Venus Moon started with me, long before I knew it would become a life's work.
I was always a child who needed her hands busy. Sewing, knitting, kneading the shoulders of anyone who'd sit still long enough, making potions from rose petals at the bottom of the garden. Nobody taught me any of it. It just felt like the most natural thing in the world, and still does. That's the thing about this work: it has never felt like something I learned so much as something I remembered. As though my hands knew it before I did.
I was born on a Friday - Venus's day; with my Venus and Moon both in Cancer, the sign of water and feeling and care. Venus for beauty and softness; the Moon for instinct, for what moves under the surface. Which is more or less how I work. The name was never really a choice.
Hi, I’m Sophie!
Fifteen years in, I've trained in more than I can neatly list. Some of it came from Belfast's spas and clinics; some I went looking for, like the weeks in Goa learning the Ayurvedic arts of Abhyanga and Shirodhara. Travel teaches you things a course can't - mostly that the old traditions were never as separate as we think.
Along the way I've studied acupressure, womb massage, Brazilian lymphatic drainage, danced and performed as a belly dancer, and currently deepening my studies through lunar yoga. My aromatherapy training came from Amanda Brady, who taught the very first Neals Yard Remedies aromatherapy course in Covent Garden. I'm a Reiki Master, advanced in reflexology, and trained to work with people through pregnancy, fertility and cancer. Somewhere in amongst it all, I took a Higher National Diploma in Hair and Beauty Management too - finished it with distinction across the board, and the Jill Black Award to go with it
I've trained and worked in five-star spas too, deepening my facials and learning the full-body rituals: scrubs, wraps, warm and cold stones. (I'm particular about those stones, for the record - handpicked basalt from Baja and Arizona, and pure marble for the cold.)
Lush first hired me as a spa therapist, for a Belfast spa that, as these things go, never quite opened. I stayed anyway, working the shop floor with my hands deep in the products I already loved and training staff in massage for customer demos. It suited me completely. I've always been drawn to things made fresh, by hand, with real ethics behind them, and that's never left me.
I've worked on film and television sets too, looking after crews through long, demanding shoots - the kind of work that reminds you how much a good treatment matters when people are running on empty.
The long way round
Why I work the way I do
Here's the part that matters most. I live with chronic health conditions myself. I know what it is to be in a body that won't cooperate - tired in a way sleep doesn't touch, sore in ways that don't show, talked about rather than listened to. It taught me to slow down. To adapt without being asked. To meet a body where it actually is that day, not where it's supposed to be.
So if you come to me worn out, in pain, or just tired of explaining yourself - you won't have to. I get it more than you'd think.
What to expect
Your first visit is unhurried, and led by you. We'll talk through what you need, then I'll shape the session around it. There's nothing to prepare and nothing to get right - just come as you are, and let yourself stop for a while. No two bodies arrive the same, and no two treatments are