Lindsey Ta.
World Champion. Founder. Master Artist.

2016 World Microblading Champion. Over 15,000 clients transformed. Founder of Microblading LA, named Yelp’s #1 permanent-makeup studio in the US.

In 1978, a hundred and fifteen of us fled Vietnam on a fisherman’s boat. The boat cracked in a storm. My family lived on a small island for three months while they repaired it.

When they set out again, they had no destination. Just open water. A Norwegian oil tanker found them and picked everyone up. My family didn’t even know what Norway was.

A year later, in a small town called Lillehammer, I was born.

My oldest brother opened the first nail salon in Valencia, California — forty years ago, when Valencia was still farmland. I started at sixteen. My family brought me from Norway to learn the trade.

But I missed my friends and went back. Here’s what nobody knows: I brought the skill with me. At sixteen, I got a job doing nails in the biggest mall in Oslo. Nobody in Norway was doing nails like that.

At eighteen, I came back to America for good. Built my own clientele. Was making ten thousand a month. Comfortable.

Then my brother called the whole family together to open the biggest nail salon in LA. I was the youngest of nine. I didn’t have a choice.

We opened a four-thousand-square-foot salon in Rancho Cucamonga. The business was a huge success. But working with family nearly broke me.

I was the youngest. No say in anything. Crying almost every day. I went to my father and said, ‘Dad, I don’t think I can do it anymore.’

I left with nothing. Started over from zero.

That taught me something I carry into everything I do: I know what I’m worth.

The reason I do what I do started with my own eyebrows.

At fifteen, my sister waxed off half my brows. It never grew back the same way. From that day on, I drew them in every morning. One day they’d look fine. The next day, angry. Or uneven. I never let anyone see me without them.

Years later, a nail salon owner in Hermosa Beach said, ‘Lindsey, you should do permanent makeup.’ I thought she was crazy.

My first class was at someone’s house. I practiced on a banana for an hour. The instructor lounged in her chair while I tattooed by myself. After, she said, ‘Good luck.’

The second class got me on a real machine. Brows, lips, eyeliner. That was the beginning.

The early days were brutal. One client every three weeks. I was doing nails and permanent makeup at the same time, driving between two salons.

My family thought I was crazy for leaving nails. But Roy said, ‘Stop doing nails. Do what you love.’ Then: ‘You have to share your work.’

I posted a ten-second video on Facebook — a girl with no eyebrows, then her new hair strokes.

My phone died twice that evening. Within days, I was booked from six a.m. to midnight. Ten appointments a day.

A year in, the first-ever world microblading competition was held in Amsterdam. I never intended to compete. Roy said, ‘You’re not doing it to win. You’re doing it for the experience.’

I flew there alone. During the competition, a crowd gathered around me. They started going through my tools, trying to figure out why I was getting that effect.

Then David Zhang — my idol, one of the judges — came to me and said, ‘You are going to win.’

I walked out with first place.

I didn’t know how good I was until that room full of strangers told me so.

We found a space on Ventura Boulevard that had sat empty for seven years. Nobody wanted it. We built it from nothing.

Bella Thorne posted her results on Snapchat and it went viral across multiple magazines. After that came Huda Beauty — we gained a hundred thousand followers overnight. Then the Allure features, the Refinery29 segments, royalty flying in from the Middle East.

But the moment that stays with me most is a woman who came in after surviving cancer. She had lost her brows. When I finished, she turned to her son and kept saying in Spanish, ‘Look what I have now.’

A year later, her son messaged me. She didn’t make it. He thanked me for the happiness those brows gave her in her final year.

That was ten years ago. I’m still here. Same location. Same standard.

“I know what it feels like to not have eyebrows. That’s why I do what I do.”