ago with great aspirations and a dream of having a great salon, offering quality hairdressing and good client service.

I was fortunate that my dream came true and my salon was popular from day one.

Quite early on, I realised that I and Yasmin as well as the other stylists, who had become very busy, needed assistance. So, we started mentoring few of the shampoo girls and helpers who had shown interest in some of the simpler services. We taught them blow drying and hairstyling and later even technical services like highlights, colouration, perms etc.

Thus, we created careers for girls who were not educated but who were competent enough to learn new skills that made them job-worthy and financial independence. The amazing part of this experience was that back then we didn’t realise that we have given birth to an important new career prospect, especially for underprivileged boys and girls. They now had the opportunity to build a rewarding career and earn well, too.

To me, the ultimate fulfilment was to train the lesser privileged girls. By teaching them blow drying and hairsetting, we were able to extricate ourselves from such time consuming tasks and at the same time empower them to become an integral part of the salon.

It was amazing to see the transformation. They blossomed from simple, diffident girls to poised young women who could handle clients that came from a background that was unfamiliar to them. I can proudly say many of them have turned into great hairstylists and some are salon owners as well. This has been a great source of satisfaction and has indeed been rewarding. As an Indian woman who had seen success in my business, I was grateful to God that I was shown the way to guide and help underprivileged women to earn through hair and beauty. Thousands of women from lesser privileged homes are earning well and are giving a better life to their children and most importantly have broken the circle of poverty due to this profession.

Our Prime minister Shri Narender Modi has repeatedly emphasised the importance of skill development in India, especially skills that need to be created for the empowerment of women. Our hair, beauty and spa industry has created worthy careers for innumerable women in India.

I am grateful to FICCI-FLO Mumbai that has been kind enough to facilitate this course so that the underprivileged girls need to pay only a small amount of the fees. This training had stopped due to the pandemic but now we are gradually starting it again.”

This article appears in the Apr-May 23 Issue of Professional Beauty/ Hairdressers Journal India

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