The person holding the file
Aleksandra Bessonova
I would rather you knew where the standard came from than take my word that there is one.
What bothers me about this industry is how much of it is the same. Not the technique — the absence of any individual approach at all.
— and the individuality I mean is in how the client is treated, not in the nail art
Plenty of people talk about the work: how to hold the file, which bit, what speed. Very few talk about how to treat the person the work is being done to. Trust is not expensive these days — it is everything. That is the part I built this studio around, and it is the part I teach.
Where the base comes from
That is the year the foundation was laid, and every year since has been added to it — 2013, 2014, all the way to this one. I am still taking classes. A technique you learned once and never revisited is a technique from that year, not from this one.
Where the method was worked out
Not a weekend course. The city where this was developed, taught by people who stop you mid-motion and make you do it again. It is not a flattering way to learn. It is the only one I have seen hold.
Why I believe in retraining
She owned a travel company, and sold it. She became a director at a law firm, and was made redundant. Then she retrained as a cosmetologist and started again, at an age when most people would have decided it was too late.
I do not think she ever pictured herself doing facials. What I took from watching her is simple: it does not matter what you already know how to do — you learn anyway, because you never know which way life is going to turn you.
8177 Glades Road, Suite 210
Open every day, nine to five, by appointment. Three hundred five-star reviews in the first year. Every technician here is trained by me before she works on a client — not hired on a certificate, taught and then checked.
The standard is an hour and a half on short nails, and it holds because the order of work is fixed. Speed here is not rush. It is the absence of chaos.
“Why would I learn from someone your age?”
A fair question, asked often enough that I have an answer ready. Because the technique I hand you is one you can charge more for, and I can show you what it does to a price. Because three hundred people left five stars in my first year here. And because I learned this method recently rather than a decade ago and then stopped — which, in a craft that keeps moving, turns out to be the argument in my favour.
Teaching someone else’s team
A salon owner in Boca Raton asked me to train her nail technicians. Eight hours, six in the room; I taught five, since the sixth only does pedicures. They had been working their own way for years and were not thrilled that a stranger was coming to change it. The whole story, and what I teach →
What gets published here
Articles on this site are reviewed by me against what the studio actually does. Medical and chemical claims are attributed to named sources and kept separate from our own observations. We do not diagnose and we do not promise a risk-free result. Where something is unverified, the page says so instead of offering a plausible reason.
If you want to ask me something before you book, write. I answer these myself.
— Aleksandra