Routine trips to the beauty therapist led to cancer diagnoses for two Harold Hill women.

Julie Rosaman and Jean Clubb believe Maria Hayllar of salon Heavenly may have saved their lives when she sent them to the doctor about marks on their faces.

It started when 82-year-old Julie went to the Petersfield Avenue shop for a facial last year.

Maria, 39, told the Recorder: “Julie came in and I said: ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but from the training I’ve done that doesn’t look quite right. For your own peace of mind, you should go to the doctor.’

“She had skin cancer.

“Now she’s had all the surgery and reckons we saved her life.”

But the modest 39-year-old said she was just doing “what you’re trained in” as a skincare specialist.

Grateful Julie said Maria had been “absolutely lovely” when advising her to get the mark looked at.

“I thought it was caused by my glasses rubbing,” she said.

But she followed Maria’s advice and visited her GP, and after a hospital referral the raw spot on her nose was diagnosed as skin cancer.

A year down the line, the cancer is in remission – but Julie knows it could have been much worse if the disease hadn’t been caught early.

“If it hadn’t been for Maria I would have gone on another year with it,” she said.

Months later, with Julie in treatment, Maria was surprised when the same thing happened again.

Over the summer, 70-year-old Jean Clubb walked into Heavenly with a similar problem.

“I’d noticed an abrasion a long while ago on my face,” said Jean, of Charlby Crescent. “It used to bleed but I didn’t take any notice.

“Then I went to Heavenly for something and Maria said: ‘What’s that on your face? You need to go to the hospital.’

“So I went to Queen’s Hospital and it was a form of cancer.

“My friends used to say, ‘you can’t notice it’ – but Maria did.”

Now with both women making good recovery, Maria said she hoped to encourage other people to pay attention to their skin.

“With the older generation sometimes people aren’t so concerned about marks on their faces,” she added.

Julie agreed that people needed to speak up about embarrassing problems as they could be dangerous.

“We need people like Maria not to be shy about talking about it,” she said. “If she hadn’t come out with it I don’t know how far it would have gone.

“It’s the first time anything like this has happened to me,” she added.