Zoe Rye

I came from school straight into Level 2 as I got the grades I needed. I chose MidKent College as at my school, the beauty course offered wasn’t as detailed and you had to choose another subject to go with it,  but I just wanted to focus on beauty. 

I do have to travel for a while to get here - about half hour on the train and then half hour walk, but my timetable is 3 days per week in College so I don’t have to make the journey every day. 

So far we’ve covered waxing, manicures, pedicures, facials and make-up. Make-up has been my favourite part of the course so far.  I want to progress onto the Level 3 at MidKent as I feel you need to do that to back up the Level 2 and then I’m going to go to London to do a specialist make-up course. I want to do weddings, bridal make-up and make-up for photo shoots. 

My tutors have been really helpful. I think it’s easier to learn at College, but harder at the same time. Because it’s only 3 days a week, we do get more time to study on the days that we’re not in, but also there’s a lot to fit in on those three days.  

We do have to do a lot of written work and that surprised me – I didn’t realise we’d do so much course work! For every unit that we have, there is coursework to do as well as practical. 

I’ve been surprised by how deep we go into things, so when we started to make-up, we had to learn about different bone structures. I thought we’d go straight into make-up but it’s a lot harder than people think. 

We’ve also learnt about skin types, hair types, contraindications, skin reactions and all of that. 

We can bring clients in for different units which makes it easier to learn. 

If you’re thinking about studying Beauty Therapy, I’d say do it! It’s more informative than people think – you learn a lot more about your body and it’s all focused on what you would do at work, but there is a broad range of jobs you could get from doing the programme.