Prof. Ramani Arsecularatne

The turning point came almost by accident. While her daughter was in school, Ramani’s fruit carvings and floral arrangements, made originally for family occasions, began attracting attention and admiration. She recognised an opportunity and acted on it: buying craft supplies between school runs, placing her own newspaper advertisements and building a client base from nothing. She began teaching in rented halls, and her course offerings expanded quickly: floral arrangement, fruit and vegetable carving, bead jewellery and soft-toy making. Encouraged by her husband, she took up costume-jewellery design after short courses in Bangkok and Singapore, and by 2001 her students were staging annual exhibitions such as Saree Splendour at the Hotel Galadari.

A training trip to Japan alongside her husband introduced her to Japanese floral arrangement techniques, which she brought back and introduced to Sri Lanka for the first time. At the peak of this first venture, she ran close to a hundred arts and craft classes nationwide and staged large public exhibitions at the BMICH.

What distinguished her from other small entrepreneurs of the period was her response to competition. As her own students began opening rival classes and the market grew saturated, she did not defend her existing position. She moved beyond it, repeatedly funding overseas training with her own earnings and returning each time with a new specialisation. This pattern of continuous reinvention, sustained across more than three decades, is central to the longevity of the enterprise she went on to build.

Ramani identified early and accurately a gap in the Sri Lankan market: the country had beauticians, but no formally trained aestheticians. She pursued advanced qualifications in Singapore and at the Christine Valmy International School of New York, becoming one of the first professionals in Sri Lanka to formalise cosmetology and aesthetic therapy as a distinct discipline. Her professional certifications went on to inform the national cosmetology curriculum and at one stage carried enough international recognition to support skilled-migration applications to Australia and Canada.

Despite the commercial value of that credibility, she declined to monetise it improperly, maintaining strict standards around certification throughout her career, a decision that preserved a reputation for integrity that continues to define the institution today.

More than 40,000 students across Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh trained under the Ramani Arsecularatne International Academy of Cosmetology, Arts & Crafts. A significant portion of her work was explicitly aimed at economic empowerment: she provided free training in cosmetology and beauty therapy to war widows and members of marginalised communities, enabling financial independence for people who had few other pathways to it.