My Story

Before I ever held a pair of tweezers, I was the one on the treatment table. That part matters, so I am putting it first.

I have never been a fan of body hair. It traps odour, it dulls the skin, and in certain neighbourhoods of the body it simply does no one any favours. That is my honest opinion, and I have a great many of those. For years my answer was a razor and a sink full of regret, which works right up until the morning it doesn't.

The turning point came when a friend in an Esthetics program asked me to be her practice model. One wax and I was a convert for life. Then her school closed, and I learned the thing nobody warns you about: once you have been smooth, going back feels unthinkable, and finding someone who will wax a man properly sits somewhere between difficult and mythical. I spent two long years looking like a Yeti who had given up on himself.

Eventually I was slipped a phone number, the way these things travelled in the early 2000s, for a discreet gentleman downtown who quietly performed Brozilians for men. You did not Google him. You knew someone who knew someone. My first appointment introduced me to a register of pain, and frankly a little blood, that I would not wish on a tax auditor. Had I believed it would always feel that way, I would have walked out and stayed hairy forever, but I trusted my esthetician, kept the five-week rhythm he prescribed, and sure enough the pain dimmed and the skin made its peace. After a few of those sessions I would be so comfortable that I would half doze right there on the treatment table.

I tell you all of this so you know the truth up front: every service I offer, I have first received on my own skin. I was the guinea pig, the one who volunteered first, so my clients can be certain that I know exactly what skilled hands feel like, and exactly what bad ones cost you. You are getting the version I would book for myself, always delivered from the position of offering the very best of these services.

Here is the part that makes people tilt their heads. I have spent roughly thirty years in IT. Systems, logic, problem-solving, the quiet pleasure of making a complicated thing finally behave. I never left it. I still do it. To this day I run two careers side by side, and I keep a wall between them you could bounce a coin off.

That wall is deliberate. When I am in IT, I am all the way in IT. When I am in the clinic, the laptop is shut and you have my complete, unhurried attention. Neither world is permitted to bleed into the other, because both of them deserve to be done properly. As it happens, thirty years of chasing down impossible bugs is excellent preparation for a craft that rewards patience, precision, and an unreasonably steady hand. The follicles, unlike the servers, at least stay where you put them. The skills genuinely transfer: precision, accuracy, patience, and repetition are exactly the qualities that make for a top-tier professional in either craft.

This one still makes me grin. Around 2010, my long-time esthetician, the same discreet gentleman who had rescued me from my Yeti years, mentioned he was thinking about retiring. I must have looked stricken, because he immediately followed it with a pitch.

He knew I worked in IT. I told him, plainly, that I knew nothing about aesthetics, or skin, or any of it. He waved that away. I am a fire inspector, he said. This is no different. You do it on the side, and you might find you love it. And when I retire, I will hand you every one of my clients, so you walk into a business that already has people coming through the door.

He offered to mentor me, and given our close friendship over the years, he was confident I would make an excellent protégé. Encouragement like that, from the de facto male esthetician in downtown Toronto, was genuinely empowering.

It was, I admit, a hard offer to refuse. So I told him that at the very least I would go earn my waxing student certificate and see how it sat. I had no idea what I was about to walk into.

Here is something I genuinely did not see coming: this industry is so overwhelmingly built around women that, as a man, I could not get through the front door of a single school.

I spent over a month calling academies, nearly every day. Rejected, again and again, for one reason. Schools told me flatly they were an all-female school, which was not actually true. Some hung up mid-sentence. More than one asked, with real bewilderment, why would you even want to do this? It is a woman's job.

This was the 2000s, and I could not quite believe a man was being shut out of aesthetics, yet all that rejection taught me something the schools did not mean to teach. If it was this hard just to get in, the market on the far side had to be wide open. There were almost no male practitioners, the services were designed almost entirely for women, and my own technician had told me he was so relentlessly busy that doing this on the side was well worth it. Every door that slammed was, in its own backhanded way, confirming there was money and demand waiting behind it.

At one point I had had enough and called the Human Rights Tribunal to describe exactly what was happening. They listened, told me I had a very strong case, and suggested I file a formal complaint so they could sit the top schools down for a serious conversation.

I thought about it. Then I thought about it differently. Why force a roomful of reluctant schools to train men, when I could simply learn the craft myself and quietly corner a market nobody else was bothering to serve? That, precisely, became the plan.

I found a school in Brampton. Before they could reach for the receiver, I slipped in a question: why do schools have such a hard time training men? I see your ad everywhere, so maybe you can train me.

To their credit, they were honest. Their student body was mostly women, many from cultures where being in a room with a man, let alone practising hands-on techniques on one, simply was not possible. Since students learn by working on each other, most schools just did not want the complication.

That actually made sense to me. So I offered a deal: put me in a room on my own, let me learn on my own, and I will bring my own models to practise on. They said yes. After a solid month of dial tones, that was the door that finally swung open.

The waxing course itself was short, six hours total, two hours a day across three days. By the end the other students had thawed toward me, and the instructor was impressed enough to offer me a seat in the full diploma program. Apparently I had a knack for the thing nobody wanted to let me try.

I told the instructor the truth: I was already working full-time in IT during the day, so I could only take the diploma part-time. It took me two years, but I finished it, practising out of my own home on basic waxing while I studied. I had never done anything remotely like this, and at the start it was a real challenge. Then it clicked, and I was gone. I loved it.

The instructor must have seen something, because when I finished she offered me a second program, an advanced medical aesthetics course, which I spent the next nine months completing. When that was done, she made one last offer: come open a salon with her, inside her clinic. I thanked her warmly and said no. I had always meant to build my own.

Here is the twist that quietly settled everything. The mentor whose looming retirement set this entire adventure in motion, the one who promised me all his clients? He changed his mind and decided not to retire after all, which, naturally, I applauded, since who else was going to do my Brozilian? So I inherited exactly none of his clients. I did become his delegate whenever he travelled, which handed me more seasoned clients to work on, and they were warm and supportive of my work, though they always returned to him the moment he was back in town. I built MAIR Care from absolute zero, one smooth back at a time. He finally did hang up his tweezers, mind you, thirteen years later, right at the end of 2025. Some people just cannot quit a good thing. I understand the feeling.

My framed certificates tell the tidy version of this timeline, a Wax Technician certification in 2013, a Diploma in Aesthetics and a Medical Aesthetics certificate by 2015. The real version is the one above: a month of slammed phones, a room of my own, my own models, and two careers I flatly refused to let interfere with each other.

Once I started actually performing these services, two things hit me at once.

The first was that there is a genuine finesse to this work. A good wax or a clean laser pass looks effortless, and that effortless is built from a great deal of practice and a very steady hand. In 2017 I went deeper still, completing my training on SharpLight's FORMAX platform and qualifying to operate DPC-IPL technology, the engine behind modern laser hair removal. I wanted to understand laser down to the wavelength, not just point it and hope.

The second thing stung. I realized how thoroughly I had been fleeced as a client over the years. I had spent a small fortune on laser at clinics perfectly happy to sell me far more sessions than I ever needed. Once I was on the other side of the machine, giving honest, well-judged treatments myself, the difference was night and day. The results were excellent, the clients were thrilled, and nobody was paying for sessions that did nothing.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about this industry: it is largely unregulated, which means it is not always run in the client's best interest. So I decided, again, to be the exception. I give honest, trustworthy treatments that actually deliver. I work as efficiently as I can to get you there, and I never drag things out to squeeze an extra dollar. It turns out that when you operate with integrity, you do not just build a client list. You build loyalty, and a surprising number of those clients become real friends.

I ran laser for many years, and I loved it, but I kept noticing the same thing as a client neared true smoothness: the hair holding out at the very end was almost always white, grey, or platinum, and laser simply cannot see it. Laser chases pigment, and that hair has none. There is exactly one method that handles it, and it happens to be the only technique recognized as truly permanent: electrolysis.

I was not trained in it, yet my own laser clients kept begging me to learn, so I could finish the job in-house rather than send them across town to a stranger. After a couple of years of steady nagging, I gave in and signed up for a course.

Then, just like the aesthetics program a decade earlier, I walked straight back into the same wall: finding a school that would train a man. This time I was lucky enough to reach Lucy Caruso of the Caruso International School of Electrolysis. She told me, plainly, that she does not usually train men. I convinced her anyway. To this day she reminds me what an impression I made, still introduces me as one of her best pupils with a natural talent for this service, and she would go on to be pivotal in endorsing me for the FCEA board. She remains one of my staunchest supporters.

In 2021 I earned my Diploma from her school and the title of Certified Electrologist, covering galvanic electrolysis, thermolysis, and blend. That same year I added a certificate in non-invasive electrocoagulation and completed manufacturer training on the Silhouet-Tone Evolution 7 Sequential HD and in thermocoagulation. Electrolysis is slow, meticulous, one-follicle-at-a-time work, and it suits me down to the ground. It also works on every hair colour and every skin tone, which makes it the most inclusive tool in the room and the heart of the gender-affirming and pre-surgical work I am proud to do.

If you are going to do a thing, do it all the way. In 2024 I sat the certification examination of the Federation of Canadian Electrolysis Associations (FCEA), in front of their board, and earned the designation Certified Professional Electrologist (C.P.E.). Later that year I completed the Apilus Masterclass, all eight modules, through Académie Dectro, the people behind the Apilus xCell Pro I use today.

That same year I was honoured to join the FCEA board, and I have served through 2025 as a Board Director, helping shape the standards of the very profession that spent a month hanging up on me. Life has a sense of humour. So do I.

I have not stopped there. As I write this, I am building an extensive, interactive study guide for the Certified Professional Electrologist (C.P.E.) and Certified Canadian Electrologist (C.C.E.) examinations, so that fellow members walk into that board exam prepared to pass with flying colours. The schools once made it hard for people like me to get in. The least I can do now is make it easier for the next electrologist to get through.

In all my years in this industry, I have heard of only a handful of other male aestheticians. You could count them on two hands, and after COVID, fewer still. Even so, I have never believed clients choose me simply because I am a man doing this work. They choose me because the service is honest, the results are real, and they can trust me. That, more than anything, was the mark I set out to hit, and somewhere along the way I hit it.

In 2026 the work spoke for itself. MAIR Care was named the #1 Best Electrolysis Clinic in Toronto and the #2 Best Aesthetic Clinic in Toronto, and the website even picked up an Awwwards Honorable Mention. Apparently I am also something of a name on ChatGPT and Reddit, which came as a real shock and a genuinely cool surprise. It even tickled my IT side to discover I am reasonably well known in the male esthetics world, or something like that. For a fellow who started out hairy, skeptical, and bleeding through his first Brozilian, that is a strange and wonderful place to land.

The truest proof, though, lives in my appointment book. Some clients drive up from Buffalo and cross the border to see me. Others come from as far as the Bruce Peninsula, stay overnight in the city, and book their longest treatments while they are here. A few have moved abroad entirely, and when they fly home to visit family, they make a point of scheduling time with me, because, as they put it, the services elsewhere are just not the same. I will happily wear that feather in my hat.

My beginnings were humble and, on at least one memorable afternoon, painful. That is exactly why I am so set on giving my clients the opposite: honest advice, expert hands, total discretion, and a fair price, in a space that is clean, calm, and genuinely welcoming to everyone.

My clients run the full range: young and old, male, female, non-binary and trans, straight, gay, bi, and fluid. Everyone comes for the same thing, the results they want and the service they need, from someone who will walk the journey with them. I do a great deal of pre- and post-operative work for gender-affirming surgery, for clients managing folliculitis, and for those facing pilonidal cysts, where an ingrown hair settles into the skin near the tailbone, turns into a painful infection, and can lead to surgery. I have clients who never once wore a shirt in public, or shorts, or a tank top, and now they do. It is humbling to realize that something as small as hair removal can genuinely change how a person sees themselves, and how happy they are in their own body.

It does not matter who you are or where you came from. If you have come to see me, you will be treated with the utmost care and respect, and no one here is ever told this is a female-only service and sent home to the razor. Running ten minutes late? We will make it work. Need to cancel at the last minute because life handed you something more important? I understand completely, because it usually has.

I am still in IT, still smooth, and still, after all these years, determined to help people improve their self-care and the way they feel in their own skin, one honest, unhurried appointment at a time.

Come see for yourself. Worst case, you fall asleep on the table. I do.