NATURAL BEAUTY

Nicole Farsalas got her start in the hospitality business but she was always more interested in skin care. After moving around the country for her husband’s job in finance, she landed in Boston, where she attended aesthetic school. She started working in the salon industry and felt at home.

“I really enjoyed it. It was like hospitality, but I’m glamming people,” Farsalas says.

A few years later, Farsalas, who grew up in Streamwood and now resides in Oak Brook, followed her husband home. It was then she decided she wanted to open her own business, which she started in her basement or on location in clients’ homes. Things took off from there, with a hiccup due to the pandemic.

“I started getting busier and busier, so it was becoming successful. I got into a salon suite right before COVID and before I could open everything was shut down,” she says. “All this new product I had paid for, and I thought, ‘This is not good’.”

But she did have a website and an idea suggested by a client that she think about marketing her own self-spray tanner. She worked with a chemist that she knew in Boston and started selling her own branded tanner online. Social media influencers and bloggers pick up on it (they really liked it) and spread word to their followers with photos and videos.

When she reopened her salon, the online attention brought her a rush of new clients and she quickly outgrew the space and looked for more. The search led to her opening GloUp on 16th Street in Oak Brook, a full-service salon where she and her team provide hairstyling, makeup, and specialized spray-tanning and skin-care services.

“During COVID I noticed that a lot of my clients started breaking out from the mask, and I initially went to school because I studied the skin, so I said I wanted to have skin care as well,” Farsalas says. “I linked up with someone that worked in pharmaceuticals, and she suggested I create my own brand of medicalgrade skincare products. I now have medical grade skincare line, the at-home tanning products and then the full-service, in-person salon.”

“We offer that simply because I really care about skin, and I only use medical grade. I didn’t want to sell something that I wouldn’t use,” says Farsalas.” The important part is our solution is organic, paraben-free, and never tested on animals, and it’s actually edible. It’s incredibly clean.”

Farsalas says everyone wants to be like naturally tan, especially for special occasions, but they want to protect their skin as well. Date nights, weddings, housewives who need a brief getaway with their girlfriends and want to look their best are all reasons clients come in for hair, makeup, and tanning.

She also offers private parties and events on Sundays when the salon is closed. She wants to cater kids’ parties for girls where they can get a little bit of makeup, curl their hair, and do a little fashion show.

“We can go on site, too, but we think it would be a nice space, like a destination so the moms don’t have to like clean up so much,” she says. “That’s something new that we’re working on because not many other salons do that.

“We’ve also done a makeup class and we had a bartender teach the ladies how to make martinis. And then we taught them how to do a smokey eye. and it was a huge hit.”

GloUp salon is located at 1600 West 16th Street, Unit 16 in Oak Brook, 630-659-9477, glouplifestyle.com