Meryl Smith Lawton

Beauty Pioneer | Rose Piotrkowski her salon, a business she started building when no one knew what a cosmetician did.

Get it?

I’m sitting in a chair with my eyes sealed shut with some kind of blinding chemical and an odd tingling gel spread over my eyebrows. A form of torture, you ask? A cruel and unusual interrogation technique? A bizarre ritual?

Well, kinda. I’m doing what people have done for centuries. I’m suffering to make myself beautiful.

And “suffering” is a strong word. I’m in the hands of Rose Piotrkowski, who, as one of the first cosmetologists in Edmonton, truly embodies the title “beauty professional,” and has fortunately kept my suffering to a minimum during my appointment.

We talk while my eyelash dye works its magic.

“When I came to Canada, cosmetology was still in diapers,” she says with a hint of Polish still in her voice. Rose grew up in Poland and, not long after the war, her family decided to get the heck out of the communist state and figured Canada would be a better place to grow and prosper. “We waited five years for the papers to come through,” she says. And in that time she went from being an impatient 15-year-old, ready for a new adventure, to a fully trained cosmetologist looking to start her career in her new country.

Except in 1962, her new country had never heard of cosmetology. “I went to the labour office for help for getting a job when we got to Edmonton,” she recalls. “The girl behind the desk asked me what I did. I told her cosmetology. She flipped through her book and came up with nothing. I told her I was a cosmetician, which is another word for what I do. Nothing. Nothing for esthetician either. She was stumped.”

Which was surprising and concerning for Rose, as cosmetology had a long and glorious history in eastern Europe, and she studied at the best school in Poland. In Poland, cosmetologists worked hand in hand with dermatologists, and skin care and esthetics was a huge industry.

But not in Canada. “The closest anyone could come was doing manicures in beauty salons,” she says. Which was a significant step down from working with doctors.

So Rose took temporary work until she heard through the immigrant grapevine of an actual esthetics shop in Edmonton. Rose was elated. She managed to make contact with an Austrian woman who had a similar background to Rose, and who did indeed own an esthetics shop on 124th Street. But she was closing it because Edmontonians had no interest in esthetics. Rose bought her business for a song and called it La Beauté, confident that she could attract clients, despite her predecessor’s failure.

And attract she did. La Beauté became a great success, bringing in all the Mrs. So-and-Sos behind the big names in Edmonton. Her clients were the wives of doctors and politicians and entrepreneurs, the who’s who of Edmonton’s social sphere in the 1960s and ’70s. And ’80s and ’90s and 2000s. Rose’s career has spanned over four decades, and her reputation has become that of the best of the best. She still caters to some of the same families who came to her in the 1960s.

But introducing Edmonton socialites to the world of cosmetology and esthetics was a slow process. “Manicures were common back then, so I’d just happen to mention to my manicure client that I could shape her brows,” says Rose. “Or I’d see their poor kid with acne and drop the word that I could help.”

Rose built her business on the philosophy of educating her clients, teaching them how to shape their own brows, how to cleanse their own skin. Which seems counterintuitive to any good businessperson, giving away trade secrets, but Rose has been busy every day of her 40-something year career, so it seems to have worked.

And Rose is about to share some of her trade secrets with me. She’s wiped the tingling gel from my eyebrows and cleansed my eyelashes and it’s safe to open my eyes. I see bold, dramatic brows in the place of my usual weak blondy-red ones and long blue-black eyelashes fringing my eyes.

Wow. I’ve got eyes. Who knew?

And now Rose is going to show me how to shape my brows, to draw even more attention to my peepers. She uses her tweezers like a ruler to show me the proper boundaries of the brow line — in a straight line from the corner of my eye to my temple on the one side, and from the tear duct to the centre of my forehead on the other. She immediately sees that I’m a twiddler. That is, an eyebrow fiddler — a terrible nervous habit, I soon discover, one that wrecks the symmetry of my face. I vow to stop there and then. You don’t want to get Rose mad at you for twiddling your eyebrows.

And then she begins to pluck. “You never wax your eyebrows,” she says firmly. “Waxing your brows weakens the skin and gets rid of the tiny baby hairs so it doesn’t look natural. Get it?” she says. She often says “Get it?” to punctuate her point. And when she’s done, I really do get it. I have the fanciest brows I’ve ever seen on my face.

But don’t go trying to book an appointment with Rose. She’s arranging to retire soon and already has more clients than her time allows.

But thanks to Rose and her few contemporaries, the esthetics and cosmetology industry is alive and well and mainstream in Edmonton. It’s people like Rose who have raised skin care to an artform and who have shown us the importance of a well-groomed brow. Now, you certainly don’t have to be a Mrs. So-and-So to partake in the beauty industry, and you can have bizarre beauty torture experiences in spas across the city.

And I’ve got three weeks to a month before I have to deal with my eyebrows again.