As a child, Aya Restrepo was regularly compared to her sister, whose lighter skin and blue eyes were praised for their beauty. “They would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re getting pretty’ or ‘You’re getting there,’” she recalls. “I looked at beauty as a form of power. What makes people pay attention to this person versus that person? What makes it so powerful?”
She became “obsessed” with people’s features and their clothing. When she asked her mom whether she could become a fashion designer, her mom replied, “You can always be a fashion designer, but I need you to get a job that’s going to make you secure money.”
Heeding that advice, Restrepo, who moved with her family to Ann Arbor from Amman, Jordan, when the Gulf War broke out, graduated from the University of Detroit Mercy as a physician assistant, then went on to Johns Hopkins’ Physician Assistant Surgical Residency Program. She was recruited by the University of Michigan for cardiac surgery.
Along the way, she got married and had two children, finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the grueling hours required for cardiac surgery. She moved into aesthetics, training at Skin & Vein Center, performing multiple “mini facelifts” a day across three offices in metro Detroit.
A divorce forced her to once again reassess her life and open her own practice in a one-room rental at Cosmo Salon Studios in Troy — one month before the pandemic forced her to shut down. After years of building her business, she now runs her med spa, Glam Jail, from an 11-room building in Birmingham. The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to helping clients break free of societal expectations.
The rooms in Glam Jail — which have names like the Cloud Room and Feather Room — are individually decorated with an intricate mobile, luxe wallpaper and intriguing art. “Art changes the way people feel,” Restrepo says. “If you’re stressed out, you actually age.”
Restrepo is hyperaware that the quest for beauty can affect young women. “I have to tell a lot of [them] that not every line is a bad line — we need contours in our face,” she says. And if you want “your lips to enter the room before you do,” you’re in the wrong place. “That’s not the point of why we do lip filler. It disappoints a lot of people, but I ethically feel better sending them home.” She also makes a point of celebrating aging by hiring women who are long past the expected retirement age, including her 82-year-old project manager.
In addition to opening her med spa, Restrepo has also fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a fashion designer. In February, she hosted an invitation-only fashion presentation that debuted her eponymous capsule collection of made-to-measure overcoats and jackets, sculptural silhouettes made from Italian double-faced cashmere, velvet, French tweed, and chenille.
“When I turned 40, I thought, ‘What are you waiting for?’” she says.
Restrepo went to Italy to visit factories and choose fabrics, aiming to create a line that was both timeless and a little quirky, with small runs to keep it unique. After Restrepo takes measurements and places orders, pieces are made in Italy and delivered eight to 10 weeks later. “It’s high end and hand finished,” she says.
The first collection, which she named Silk Petal & Stone to represent that women can be both soft and the rocks in people’s lives, ranges from $3,700 to $7,500 and is available to view at Glam Jail by appointment.
This story originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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