Skin Image owner and skin therapist Nina Quan.
A rural Northland beauty clinic has shown it can mix it with the big players in the industry, nailing third place in a nationwide competition.
Paparoa's Skin Image Clinic took out the third spot in the Best New Business of the Year category of this year's Beauty NZ Awards.
This puts the clinic, which has been open less than a year, alongside the best salons in the country.
Owner and skin therapist Nina Quan hopes her win will encourage more salons to become members of the New Zealand Association of Registered Beauty Professionals (NZRBP), which ran the awards themselves for the first time this year. Beauty salons and clinics do not have to be registered in NZ.
Ms Quan came from Vietnam in 1981 as a refugee. She said the association was working hard to improve the professionalism of the industry and to foster adherence to national codes of conduct and ethics to ensure safe and hygienic practices.
She said going through the award process forced her to reflect on her past achievements and use that to decide how she could practise what she was passionate about and what she wanted for her skin clinic.
"Writing it down consolidated my vision of wanting to create a small reputable clinic that delivers efficacious treatments using proven technology and products to help women achieve healthy, beautiful skin. Once this was clear in my mind, the rest was simple."
Ms Quan has a BSc from Victoria University of Wellington majoring in biochemistry and genetics. After a few years of working and doing her OE, she went back to study and gained an MBA from Otago University.
She then embarked on a marketing career for the NZ Dairy Board which eventually took her back to Vietnam where she was marketing Anchor milk and Anlene to the Vietnamese.
After the Dairy Board, she joined Unilever and began working in the skin care business. It was here that everything came together.
"A passion for skin care was ignited, my science background, my nutrition background from the Dairy Board and my intrinsic cultural understanding of beauty."
After many years of working overseas in large corporates doing product development and marketing skin care products, the time was right for her to come back to her adopted country, settling in a small town and working directly one-on-one with clients.
"I'm loving sharing my knowledge of skin and my aim is to help women 'age younger with beautiful skin'.
"That's why Skin Image is very unique in that it's not a typical salon that paints nails and does make-up, nor is it a cosmetic surgery. But it's somewhere in between where treatments are not pretty and fluffy.
"The treatments are results driven without the invasive surgery or the cost of cosmetic surgery. And I'm able to do this with my science and beauty background combined.
"Most beauty therapists don't have the skin science background and most doctors don't appreciate the finesse of beauty."
In May this year she went to Melbourne to learn cosmetic tattooing, in August she had refresher training in collagen induction therapy (or dermal needling). She plans to attend a course on skin lesions in November.
Ms Quan is proud of her achievement which has topped off a busy period - for the past nine months she has renovated the old premises she took over in the main street of Paparoa and introduced a very different business model, one that focuses on skin health.
She plans to add this winning model for a new clinic she is opening in Waipu this November.