A nurse’s passion has brought her Queens home business to New Hyde Park’s Jericho Turnpike.
Nurse practitioner Lyubov Mashkabov, who goes by Linda, started her med spa, The Beauty Cellar, in her Forest Hills basement in 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I always had a passion for the beauty industry,” Mashkabov said, but had gotten swept up in home healthcare work as a nurse while raising a family. At the urging of a friend, she decided to take a leap of faith, sign up for some additional classes and start offering Botox treatments to friends and family in her basement.
“I just decided let’s see how it goes,” said Mashkabov, who has nursing degrees from Adelphi University and Long Island University. “We created this nice little office space in the basement. My patients really loved the home-based setting. They felt like it was just more intimate and discreet.”
Soon The Beauty Cellar offered much more than just cosmetic procedures. Mashkabov took courses in and began to offer regenerative platelet-rich plasma treatments, sexual wellness counseling and IV vitamin drips. Now the practice offers over a dozen services, including weight loss and anti-aging treatments, laser hair removal and a range of facials, including vampire and geneo.
Mashkabov said as a nurse she focuses on informing her patients about all treatments and procedures she carries out and also offers blood work to identify vitamin deficiencies for patients, something she said she has found is critical in addressing health issues that have gone untreated.
“I’m all about educating,” Mashkabov said. “I love teaching my patients about why we’re looking at these values, why this is important. No one just gets an injection and goes home.”
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After operating out of her roughly 200-square-foot basement (where the business gets its name) for about four years, she felt she had outgrown the space and needed to expand.
“It came to a point where I had two, three people waiting on our couch at a time,” Mashkabov said. Now, she said, her 1,600-square-foot New Hyde Park location is so busy that her receptionist was shocked to find herself faced with a crowd during the first few days of opening.
“All our patients from Queens are following us to Long Island and the New Hyde Park community and everyone in Long Island is getting to know us,” she said, adding that she even has a few celebrity clients. “Everyone is just so happy we’re in the neighborhood. They are all saying that they needed a place like this here.”
Though the business is now out of her family’s home, her children and husband still find themselves heavily involved, a point of pride for Mashkabov.
“It’s like we built this little home in New Hyde Park and my family’s a part of it,” she said. “My husband helps me manage the place. My oldest son, he’s like a social media manager. My second oldest, he does the website.”
“I love the space we created,” Mashkabov added. “We really went all out. I wanted a very homey feeling. And I think that’s what we have here.”
The Beauty Cellar is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday.
