Christine Gardiner

If you love the skin you’re in, you ought to take care of it. CARA HUNT spoke to Christine Gardiner whose business, launched during the pandemic, can help people to do just that.

It’s the glow of healthy skin for Christine Gardiner. As the owner of Utopia Spa, she is committed to helping her clients improve the quality of their skin and their overall appearance and health in general. “I got started in this profession in 2005,” she told Tribune Weekend. “I was in Turks and Caicos and I got a job as an assistant in a dermatologist office.”

Her duties primarily involved removing moles both for cosmetic reasons and to have them biopsied to determine if they may be skin cancer. She also did acne treatments, skin screening and mole mapping.

Mole mapping uses photography to track any changes to your moles over time. These changes can include changes in the size, shape and colour of your moles, signs that a mole could potentially be turning cancerous. This technique is a useful tool for identifying skin cancers, called skin melanomas.

Mole removal is actual one of her favorite things because it can have such a drastic impact on appearance. The job quickly became a passion.

“I love it because you can just immediately see a difference in your client’s skin,” she explained. It is just obvious to see when you look at their before and after photos. After four years working in The Turks and Caicos, she returned home and worked in the office of a local dermatologist before deciding after a while she was ready and wanted to branch out on her own.

“I also wanted to extend my services with my own spa,” she explained, “and so I also learnt pain management and massage an facial peels and hair removal , waxing and acne treatment.”

Although her passion was intact, unfortunately her sense of timing was not. She opened her new business right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which of course was challenging.

However, as things started opening up again, her business began taking off.

She says one of the main things she wants to her clients to remember is how important it is to use natural products on your skin.

“The one thing that many females do that is something that they really shouldn’t is bleach their skin. I don’t like bleaching because there are so many chemicals in it that damage the skin. It strips away the pigment and the thing with bleaching is once you start, you have to continue to do it to maintain the results and avoid stretch marks and when you stop bleaching, you actually start to turn darker,” she said.