I was a trainer for Mina Henna Brows in the South West, but I didn’t renew my contract at the beginning of the year. The main issue is that henna is not distributed by any of the big professional companies with all the infrastructure that we take for granted. Working with smaller, new start up companies is fraught with difficulties, especially with Brexit. The service isn’t consistent because they’re not established and experienced. Stuff happens.
Now with Covid, many companies have switched to online training which can be awesome but may not suit everyone.
I still use Mina, I’ve not been tempted to switch to any of the other companies because they are less experienced with henna. I like the product and it’s worked very well for me as a therapist, but I think it’s tricky if you’re not a master brow technician.
If you’re not confident, henna shows up every imperfection in your work which is very demoralising. To be good at brows you need to do loads. When I first trained in advanced brow shaping in 2013, I put myself on Groupon and did something like 52 brows for about £6. When I switched to henna it took me a year to feel confident and I have a large established client base. Now most of my brow work is henna, so it definitely paid off for me.
I haven’t seen any complaints online from established, experienced therapists - all the complaints that sounded awful, when you look into them, the expectation was unrealistic. For example I saw one complaint from a training school that had presold training places before opening an account with a henna brand. When their opening account order didn’t arrive “next day” they were furious, but they were holding their small, non VAT registered supplier to a higher standard than they were operating to themselves.
At the time that this happened Mina were amazingly supportive to me - they’d given all their trainers notice that they were low on stock (Because one trainer had cleared them out unexpectedly and they were waiting on new stock) and I was caught out. Mina sent me enough henna to run my training course, which totally saved my bacon, and the kits followed on later. There are always 2 sides to every story.
