"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'"
— Toni Morrison, O, The Oprah Magazine (2003)
I was the girl who knew, early, that this was my only route.
My family's story starts with humbleness. Mine grew up on the opposite side of that, and it's the tension between the two that made me who I am. I was my mother's shampoo girl at fourteen years old, standing with her at the salon she worked at, watching her rewrite our entire trajectory one client at a time. I didn't have language for it then, but I was watching beauty work as something much bigger than beauty. I was watching it heal.
I got licensed in 2019 and I didn't wait around. I opened my first salon suite right after graduation and built outward from there: services, education, mentorship, leadership. But I need you to know something before you read another page of this magazine: I am not just an esthetician. I'm educated, I'm earth-loving, and I fell in love with wellness long before skin became my medium for it. I'm an all-around healer and a lover of people, with a deep love for science: how it works on the body, how we can biohack ourselves back to better, how healing is a system and not a mystery. Esthetics is where that love found its first home. It will not be its last.
Here's the part that turned my career into a mission: I have watched people I love live lives that cause them to lack a certain quality of life. I have watched people in the middle and lower class live a lower quality of life, not because they didn't care, but because nobody ever handed them the tools or the knowledge to take care of themselves.
That access has been withheld from certain communities on purpose.
Not by accident. On purpose.
And every time I teach, I'm not just teaching one person. I'm multiplying every person that knowledge will eventually touch.
I've also watched something happen inside my own industry that made me furious enough to build this. Talented estheticians, people who belong here, quietly assimilate into other industries because they believe it'll be easier over there. I don't blame them. I refuse to accept it as the only option. This industry isn't broken because the people in it aren't good enough. It's broken because nobody built the infrastructure to hold them.
So I built EPIDRM.
The name comes from epidermis, the outermost layer of skin. Foundation. Layers. Depth. Transformation. EPIDRM sits where education meets access meets community, and it exists to solve three things I've watched collide over and over in my own family, my own classroom, and my own treatment room: estheticians can't find or afford the education that would actually move them forward, this industry doesn't take estheticians seriously enough to invest in them, and the communities most locked out of the beauty economy are the same communities most locked out of quality wellness knowledge.
This founding issue is the first real proof of what I mean when I say infrastructure. It's the Provider Series, spotlighting the professionals actually doing the work with skill and integrity. It's the beginning of a community built for the people this industry has underestimated. And it's my invitation to you — reader, provider, future founder — to be part of building it with me, not just watching it happen.
Those who belong in this industry will try to assimilate into others because they believe it's easier. We can make this easier and better. We just need to build the infrastructure. That's exactly what EPIDRM is here to do.
Detroit is where we begin. The world is where we're going.
With love, science, and a little bit of chaos,
KaTera Marché
Founder & Editor-in-Chief, EPIDRM Mag
Director of Education, IMBeauty
Owner, EPIDRM