Head Mei-Cha Trainer Dawn Cragg Awarded Prestigious M.B.E. Award

We are delighted to be able to congratulate Dawn Cragg, a founding director of l.P.T.l. and Master Trainer for Mei-Cha International, on getting awarded the prestigious M.B.E. (Member, Order of the British Empire). She was given this honor for her outstanding work in developing Medical Tattooing as a service to the Health Care Industry. Dawn was presented the award from Princess Anne at the 2010 honors ceremony, and Lin McKinstry, founder and president of Mei-Cha, was delighted to be there to see her receive this richly deserved honor.

About Dawn Cragg

(From The Therapist, Spring 2010 Issue)

Although Dawn was primarily responsible for starting I.P.T.I. she has always continued in her role as a professional Beautician.

She started her lifetime of work within the cosmetic industry as a counter girl in the cosmetics and hair department of the Margate store of Timothy \White & Tylor. Here she first showed her entrepreneurial flair by offering to apply the DIY perm kits she sold to her customers during the day at their homes after shop hours. Later she spent a year as Au pair in Paris, returning fluent in the French language. This was followed by a spell training in the BBC make-up school after which she became the youngest area distributor for a doorstep cosmetic sales company - a role she continued as importer and distributor when she went to Hong Kong for a few years in the early sixties. Also whilst she was there she established a multinational nursery school and later, with a Chinese friend, she set up the first Beauty School in the then Colony.

Returning to the UK, her life descended into the mundane. Secretarial work for a managing director given to outbursts of violence against the office furniture followed by various periods of employment as a shop assistant, as a veterinary assistant, as a night club cloakroom girl and as a tallyman. Such work provided no real challenge and consequently Dawn undertook Adult Education training and also further training in Beauty Therapy.

The Beauty Therapy training proved pivotal in her career when the school principal declared her intention of retiring. Realizing that she could do a better job she bought the school and with just 12 students moved to Retford into a disused infant school which had outside mini-toilets and a heating system consisting of row ex-military coke stoves. However, 12 months and row premises moves later, she had become the principal of the then largest private Beauty Therapy school in the UK with 70+ vocational students housed in a Nottinghamshire teacher training college.

With this success new opportunities presented themselves and in quick succession she had established schools of Hairdressing, Film, theater and TV Make-up and \Wig-making and finally a training studio for developing special effects for both film and theatre. Students arrived from Asia, Australia and also from the Steven Spielberg studios in America and it became a mark of the standard of training that within 5 years former students of the school were directors in charge of make-up and hair styling in the national theatre companies of five Scandinavian countries.

In 1983 Dawn came across 'new' skill - that of micropigmentation or, as she now prefers, Cosmetic Tattooing. Realizing the potential of a permanent cosmetic technique that could disguise scars and 'replace' eyebrows that had disappeared due to over frequent plucking and which at the same time would eliminate a personal time consuming daily chore, she booked herself on a training course in Paris.

At the time the technique, quite literally, simply involved using white sewing cotton to tie a sewing needle into the split end of a short bamboo stick! With absolutely no regard to hygiene or disease transmission the needle was then used to implant tattoo pigment in the skin to be treated. From this basic beginning has developed the complex and technical micropigmentation industry with sophisticated machines capable of preventing cross infection and able to fulfill many additional tasks beyond the simple cosmetic procedures that had only been possible previously.

Since her initial training in Paris, Dawn has undertaken additional training in the UK, in Asia and every year attends training seminars in the USA. Realizing the tremendous personal and psychological benefit that treatments such as scar concealment, recreating areola following mastectomy operations and, in suitable cases, being able to treat alopecia and vitiligo could have, she has spent much of her time encouraging and training specialist hospital nurses enabling them to help patients who had suffered disfiguring accidents or surgical operations. It was for this ongoing work that Dawn was awarded the M.B.E. with the citation Medical tattooist, for services to Healthcare.

Further information :
www.dawncragg.net