Shawn O'Hara: Welcome, everybody. My guest today is Jo Shay, who is the owner of The Nest Aesthetics here in Victoria, BC. She's an experienced aesthetician and medical aesthetician with over 25 years in the industry. She combines clinical skincare expertise with a holistic lens, drawing on her training in phytotherapy and yoga therapy to support clients' overall wellbeing.

At The Nest Aesthetics, Jo focuses on honest skincare results, offering skincare treatments such as microneedling for face and hair loss, chemical peels, and facials in a calm, nurturing environment. Her work is grounded in integrity, clear communication, and a commitment to ongoing learning so she can provide thoughtful, results-driven care. Welcome, Jo.

Jo Shay: Thank you for having me.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, thanks for being with me today. So tell me, what do you do at The Nest Aesthetics?

Jo Shay: Well, I am The Nest Aesthetics. I'm a solo practitioner, so I work there by myself. My focus is on helping clients navigate an overwhelming amount of misinformation that is showing up in skincare right now, and providing services that are grounded in education and realistic expectations. As you said, I offer skin consultations, facials, microneedling, and chemical peels. And my services are highly individualized for each individual person.

Shawn O'Hara: How did you get into this?

Jo Shay: It's not a very dramatic story in that I didn't grow up dreaming about being an esthetician. When I left high school, I wasn't sure which direction I wanted to go in and had a friend who was in the hair program who suggested that I go into aesthetics, or look into aesthetics, and I did.

I have always been a bit of a black sheep in every industry that I've ever been in, and I wasn't heavily into makeup or how I looked. I didn't really care about any of that. But I really loved the idea of helping people to be more confident and comfortable in their own skin, and that part came very, very naturally to me. So I went straight into aesthetics out of high school and have been doing it ever since.

Shawn O'Hara: So you've been doing this for over 25 years?

Jo Shay: Mm-hmm.

Shawn O'Hara: And how have the regulations or compliance changed in that time?

Jo Shay: It's actually changed quite a bit. When I went to school, the program was very broad, so it was a very comprehensive program. We did skincare, we did waxing, nails, body treatments, massage therapy, for example. It was all encompassed in the same program. And it was licensed as well, so at the end of your training, you had to sit a licensed exam, and then you had to renew the license every year.

Now the industry is much more fragmented in the sense that you can train in a single modality, so you can just train in waxing or you can just train in nails or microneedling without the comprehensive overall program. There's no licensing anymore, no regulations or regulatory board, I should say. And there are excellent trainings available, but they're very varied.

The quality and depth of that education is not very consistent. And then the term medical aesthetics developed over the 25 years that I've been practicing. It's more of a distinction between how we practice versus different regulations, designation sort of thing. In general, medical aesthetics is used to describe aestheticians who work with more advanced technologies or alongside medical professionals, but there's no separate governing board for them either.

For me, what stayed consistent throughout is the foundation that I got doing the comprehensive program. I maintain the rules and regulations I had to follow back when we were licensed. I have maintained those structures coming through my whole career.

Shawn O'Hara: So medical doesn't necessarily refer to being practiced by a medical professional, like a nurse?

Jo Shay: No. They're often working underneath a medical professional, and depending... there are some services that they do that don't need to be governed by that medical professional. They're often working under a medical director, but sometimes the doctor will meet with the client and go over the treatment plan and the depth and style of treatment, and then the medical aesthetician will actually perform the individual treatments under the observation and supervision of that medical director.

Shawn O'Hara: It's a very gray area, then.

Jo Shay: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: In your practice, what do you do that you would consider medical aesthetics, and what do you do as non-medical aesthetics?

Jo Shay: A lot of what I am trained to do in medical aesthetics I'm not currently doing. I would consider laser treatments, both for skin and hair removal, to be in the medical aesthetics realm. I would probably put microneedling and chemical peels there as well, although it's also in an aesthetician's scope to do it. That's where the gray area kind of comes between the two professions.

And again, because I've been doing aesthetics for so long, I learned how to do all of these things before there was the medical aesthetics distinction. I have re-upped my certifications to be more in alignment with medical aesthetics now, but I did also learn those as an aesthetician way back in the day.

Shawn O'Hara: Would one say that the difference is that non-medical would be hair, nails, waxing?

Jo Shay: Yeah, and facials as well. The more simple services would be considered aesthetics, and the more in-depth, higher-technology services, like microneedling and laser treatments, would be more on the medical aesthetic side.

Shawn O'Hara: Almost once you hit some advanced equipment, then it becomes medical aesthetics?

Jo Shay: For people who don't really understand what aesthetics is, I usually use the equipment as that defining language, because that's where you have to be more cautious and have higher training to work the equipment properly without harming the client. So I would often use that language as the description between the two.

Shawn O'Hara: Right, because you're using lasers, which could pose some issues.

Jo Shay: Yeah, and microneedling as well. Microneedling is puncturing the skin with little needles, so if you don't have the training or the understanding of how the skin works, you can do quite a bit of damage if you're not careful.

Shawn O'Hara: Right, and that has to be in a sterile environment as well.

Jo Shay: Absolutely, yes.

Shawn O'Hara: Similar with the chemical peels?

Jo Shay: Absolutely. With both microneedling and chemical peels, there's a distinction in the depth we can go into as aestheticians or medical aestheticians, and then doctors or nurses can go quite a bit deeper, with different products than I can use as an aesthetician. And there would be reasons why you would want to go deeper versus more superficial.

Shawn O'Hara: What do you mean by deeper? Literally deeper into the skin?

Jo Shay: Yes, literally, depth. So in microneedling, I'm talking about the depth the needles insert into the skin. And with chemical peels, they penetrate deeper into the levels of the skin. So for chemical peels, you can burn a client if you're using the wrong product on their skin, leaving it on for too long, or going too deep.

Shawn O'Hara: So you really have to know what you're doing.

Jo Shay: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: Do you provide disclaimers to clients about that?

Jo Shay: Oh, absolutely. They sign an informed consent before they have treatment. I have to do a consultation with them before they do the treatment, and in that I go through all of the possible treatment outcomes, including that this could, in rare circumstances, happen, but my training will hopefully prevent it. There's always a health history that's taken, and then a client consent that's taken as well. That's required by Health Canada.

Shawn O'Hara: That's a good segue into who regulates you and your profession.

Jo Shay: In BC there is no singular regulatory college for either aesthetics or medical aesthetics, but there are layers of oversight. Health Canada regulates medical devices and certain products that are used, while local health authorities regulate our sanitation, infection prevention, and establishment requirements.

There are treatments that involve prescription products, such as Botox or other injectables, but those fall under regulated health professionals like physicians and nurses. They are outside the scope of aestheticians and medical aestheticians.

Shawn O'Hara: So no one single regulatory body.

Jo Shay: No, unfortunately. There's a lot of onus to maintain ethics and safety practices and continued education, and it all falls onto the individual practitioner, unfortunately. We're not a highly regulated industry, shockingly.

Shawn O'Hara: So different professions can do similar techniques or modalities, and be regulated by their college or not regulated at all.

Jo Shay: Yes.

Shawn O'Hara: A doctor doing microneedling would be overseen by that college, and a nurse practitioner is a separate college?

Jo Shay: Absolutely.

Shawn O'Hara: Even though it's the same technique.

Jo Shay: Yes, absolutely.

Shawn O'Hara: Which could certainly get into separate rules, separate regulators.

Jo Shay: Yeah, and different expectations of treatment as well. Even a microneedling course, which is often about a week, is often taught in the sense of just teaching you the technique. It's not teaching you the impact you're having on the skin, or the skin physiology. It's more about how to go through the process versus understanding what exactly you're doing, which is a little bit frightening as well.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, that could be very frightening, and people wouldn't know.

Jo Shay: Absolutely.

Shawn O'Hara: And you mentioned earlier about misinformation. How does that play into all of this?

Jo Shay: I would say that's the largest thing I deal with on a day-to-day basis. There is so much misinformation about individual ingredients, outcomes of products, outcomes of treatment, how a treatment should be done, when a treatment should be done. I am helping clients daily weed through various different aspects.

I'll have clients coming in saying they want a certain treatment that isn't applicable to their skin or isn't going to do them any benefit at all, and then I have to spend a lot of time re-educating them on the true outcomes of different things. It's a lot. The misinformation is everywhere. TikTok and Instagram are pretty much the bane of my existence in that sense, because there are people on those platforms saying they are dermatologists or aestheticians, and in reality, they're neither. They're just influencers of some variety.

And even amongst my field, there's misinformation. We are often taught one singular product line, and that product line wants to sell that product line, so they often speak poorly about other product lines, and there's misinformation there too. So even amongst my industry, there's a lot of misinformation, and you're reading through a lot of it to get to the truth.

Shawn O'Hara: It's a complex thing.

Jo Shay: It's very complex, and it does require... I do a lot of continued education and research. I read a lot of studies. I'm a bit of a geek in that sense. I really like to learn. So it requires me, and every individual practitioner, to do a lot of research to find the true information, or the accurate information, I should say. It requires us to do a lot of self-driven learning.

Shawn O'Hara: When clients first come to you, do they know what they want, or do they come saying, 'I have an issue, what can you do about it?'

Jo Shay: Both, absolutely both. Because I also offer skin consultations, some people come to me and say, 'Here's everything I'm using, what's of benefit and what's not?' Or they've had a friend who's had a chemical peel and got really great results, so they think they want to try it. We talk about their health history and their goals to really decipher what is best for their unique condition and their unique skin, versus trying to fit into a trend or a specific product. Every single treatment that I do starts with a conversation.

Shawn O'Hara: I noticed, looking at your website, that you have that.

Jo Shay: Yeah, that's really important to me. And I'm very, very honest. So if somebody comes in and they're using a $300 serum they've been told is the best thing they can possibly use on their skin, and I don't think it's going to be as beneficial as a $20 product, or that they shouldn't be using it at all, I will be very honest about that.

I don't want people spending money on trends that are unnecessary for what they have, and that includes treatment. If somebody comes in wanting a treatment from me and I don't actually think it's going to accomplish their goals, I will be very clear on that and make other suggestions that would be in the correct direction for what they're looking to accomplish.

Shawn O'Hara: People tend to come in both knowing and not knowing, because what I've noticed with a lot of aesthetics is that people have to have an idea of why they're there. It doesn't always start with, 'I have an issue, how do I solve it?'

Jo Shay: Sometimes it does. Sometimes people come in with a condition they're seeking treatment for, like acne, or pigmentation, or fine lines and wrinkles. But often I find that my clients right now are very well-informed, in the sense that they've done some of their own research, but that research often leads them to be more confused.

So my place in that is to help them understand what part of their research is accurate and true for their skin, and what is misinformation. Some people will come in specifically because they've heard microneedling is an amazing treatment, so they're coming in a bit more specific for the treatment, and it's a different conversation. But every client is unique, in the sense that why they show up at my door could be different.

Shawn O'Hara: Interesting. People tend to start searching when they have an issue first. How can they tell if they're following an influencer who's not qualified, or can they?

Jo Shay: It's very complicated, and it's not always clear, honestly. Even for myself, part of the business is that I have to be online, so even as I'm looking online, I'm following people who I know are dermatologists or in the industry, and the way they describe something could be misleading as well.

I think it's probably well-intentioned, they're not trying to be misleading, but their focus and what they're trying to say doesn't always land the way they're wanting it to land. So it's very murky. It's very challenging to know who is speaking factually and who is marketing.

Shawn O'Hara: If that's difficult for you, it's even more difficult for a consumer.

Jo Shay: Absolutely.

Shawn O'Hara: How do you follow them? Is it through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Patreon?

Jo Shay: I don't like social media, so I'm avoiding most of it. I exclusively use Instagram, mostly because it's the one I'm familiar with, and everything else overwhelms me.

Shawn O'Hara: There's a lot there.

Jo Shay: There is a lot, yes.

Shawn O'Hara: Okay.

Jo Shay: Yes. The industry in Victoria is big, but it's small for us. We all know of each other, so I do know who's... I have a large list of recommendations for my clients, for people I trust for certain services, who I either see myself or know to be of a similar caliber to myself. So I have a large referral list, in the local sense.

Shawn O'Hara: That's good. That's very handy.

Jo Shay: Mm-hmm.

Shawn O'Hara: Your industry isn't regulated. Do you belong to any organizations for your profession?

Jo Shay: No, because there isn't any specific organization managing us, I'm not a member of any particular organization. But continuing education is something that's extremely important to me. There are organizations, like MCAS, I actually don't know what it stands for, International Medical Aesthetics. Anyway, there's an organization called MCAS that I do follow. They offer a lot of great webinars, and they have a great discussion board, so folks from dermatologists down to medical aestheticians can post there if they're seeing things in the treatment room that are new or challenging. I can follow that to see where the industry is going, and be a bit of a fly on the wall to hear what's going on at the dermatologist and nursing levels as well.

I attend conferences. Like I said, I do a lot of research, but because it's not governed by a single professional college, it really is up to the individual to continue their education and be ethically self-governed.

Shawn O'Hara: From a marketing perspective, what kinds of claims or language do you need to be careful about on your website, your social media, or when you're talking with people?

Jo Shay: I have to be very careful with my marketing to not overpromise or make any medical claims. I am not a medical professional, so I have to be very careful in that realm, and I avoid language like 'cure' or 'guaranteed,' just so that I'm not overpromising and creating unreal expectations for treatments.

A lot of my marketing is more around the why behind why we might do a treatment or why behind a product, educating in that sense without any overpromising. I really truly believe that clients deserve transparency. Skin is so complex, and the results depend on so many different factors, that saying a specific treatment will yield certain results is incorrect, because it depends on your consistency of treatment, your health history, your lifestyle, and your home care is a large piece of it too.

So a lot of the onus falls onto the client. If I'm making claims but I don't know those pieces of their history, I'm making inaccurate claims. So I prefer to educate clients honestly about what a treatment could improve on, rather than promising perfect results.

Shawn O'Hara: So what challenges have you faced with marketers you've worked with in this area?

Jo Shay: I do all my own marketing, so I don't actually work with anybody else who's a marketer. Because I'm a solo esthetician, I can really guide my own marketing in the way that I feel comfortable with. Again, my whole concept is based around honesty, so that's typically where I stem from for everything.

Shawn O'Hara: Ever been burnt by bad marketers?

Jo Shay: I have been burnt in the sense that other people's marketing has burnt me, and I have to spend a lot of time re-educating clients, but not in my own sense, no.

Shawn O'Hara: So they've been promised things that just aren't deliverable?

Jo Shay: Yeah, and a lot of my clients do come to me after receiving poor results elsewhere, and I do a lot of fixing in that sense too.

Shawn O'Hara: A lot of repair work, sort of.

Jo Shay: Yeah, which again comes into microneedling and chemical peels specifically. If they go somewhere where they were promised that in three sessions they were going to have magically youthful skin, and then they come to me and they're upset with their results, I can explain to them why they are where they're at, and we can work through it. A lot of the time with microneedling, if you're not careful with how you do it, you pull the needles across the skin and cause scratches, which takes some time to heal, so I do some repair work there. Same with chemical peels. I often get people coming to me after being burnt by somebody.

They still want to try chemical peels, but in a more controlled environment, or we just repair the burns and help them get back to a baseline of healthy skin.

Shawn O'Hara: How severe can these burns and cuts be?

Jo Shay: With aestheticians and medical aestheticians, the burns are significant, but they're not permanent in the sense that they don't necessarily cause permanent scarring. That's mostly because of the depth we're allowed to go to. We can't even get access to the higher levels of chemical peels, because of the regulations around the clients or the companies selling the chemical peel product.

With microneedling, they can cause permanent scars on the skin if it's not done properly. It can be quite dramatic, and it's scary for clients. It can be quite frightening.

Shawn O'Hara: You really have to check who their practitioners are and know what they're doing.

Jo Shay: Absolutely. And that requires you to know which questions to ask, which not everybody knows.

Shawn O'Hara: Can you tell us some of what they should be asking?

Jo Shay: Asking if somebody's certified in a certain treatment isn't necessarily the best question, because, like I said, you can take a weekend course and it will show you the technique but not the why behind it. So asking questions like, 'What is this doing to my skin? What is the process that's happening in the levels of my skin?' That's where you're going to know. If they can't answer those questions, they don't know what's happening, and they don't know the why behind the treatment, and those would be people I would steer away from.

Shawn O'Hara: They can't fully explain it.

Jo Shay: Yes. And it's very science-y, and a lot of people don't have the language to explain it, but they will be able to piece together an explanation. If they can't answer it at all, that's where I would turn and run.

Shawn O'Hara: That means they've just done the week-long course and don't have the in-depth training.

Jo Shay: Absolutely.

Shawn O'Hara: And then if they're outside of Greater Victoria and have been damaged, have had a bad experience, what can they do? How can they find people like you?

Jo Shay: I would do exactly that, just ask a ton of questions to people who are getting deeper into the why behind the treatment, and they'll be able to find somebody. People who offer skin consultations are typically the people who understand the skin a little bit more. One of the things I like about owning my own business is that there's no requirement for me to be selling product to people.

When you work for other people, they typically carry a product line that you're required to sell, so oftentimes you have to push product that might not be right for the skin. Whereas if you're doing a skin consultation, typically your purpose is getting people to their beautiful baseline of healthy skin. It's a good opportunity to go in and just have a conversation with the practitioner so you can ask specifics, like, 'What is this vitamin C doing in my skin that I might need it for?' If you ask those kinds of questions, you'll be able to gauge whether or not the person has the in-depth knowledge they need to fix your skin.

Shawn O'Hara: Right, so it's the questioning.

Jo Shay: Mm-hmm.

Shawn O'Hara: Going in and asking, 'I've been damaged, this happened to me, I went through this treatment, how can you fix it?' and seeing how they respond.

Jo Shay: Mm-hmm. And if their response is, 'You're going to buy these seven products,' they're not the right person, they're just going for sales.

Shawn O'Hara: Okay, so very much a buyer beware.

Jo Shay: Very much, yes.

Shawn O'Hara: Looking down the road, what changes do you see? You've seen a lot of changes in the years that you've been doing this, the fragmentation and the regulations and so on. What kind of changes do you see in regulations, in treatments?

Jo Shay: I think we'll continue to see a stronger expectation around education, around transparency. Ethical marketing, I'm hoping is something that will come down the line. Clients are way more informed, like I said, and they are asking better questions about qualifications, device safety, ingredients, et cetera. I really hope there will eventually be pressure for more standardized education and a clearer oversight for my field within Canada. I'm hoping that's the way it goes, but I don't necessarily see that happening. But I would love to see licensing come back.

Shawn O'Hara: Turn it into more of a regulated industry, with a certification that people could put on their websites.

Jo Shay: Yeah, that would be brilliant. Anything to make it more clear for clients as to where to go, that's trusted, would be lovely. But again, I don't know if it's going to go in that direction.

Shawn O'Hara: It may. We currently have what's been phrased an activist government in this province.

Jo Shay: If clients are driving the bus, that's where it's going to go, because, like I said, they're far more curious and educated, and they are asking better questions. So if the population who's getting the treatments is driving the change, that's definitely where it will happen.

Shawn O'Hara: We'll have to see how that evolves.

Jo Shay: Yeah.

Shawn O'Hara: So even going to a practitioner's website and seeing a certification in the footer isn't necessarily reassuring then?

Jo Shay: It's reassuring in the sense they have some training. You can also apprentice, so you don't necessarily need to do courses. You could apprentice. But I have been in places where there are 30 certificates on a wall, and that's brilliant because it means that they're continuing their education, but it doesn't really mean that they have a foundation understanding of skin.

It matters more in certain elements of aesthetics than others. Waxing is a fairly simple process, but even that I would love my practitioner to know why they're pulling in a certain direction versus another. It's tricky. Seeing certification isn't necessarily the tell that they're understanding what they're doing.

Shawn O'Hara: Fascinating.

Jo Shay: I am not making it sound very positive, but it is the way of the world right now.

Shawn O'Hara: Well, it's good to make people aware. As a marketer, that's what interests me is when I've looked at a lot of businesses in general, they tend to go with, they're expecting people to already know what they want, and with the rise, especially with AI searches, artificial intelligence searches, they are going through sites that are providing that information, and people aren't necessarily starting with, 'I want this treatment.'

They're starting with, 'I have this event coming up,' or, 'I have this condition, I have something I want to deal with, I have a problem.' And the people who are providing that information first may be doing better in the AI searches and then more likely to be, at least have their sites researched and then booked from there.

Jo Shay: One of the things that is fairly consistent across people who are trained at a level that understand the skin is a blog. A lot of websites that have blogs that go into the why behind certain things, you'll be able to tell through their blog if they truly understand. Well, maybe not, because AI can write that. I don't use AI necessarily, so I'm not sure how it works. But a lot of the people that I trust have blogs on their websites that do go into the in-depth reasons behind treatments.

Shawn O'Hara: I guess that's a whole other issue on that.

Jo Shay: AI is probably going to change everything for us. Even before-and-after photos, I don't trust before-and-after photos. I never post them. Even if I'm taking the photo and I can see the difference between the before and after, it's just too easy to edit photos to look better than they are. So I don't trust before-and-after photos at all. I'm very skeptical myself on treatments, so if I haven't seen it, I don't trust it.

Shawn O'Hara: It's that very complex.

Jo Shay: Yeah, it is.

Shawn O'Hara: As you've gone through this journey in your practice, what have you learned along the way? What would you tell yourself looking back at the beginning?

Jo Shay: Oh, that's such a good question. I think the thing that I would share with myself, in the beginning when I went to school, like I said, it was a very broad program. So we learned nails and waxing and things that I didn't have a passion for necessarily. I'm not a nail artist, that's not my thing.

I think if I were to go back and tell myself what to look forward to, it would be the continued education, that there's always something to learn, some new technology, new awareness of treatment outcomes, that's really exciting. And that I do have the ability to structure what I do around what I really love, and I can leave the aspects of the industry that I don't like for the people who really love that.

Again, I think coming up in an era where we were a jack of all trades, we did everything, it was really hard to understand that I could make the choice to just focus on skin. And now 25 years in, I get the opportunity to do that, which is quite exciting.

Shawn O'Hara: And that'll change too with newer treatments, new technologies. New everything coming along.

Jo Shay: You know, even the microneedling for hair loss, that's a newer one. I wouldn't say that's necessarily in the skin realm, and yet it is. The advancements and development in that have been phenomenal, and I'm very excited about that. That's my new favorite treatment to offer. But treatments change consistently, and that's part of what's fun about it, you're constantly having to maneuver and learn, and I love that aspect of the industry.

Shawn O'Hara: I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was getting into more of trials and so on, and peptides and all sorts of things, and the effect that that will have on all of us. That's all new tech.

Jo Shay: Yeah. It's very cool.

Shawn O'Hara: Thank you, Jo. This has been fascinating. How can people contact you and reach you?

Jo Shay: Either through my website, which is thenestesthetics.ca, or through Instagram, I'm @the.nest.aesthetics. Or they can give me a phone call. I am pretty much always available for email, text, or any of the above.

Shawn O'Hara: Great, and we will put all of that into show notes.

Jo Shay: Thank you.

Shawn O'Hara: My guest today has been Jo Shay, who is the owner of The Nest Aesthetics here in Victoria, BC. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Jo.

Jo Shay: Thank you for having me.

Shawn O'Hara: And that's a wrap.

Show Notes

The Nest Aesthetics, Victoria, BC

Website: thenestesthetics.ca

Instagram: @the.nest.aesthetics