Holding My Breath: Tanya Chernova on Women Permission and Selling Skincare Product

Tanya Chernova learned early that if everyone around her was happy, she was safe. At fifty-two she is unlearning it.

"As Long as Everyone's Happy, I'm Safe"

Tanya Chernova learned the rule early, and she can still say it in a single line.

"As long as everyone's happy, I'm safe."

A Forty-Year-Old Woman in a Teenage Body

She was twelve when she started working her family's front desk and fourteen when she got her esthetician's licence. The clients were grown women and they told her everything.

"I was a forty-year-old woman in a teenage body, because I had to relate to women and all their insecurities, and they tell you everything. They'd give me their hands and say — ugh, so awful, I'm this, I'm that. Don't look. Don't touch."

The Practice She Was Not Permitted to Have

Her mother had been a dermatologist before the family came to Canada at the end of the seventies, and could not get a medical licence here. So she opened skincare salons instead, then a school, and built a business out of the practice she was no longer permitted to have.

"She's like a shark at a goal. If that goal has to be reached, it's at every cost. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day."

Selling a Product She Hadn't Arrived At

By twenty-seven Tanya was selling her mother's invention on shopping channels around the world, an anti-ageing product launched the same year as Botox.

"I was twenty-seven years old, telling forty-year-old women about facelifts. Look how smooth my skin is. I'm twenty-seven. No shit, my skin is smooth. I was selling a product I hadn't even arrived at."

Choosing Herself at Thirty

At thirty she left. The company had just passed a million dollars in sales. She was burnt out, and the vision she was selling was no longer hers.

"I don't care how much money this company is making. I have to choose my health. I have to choose myself."

Her mother did not understand the decision, and said so.

What Women Needed Was Permission

Ask Tanya what the fourteen-year-old thought those women actually needed and she answers reassurance, fast, the way you answer a question you've been asked before. Twenty minutes later she takes it back.

"I think what they needed was permission. My mother had to sit down with women and say — look, your husband buys three-thousand-dollar golf clubs. You can spend two hundred on something for you. Permission is what women need. Permission to speak at the meeting. Permission to make a mistake."

She stops. "Including permission to breathe."

The Nicest of the Nice

Which is the one she is still working on, at fifty-two, in a career built on being the warmest person in the room., in a career built on being the warmest person in the room"

"I'm the nicest of the nice. But you know what nice means? It means I'm constantly holding my breath. Adapting to everybody else."

I'm Rewiring It

The problem was never the kindness. It is the arithmetic underneath it.

"When you grow up under authority, the belief is: as long as everyone's happy, I'm safe. I'm rewiring it."

Then, quickly: "You can't put this on my website, though."