Since December 2025, Gemma Collins has hosted eight events on Forumm: and become one of the organisers we love to watch closely. Few build events as diverse or alive as she does, and turning a ticket into a real human connection is exactly what we’re here for. So we sat down to meet the person behind them.
Troon has a golf course known the world over. It has a yacht haven. And, according to the people who actually keep score of these things (Tripadvisor), it has something that quietly sits above both: a tarot reader called Gemma Collins. She spent 48 years in South Ayrshire before making Glasgow home, though Troon still claims her as its own.
Ask Gemma who she is, and you won’t get a job title. “I’m an interesting, misinterpreted character who truly believes she’s a goddess,” she says, and she’s not joking. Or ask her business coach, Wendy Harris, to describe Gemma and you get one word, ‘Maverick’. The more time you spend with her, the more the description starts to fit.
Gemma is a lot of things at once. She’s the founder of Just Ask Tarot. She’s a certified Wim Hof Method instructor teaching breathwork and cold-water resilience. Before all that, she was an award-winning travel agent, a renewables entrepreneur, a luxury-goods sales specialist, and a housing board member of eight years. It’s a CV that looks scattered on paper… until you notice the single thread running through every chapter.
That thread is tarot. It’s been her compass since she was a child, long before she understood what it was. So it’s only fitting that Gemma suggested we tell her story in four parts: Air, Earth, Water and Fire, the four elements at the heart of the tarot itself.
It’s genuinely how she reads life, including her own.
Gemma’s story starts with a curiosity that had nowhere to go.
“From very young, I knew I didn’t learn in a normal way,” she says. School didn’t fit her. The normal world people talked about bored her. But at ten years old, on trips into an indoor market near her local leisure centre, she found a fortune teller, and something clicked.
“I used to get so much comfort and joy, because I used to think: this woman understands me.” She spent her pocket money on readings and kept it a quiet secret. What hooked Gemma were the stories: the characters, the history, the symbolism, the sense that there was far more going on beneath the surface than anyone around her seemed to notice.
An Aunt gifted her a set of tarot cards when she was aged thirteen, a deck she still reads with today. And the name of the business she’d build decades later came from her own mother, who, whenever young Gemma was stuck on a decision, would tell her: “You’d better go and consult your tarot cards.” Just ask tarot.
What began as comfort became a lifelong education. Gemma threw herself into it: numerology, symbology, world religions, art history. She’s travelled to India nineteen times. She’ll tell you she can trace tarot in all religions, through Michelangelo, through the Sistine Chapel, through the carvings on historic buildings, and the four seasons, if you know how to read the code.
“Nobody ever came into my life and taught me anything,” she says. “My brain’s always so hungry and so curious.” Only later would she put names to what she’d been doing all along: reading people, profiling them, understanding almost instantly how someone makes a decision.
She just got there first, through the cards.
For a long stretch of her life, Gemma channelled that instinct into something very earthly: selling.
Her first real love was travel. She trained as a travel agent back when it was a genuine profession: memorising flight schedules across Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Manchester; writing tickets by hand; spelling everything down the phone in the phonetic alphabet. She became, by her own account, a top-selling, award-winning agent, winning trips to Brazil, Boston and New York.
And she was happy. “That was the last time I was properly happy,” she says of those years: a team, a uniform, a structure, and a craft she was brilliant at. “I was using psychological profiling the whole time. Who’s the decision-maker? How do they decide?” The same skill she’d built through the tarot, now closing sales in a row of five agencies on a Glasgow street where nobody could afford to lose a customer.
When the internet arrived and hollowed out the high-street travel trade, Gemma reinvented herself. She qualified as a domestic energy surveyor and built a successful solar-panel company, spotting the opportunity in renewables years before most. She moved into infrared heating in 2013, “too early,” she admits, a recurring theme for someone who tends to see round corners before the market’s ready. Then came luxury goods, running sales and marketing for hot-tub and swim-spa brands. Alongside it all, she gave eight years of service to the board of Ayrshire Housing.
“Sales is a process. It doesn’t matter what it is,” she says. Underneath the solar panels and the swim spas and the boardroom papers, she was always doing the same thing she does across a tarot table: reading the room, market, and person.
The conventional world hasn’t always made room for her. She’s sat across the table from more than thirty employers in recent years, and none of them quite led to the right fit, so she stopped waiting for permission and built her own thing instead.
Then, in 2019, the ground gave way.
In a single brutal stretch, Gemma lost her mother, lost her best friend, and came through a long and gruelling court case. The masking of the “fabulous, wonderful” version of herself, which she could switch on with her lipstick and her hair done, stopped working. “I just felt terrible,” she says simply.
What she reached for was cold water. This was before the wellness world had caught up with it. She walked up to a waterfall one day, not entirely sure how she felt about anything, and a stranger (ex-army) showed her how to get in safely and talked to her about endurance. She started dipping. And for the first time in a long time, she felt something lift. “I felt like Wonder Woman. There was no feeling like it.”
But the cold, she’d discover, was only the doorway. “The magic doesn’t actually lie in the cold,” she says. “It lies in the breath work.” She travelled to Wim Hof’s house to learn the science first-hand, was captivated by it, and qualified as an instructor in 2023. She learned what the breath does to the nervous system, the blood, the mind and how it could reach the parts of herself that nothing else could.
Gemma is open about the fact that she still weathers dark spells, what she calls the “dark cloud”. It comes, and she has learned how to move it. Breathwork is how. She credits the method with carrying her through her darkest chapters and giving her a way back to herself.
She believes that the breath belongs to everyone; the key to the soul, and it’s completely free, something we do every single day. And she’s clear on how it fits alongside everything else she does: “The Wim Hof Method is there to keep me better for the tarot.” Regulate the water, and she can do the work.
If Air is how Gemma thinks and Water is how she survives, Fire is where it all comes alive: the reading room, the stage, the performance.
These days, that stage is most often the Barras, Glasgow’s most famous market. Getting a dedicated spot there took some determination, and she loves it. It’s a place she built for herself, one reading at a time.
When asked how she makes a stranger feel seen: “I get into the character of the High Priestess,” she says. From there, she reads who’s in front of her and decides which of the four Queens she needs to become to meet them. The goal is simple: “I make them feel like the only, most special person in the whole wide world.”
That care shows up in the small, practical touches, too. Gemma records readings on her clients’ own phones. A video or audio keepsake they can return to weeks or months later. It’s partly the salesperson in her, who knows people don’t always absorb things the first time; partly the healer, who wants them to have the guidance to hold onto. It’s also why she can offer a money-back guarantee. Her confidence comes from the belief that a reading isn’t about predicting a fixed future, it’s about handing someone the clarity to choose their own. “It’s their choices that create their destiny,” she says. She leaves every client on a high note, whatever the cards show, because she’s lived every one of those cards herself.
That instinct for the stage is behind her boldest project yet: Howling at the Moon, a night that pairs live tarot with stand-up comedy, staged, deliberately, on the full moon. For Gemma, that timing is the whole point. She finds the days leading up to a full moon genuinely hard, and she’s far from alone, so the plan is to run the night of every full moon as a way to talk openly about mental health, mood, and the strange pull the lunar cycle seems to have on so many of us. Awareness and a good laugh, in the same room. She’s building it with comedian friend Victoria Rose: “I want to give Victoria a platform to flourish,” she says. And how does she want people to feel when they walk in? “Welcome. And magic. Everything.”
And what’s next is the part that lights her up most. Gemma can see a future beyond one-to-one readings, which can be exhausting to give day after day. She’s dreaming of Just Ask Tarot as a live show: an audience, anonymous questions, a filtered feed of the room’s real worries up on a wall, and Gemma answering them live through the cards. A Late Night Love Line for the soul, part guidance, part theatre, part group therapy. A tour. A sold-out Barrowland Ballroom, one day.
“I’ve done it in Troon without even thinking about it,” she says, referring to topping the rankings. Just Ask Tarot holds a TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice award, a badge reserved for the top 10% of listings worldwide, and sits at number one in its category in Troon. “If this is the goal, then I have to own it.”
Spend time with Gemma, and you start to see why the four elements suit her so well. She contains all of them, in constant motion; the restless mind, the practical grafter, the deep well of feeling, the creative fire.
The weather changes, the moon cycles, the tides turn. And she’s learned, across a whole life of reinvention, how to move with them rather than against them.
For all the reading she does for other people, the message she keeps landing on is one she’s really telling herself: the answers were never somewhere else.
“If you’ve got the energy, the skills and the tools,” she says, “then don’t go looking elsewhere. The magic’s already within you.”
She’s spent her whole life proving it.
