About the Academy
The salon teaches the school.
Celegant Braiding Academy is the training arm of Celegant Hair Edmonton, a professional braiding salon, and Celegant Beauty, a beauty supply store for Black and natural hair. All three share one address in Edmonton.
That matters more than it sounds. The techniques we teach on a Tuesday afternoon are the same techniques being used on paying clients in the same building on a Saturday. Our standards for tension, sectioning, scalp care and consultation are not theoretical. They are the standards our own clients are served to, every week.
Who we are
We are 100% Canadian-owned, women-owned, and Black-owned. That is Celegant’s own long-standing statement about itself, and it is the reason the business exists at all: Edmonton had a large, growing community of people with Afro-textured hair, and very little professional infrastructure built specifically for it.
Today the business runs three things from one address:
- Celegant Beauty, a beauty supply store carrying around 445 products for Black and natural hair, from brands including Mielle Organics, Cantu, Shea Moisture, Aunt Jackie’s, TGIN, Camille Rose, ORS, As I Am and African Pride.
- Celegant Hair Edmonton, a professional braiding salon offering protective braids, twists, cornrows, crochet and locs. The salon team is made up of over 8 experienced stylists and professionals, serving over 150 clients a month.
- Celegant Braiding Academy, the education arm, and the reason you are on this page.
We are listed in the Black Business Edmonton directory, an independent community organisation.
Teaching started here in 2024, inside Celegant Hair Edmonton, where experienced braiders were training newer ones on the salon floor. It became Celegant Braiding Academy, with its own curriculum, cohorts and certificates, in 2026.
Why the Academy exists
In Edmonton you can train for almost any beauty career. Not this one.
The largest beauty college in the city teaches no Afro-textured hair curriculum at all. The nearest dedicated Black-hair school in Alberta will not admit you without a hairstylist licence number, which means a complete beginner cannot start. Everywhere else, the options are a $59 online video where nobody watches your hands, or a one-day workshop that gives you a taste and sends you home.
So the people who most want this training, beginners, self-taught braiders, newcomers who have braided at home for years, licensed stylists who were never taught textured hair in their diploma, parents of textured-hair children, have had almost nowhere to go.
The Academy is our answer to that. Ten weeks. 60 supervised contact hours. In person, in a real salon environment, with a beginner welcome on day one.
Dr. Tina puts it more simply. “I have always wanted to do two things: build businesses and teach. I have been braiding clients since 2016 and running my own salon since 2015, and the part I enjoyed most was never the chair. It was watching someone who could not braid at all turn into someone clients ask for by name. The Academy is that, made into a program.”
Meet your instructor
Dr. Tina
Lead Instructor
Dr. Tina is a Master Braider, the Lead Instructor of Celegant Braiding Academy, and the Resident Hair Expert at Celegant Beauty and Celegant Hair Edmonton. She is an experienced braider and loctician, and an experienced wig maker and wig and weave installer. She opened her first salon in 2015 and has been braiding clients since 2016. By her own count she has braided more than 3,500 people over ten years and has taught more than fifteen braiders.
That first salon was Celegant Enterprise in Malaysia, which she built with her husband into a combined beauty supply store and salon. The couple stepped back in 2023 when they relocated to Canada.
She holds a BSc in Management with Multimedia, a Master’s in Human Resource Management and a PhD in Human Resource Management. She lectured at university level and worked as a social science researcher before moving to Edmonton, and has published long-form articles in human resources and the social sciences. She taught wig making publicly on YouTube through the pandemic, on a channel that has since passed 2,000 subscribers.
She is a working practitioner, not only an owner. She teaches the Academy programs personally at Unit 316, in the same building as the salon, with a co-instructor alongside her in every cohort.
- Master Braider
- Experienced braider and loctician
- Co-owner and Resident Hair Expert, Celegant Beauty and Celegant Hair Edmonton
- Braiding clients since 2016, and running her own salon since 2015
- PhD in Human Resource Management
- Master’s in Human Resource Management
- BSc in Management with Multimedia
- Former university lecturer and social science researcher
- Experienced wig maker, and wig and weave installer
- A working braider at Celegant Hair Edmonton, not only an owner
- Published author of long-form articles in human resources and the social sciences
Dr. Tina teaching in the training room. 
Running the salon: the pricing and booking side she teaches in the Empire Blueprint.
How Dr. Tina teaches, in her own words
“I have known two things about myself since I was young. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I wanted to be a teacher. I was teaching my classmates at school, and I never stopped. I went on to a BSc in Management with Multimedia, then a Master’s and a PhD in Human Resource Management, and I lectured at university level and worked as a social science researcher. But I teach from experience rather than from theory. Every point I make comes with a real example, and nobody leaves my classroom having only watched.”
“The lesson that shaped how I train came early. When we opened Celegant Enterprise in Malaysia, I hired an experienced braider. She could braid beautifully. What she could not do was take on the standards of the salon: the way we consult, the way we handle a client, the way we finish, so that no client feels she has been served by a different business depending on who sits behind her. After a few months I had to let her go. Then I hired two aspiring braiders who knew very little but genuinely wanted to learn. Within six to nine months they were working at eighty to ninety per cent of my own standard, and people looking at the finished work could not tell it was not mine. When I asked them what made the difference, they both said the same thing: the way I teach.”
“That is my method, and it has not changed. No two people learn the same way. If I can work out how someone learns, I can change my pace, my language and my examples to suit them. Some students need me to slow right down. Some need the work broken into smaller pieces. Some are quick and want to be pushed. Different approaches, the same standard at the end. And I still love the craft itself. When a student tells me a client complimented her braids, that is the part that keeps me going.”
There is always a co-instructor. Every in-person cohort is capped at eight students and taught by two instructors, so nobody spends the session waiting for a pair of hands. Dr. Tina chooses the co-instructor for each program from the braiders working under her who specialise in that style. We do not publish their names, because the person teaching a given cohort can change.
Credentials disclaimer. Celegant Braiding Academy issues a professional skills certificate on completion of its programs. This is not a provincial trade certificate, an occupational licence, or a government-recognised credential, and the Academy is not an accredited or government-approved institution. For the authoritative position on hairstyling certification in Alberta, see Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training and the Restricted Activities List, both linked from our FAQ.
Read the ten weeks before you decide anything
The full schedule, the tools list, and what you will be able to charge for.
How we teach
In person, hands on, on real heads
Braiding is a hand skill. You cannot learn tension from a video, and nobody can correct your grip through a screen. Every one of our seven in-person programs is taught in the room, at Unit 316, with an instructor standing beside you.
The one exception is deliberate: Certified Salon Business Professional: The Empire Blueprint is a recorded video course, 100% online and self-paced, because business systems genuinely do work that way. Everything else is in person.
Beginners are the point, not an exception
Foundations has no entry requirement. If you have never braided anyone’s hair, you are exactly who this program was built for. We start at safety and sanitation, hair and scalp science, tools and prep, then hand skills, then sectioning and parting, before you touch a single style.
The six specialty certifications have no entry requirement either. Foundations is our recommended starting point for beginners, not a gate. If you already braid to a professional standard, you can apply directly to any specialty certification that suits the work you want to be known for.
We name things properly
Knotless, feed-ins, stitch braids, boho, passion twists, faux locs, closures, frontals. Afro-textured. 4C. We use the words braiders and clients actually use, and we never use ethnic hair or difficult hair.
Heritage is the context. A career is the promise.
Braiding carries history, and we teach it with that respect. But you are not here for a history lesson. You are here because you want to be able to charge for this work. The Academy is built around that outcome: in ten weeks, you will be able to do this for money, safely and to a standard you can defend.
Four things we hold ourselves to
We think this belongs on an About page.
- We will not tell you what our graduates earn, because our first Foundations cohort has not finished yet. When there are graduate outcomes, they will appear on Student work with names and permission attached.
- We show you the curriculum, the hours and the price instead of star ratings. Review scores that a business publishes about itself are not evidence of anything.
- We will not imply our certificate is a government licence. It is a professional skills certificate. We explain exactly what that does and does not entitle you to in the FAQ.
- Every countdown on this site is real. The early-bird price is limited to the first 5 registrations, code FOUNDATIONS at checkout because that is a real limit, not a marketing device.
The site is deliberately built to look credible before it looks promotional.
Land acknowledgement
Celegant Braiding Academy teaches in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), on Treaty 6 territory and within the homeland of the Métis Nation. This land has long been a gathering place and a travelling route, and remains home to the nêhiyawak (Cree), Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Anishinaabe (Saulteaux), Nakota Sioux, Dene and Métis peoples, and to many other Indigenous peoples.
We teach a craft that carries the history, identity and skill of the people who practise it, and we do not take that lightly. We commit to walking alongside First Nations and Métis communities in the pursuit of equity and a fairer future, and to grounding our work in respect, in learning, and in real relationships with the Indigenous peoples of this land.
Come and see for yourself
We are a real, staffed, physical location: store, salon and classroom in one unit.
Celegant Braiding Academy
Unit 316, 8925 51 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB T6E 5J3
(587) 873-9331
Come and look at the room
Or read the curriculum first. Both are free, and neither commits you to anything.