Michelle Lujan is wary of appearing “woo woo,” as she described it. An esthetician who opened a new salon in Point Reyes Station last year, Ms. Lujan likes to use stones and essential oils like orange blossom and clary sage during her sessions with clients, if they are open to it. But people can also come for waxings, whether brow, body or Brazilian, and brow and eyelash tinting. They are free to decline the use of oils and stones during the facial. In other words, “There’s no pressure to come in and have me put a crystal on you,” she said.
Ms. Lujan, who has worked as an esthetician for almost two decades, opened Iosis—which in alchemy referred to the last phase, when a metal finally turned to gold—in the Creamery building about six months ago. She uses natural and organic oils and creams to nourish the skin without harming it. But her salon also seeks to provide a little pampering. “People are really coming to relax and be tended to in a sweet way, but also they’re looking for results with skin,” she said.
Ms. Lujan worked for years in spas in San Francisco, but the work left her unfulfilled. At one spa, in Noe Valley, she waxed almost all day long. And because she worked for someone else, she had no control over the products she used on her clients. She eventually burned out.
She moved to Bolinas in 2003 and to Point Reyes Station about five years ago. Since then, she has mostly focused on raising her two children, now 7 and 2.
Neither of her parents were business owners, but a friend who works as an anointing aromatherapist in Penngrove had a significant feminine influence on her. “She’s a woman who created a business and lives her life through expressing herself authentically. She wasn’t tripped up on, ‘What will other people think of me?’ She totally came from her own inspiration, and she demonstrated that to me.”
Balancing the business with raising two kids with her husband, Jonathan Gavzer, an acupuncturist and “functional medicine” practitioner, has been difficult. “Yet I’m carving the time to devote time to my business,” she said.
At Iosis, Ms. Lujan will greet you with a handshake that feels startlingly soft, Tulsi (or holy basil) tea and a small, artful arrangement of snacks. (Blueberries, chocolate and cashews last Tuesday afternoon.)
As the sole employee, she does it all: facials, waxings and “microcurrent treatments,” which use a gentle electric current on the skin that Ms. Lujan said can curb acne and make the skin appear more youthful.
She likes doing everything, so her work is never monotonous. During facials, when clients are often so relaxed that they do not speak the entire 90 minutes, she feels like she’s taking care of herself, too. Waxings are a little more animated, mostly because she tries to distract her clients from the discomfort, “so we’ll have lively discussions and chats and we laugh.”
There can be a delicate line between pampering clients and providing services that assume there is something wrong with you that needs fixing: hairy legs, pimples, wrinkles.
“I’m always trying to figure out how to articulate this,” Ms. Lujan said. “With what I’m doing, I wanted it to be a place where women in particular could come get their beauty needs tended to, but not have it be some kind of thing where we’re tending to this because there’s something wrong with you. It’s more: come in and get nourished and feel good.”
In the midst of my facial, Ms. Lujan worked the sebum out of my face. (In other words, after hot steam shooting from a steel probe opened up my pores, she popped my pimples. This is also optional.) I thought back to a late afternoon a few months ago when I bought a bottle of wine from the Palace Market. The cashier asked for my I.D., then looked at my face. “You look like you’re 14,” she said. I didn’t ask if she was referring to my youthful appearance or my acne.
Sometime after the sebum extraction, there was a kind of weighty green stone flecked with mica lying near my heart and Ms. Lujan massaged my face, which had never happened to me before. (Had I ever been to a salon before? she asked. I had a manicure, once, I replied.)
Her fingers softly glided across the symmetry of my jawline and cheeks, where tension is sometimes stored, gently working in Vitamin C and peptides, which are supposed to make the skin more supple. Before applying essential oils, her hand hovered above my nose, inviting me to smell a whiff. She told me later that sometimes the oils give her profound dreams.
Was it woo woo? Did I feel like I needed fixing, or hope that I might leave with blemishes absent from my cheeks? For the rest of the day, I kept looking in the mirror. The oils left a scented sheen on my countenance. The smells pulled me back to the pair of hands that had tended to my face for an afternoon, and each time I took a deep sniff, I felt myself relax.
Iosis is located in Suite 3A at 11431 Highway 1, in Point Reyes Station. For pricing and spa options, call Michelle Lujan at (415) 497.1605.