Talia Garcia Thought She Would Be a Doctor. Then Her Hair Color Was Too Fabulous.

Meet the Educators

In the salon in Old Town, the educator her student artists call Tosh teaches hair hands on with a student and her client.

Talia Garcia was preparing to become a doctor. Sports medicine, specifically. She wanted to be the one athletes came to when something gave out. Then she took a year away from school to be there to care for her grandmother, and somewhere in that year a friend finished cosmetology school and brought her along for a visit.

Garcia’s hair at the time was silvery white. She had done it herself. The instructors at her friend’s school looked at it, asked how, and did not quite believe the answer. “They were shocked that I could get my hair to that color,” she says. “They convinced me to do the whole program, and here I am.”

And, here we are at Aveda Institute New Mexico in Old Town Albuquerque, where Garcia, who goes by Tosh, is a cosmetology educator. Cosmetology at the institute covers hair, skin and nails, and Tosh teaches all three, but nails are where she lives: acrylic, hard gel, builder gel, the enhancement work that separates a manicure from a craft. She teaches lash extensions and body waxing, too. Nearly ten years in the industry, a stretch of it spent as an educator for professional product lines, and a running habit of signing up for one more class have left her with what she calls, “so many skills under my belt.”

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The story she tells about teaching is not about a technique. It is about taking the time to build your student’s confidence.

A student artist on the floor had lost his footing. He was new to the work, and a client’s hard feedback had landed on him the way it lands on anyone who is still learning, which is to say all at once. “You’re a student, so there are going to be times you’re not going to be confident,” Tosh says.

She did not send him back to the textbook. She sat down next to him. Then she did something most educators would not think to do: she volunteered her husband to come in and work alongside him, a second set of hands with no grade attached. She showed the student how to hold the file, how to build a proper manicure from the first step.

“From that one little sit-down, he is now more confident,” she says. “I don’t even need to go and check his work. I know he’s going to do a good job.” She pauses on it. “It was really huge for him.”

That is her method in miniature. Tosh knows that a classroom holds two kinds of learners, the ones who need to see it and the ones who need to read it, and she doesn’t choose between them. Theory first, at the table, out of the book. Then the tools come out and she shows them, one at a time. “It’s a mixture of textbook work and practical hands-on work,” she says, as if that were the simplest thing in the world. In a salon where student artists work on real clients, it is also the whole game.

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Ask her what she wants a student artist to carry out of her classroom and she does not reach for a skill. She offers her promise. “I want them to feel supported,” she says, “and to know that even if they leave my class not understanding, I’m always going to be there. Whether they’re still coming to school here, or they’ve graduated, or they’re veterans in the industry, I’m always going to be here to help in any way that I can.”

And for those of you looking to get started, she has some words of encouragement. “What’s holding you back?” she says. “It is such a fun industry, and it can take you far. If your heart is in it, jump in head first. Just do it.”