Crazy Sexy Life

By Virginia

I soap my hands up with cleanser and hover over Stephanie’s face. “Go on, get in there!” says our teacher, Miss Jenny. “You won’t hurt her.”

I press on Stephanie’s shoulders and start stroking up her neck and over her chin and cheeks. That shoulder move is key; we learned that if you touch your client’s face right off the bat, they’ll jump out of the bed. Next I start circling into the folds around Stephanie’s nose and all around her forehead until she’s covered in a thin layer of foam.

After spending four weeks with Stephanie as classmates at Beauty U, I know an assortment of random facts: She has a one-year-old nephew. She curses her oily skin. She just had two dates with a new guy, but there was no spark.

But suddenly, she stops being Stephanie (aunt, skin-obsesser, dater of spark-less dudes) and becomes just a face — an upside down series of planes and curves that I need to cover in cleanser and wipe clean with a cotton pad. It’s like when you say a word too many times in a row and suddenly can’t remember what it means.

Per Miss Jenny’s instructions, I repeat the cleansing and apply toner. When I finish, she opens her eyes and is Stephanie again. We laugh.

“Remember, we’re promoting relaxation,” says Miss Jenny. That means you want your client to totally unwind and let their guard down. But if Stephanie and I were training for any other profession, I wouldn’t have much reason to scrub the underside of her nose. And I’m learning that it’s a weird feeling to be responsible for someone else’s relaxation when you’re feeling anything but that yourself.

By the way, I know you didn’t ask, but here it is: I have a college degree. And I’ve spent the last six years as a pretty successful freelance writer. I’m telling you that because it tends to confuse people when I explain that I’m in a ten-month night school program at my local beauty school, training to become a certified esthetician. When you say “beauty school,” everyone thinks of that song in Grease and associates beauty school with something that high school “bad girls” like Rizzo and Frenchie do because they aren’t smart enough or rich enough to go to college.

Everyone is not completely wrong. A lot of my Beauty U classmates didn’t go to college and currently work service industry jobs (waitress, daycare worker, home healthcare aide). They’re hoping an esthetics or cosmetology license will be their way out and up. In the current recession, there are also a fair amount of women who are out of work or looking to bring in extra income. (By the way, Stephanie is a guidance counselor.)

I’m not a career changer, though. Like most women, especially, upper-middle class 20-something women, I’m a beauty consumer. I’m enrolled at Beauty U because I want to know exactly what I’m buying when I shell out for a facial, a haircut, or a tube of lip gloss.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, American consumers spent almost $85 billion on beauty products and services in 2008. That’s an awful lot of eye shadow and manicures. I didn’t keep receipts, but I’m guessing I chipped in at least $1,200 of that—between three or four haircuts ($120 a pop, plus products), five or six mani-pedis ($40 each, plus tip), an occasional bikini wax ($50, plus tip), and a whole mess of goodies from Sephora, Whole Foods’ Whole Body section, and my local CVS. Depending on your own personal beauty routine, I either sound high maintenance ($120 for a haircut? It’s New York City), like a slob (only two bikini waxes a year!? Sorry, they hurt like hell), or average, which is how I like to think of myself. And as a just-about-average beauty industry consumer, it made me sad to learn that while we’ve been dropping all that cash, the average salon worker earns just $8 to $15 per hour…including tips.

No, they are not sweatshop wages, and yes, there are super fancy stylists earning much more. But even high-end estheticians earn an average of $15 per hour, 40 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, which is only $31,200. Before taxes. And these are jobs that don’t offer much in the way of health insurance, retirement plans, or paid vacations.

Plus, that doesn’t take into account the human costs. Like, what happens when the cleanser I lathered all over Stephanie isn’t subjected to pre-market safety testing? Just ask Blog Posse member Stacy Malkan: Since the FDA doesn’t require beauty products to disclose all of their ingredients or prove they’re safe, most end up containing gender-bending chemicals, and carcinogens , which salon staff absorb for hours, days, and years at a time. Consumers absorb a steady stream in smaller doses; I apply at least nine products before I leave the house every day.

But what about the other hidden human costs? How does a 13-year-old feel when her mom brings her in for a bikini wax? For that matter, how do any of us feel about ever-more-constricting beauty standards that demand perfection from our every (hairless, invisible) pore? The beauty industry has successfully blurred the line between indulgence and necessity so that treatments that were once viewed as luxuries—manicures, facials, bikini waxes—are now viewed as essential. And while our self-esteem takes a hit, I’d argue that this quest for perfection degrades salon workers too. These are the people we pay to get up close and personal with the parts of our bodies that we hate the most. No wonder most of us prefer not to make eye contact.

Once I started thinking about all the ways women pay for beauty—with our wallets, self-worth, and health—I kind of couldn’t stop. I don’t think we should have to give up on our favorite beauty indulgences. Honest! I just called to confirm yet another $120 hair appointment. But I decided to go to beauty school and spend 600 hours learning to excavate pores, apply makeup, and wax bikini lines in order to get a better understanding of what we’re all really paying. Check out beautyschooledproject.com to see what I’ve uncovered so far.

Virginia is a writer by day, beauty school student by night. She owns 14 tubes of pink lip gloss and hates to brush her hair. You can visit her at her blog .

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