7 minute read
ARE WE PART OF THE PROBLEM?
ETHICAL BEAUTY By Robyn McAlpine
I have posted about this topic on several occasions and each time my inbox is always bombarded with the same questions- but how do I then get rid of fine facial hair? The peach fuzz?
It became evident to me that one of the major selling points of this treatment is to remove fine facial hair and give skin a smooth and fuzz-free feel, often undertaken prior to a special event so that the makeup artist has a “smooth base” in which to work on.
But hold up! Who said fluffy facial hair was even a problem?
It got me thinking that our industry is headed into murky waters when we’ve created an environment where fine, fluffy facial hair is now aesthetically unacceptable, and we need to remove it in order to not feel self-conscious.
One of my girlfriends even chimed into the conversation to say she’d recently become aware of having a hairy face. Now, I’ve known her for 2 decades, she certainly hasn’t gotten hairier in that time. But what has changed is the narrative around facial hair and how it’s suddenly unacceptable and aesthetically displeasing to have a fine layer of fine hair on one’s face.
How dare a collection of hair less than 0.03 of a millimetre in width, drain our emotional energy, take up space in our mental bandwidth and make us feel inadequate. I don’t think nature intended this hair to be under such scrutiny but here we are giving a fluff about it allowing it to dictate our level of self-esteem.
Why? Because someone, somewhere decided that bald facial skin was a measure of our self-worth?
But who is that ‘someone, somewhere’ making these decisions? No one reading this article of course, we got into the beauty industry to help people, not to make them feel bad!
But if we aren’t the ones making these ridiculous beauty standards, how do they get so much ‘airtime’ and how do these products and services that remove these now unsightly flaws, end up in our clinics and on our treatment menus?
Is it like in the movie The Devil Wears Prada? Where Miranda Priestly and her magazine entourage gather in a room to decide the next season’s fashion and trends that everyone will aspire to? Where they push a trend narrative to make everyone go out and replace their entire wardrobe just to keep up with what’s socially acceptable?
Is there an equivalent mastermind group that does this for the skin and beauty industry too?
I’m not sure there is just one person or one group we can point the finger at, that we can blame for the silly trends that have us all altering our skin and bodies so that we fit in…so I’m pointing the finger back at all of us!
Ouch! It hurts to think that we are part of the problem. Especially when it feels like there is someone else out there, starting these trends, highlighting insecurities to resolve them very conveniently with a seemingly simple beauty product or treatment.
And I’m not just talking about the treatment I talked about on my social media That just happened to be the catalyst for this conversation. It’s so much bigger than that.
It really just opened up the opportunity to talk about how the aesthetic, fitness, fashion, and beauty industry is infamous for creating a problem, and then magically coming up with a solution that we all buy into.
This creates impossible beauty standards and inadvertently our salons end up contributing to this when we use this kind of marketing mentality in our businesses.
Skin and bodies shouldn’t have to be changed to fit a trend. And any skin and bodies that don’t fit the trend shouldn’t be labelled as flawed in order to make a product or treatment solution valid.
Were taught in “marketing class” to tap into people’s pain points and give them the solution. But are we creating pain points out of nothing in order to sell a solution?
If we are choosing to make people feel inadequate to sell a product or a service, we’ve crossed a line and that feels pretty icky! When we begin to make people feel self-conscious in order to book in for a treatment (Or to sell a product) as an industry, we’ve failed.
But how do we know if we ourselves, in our own space with our own clients, are part of the problem?
And how do we make sure we are part of the solution to this style of marketing?
If there’s not a room full of beauty editors and trendsetters masterminding the next set of flaws that need correcting, how are these products and treatments getting airtime in our salons?
The first thing to ask ourselves is, are we jumping onto a trend?
We see the wider industry making money off a product or a treatment and it would be nice to get a piece of the profit pie. But does this align with our values and our philosophy of how skin should be treated? And what message does this send our clients?
Once the trend passes? What do we tell them? Do we just quietly take it off the menu and hope our clients don’t notice? Or do we jump onto the next trend and hope that’s enough to keep people coming back for more?
The second thing is looking at the way we market what we do?
Are we using our clients’ insecurities in our marketing? Do we highlight a problem to deliver a solution? Not such a bad method if the problem is a blocked sink and we have a product to clear it.
But if we’re talking about vellus facial hair, or the size of your pores, is it a genuine problem? Or a made-up problem used to promote a service that will give temporary solutions to a problem we manufactured to begin with?
Thirdly, do we find ourselves justifying it? Ever thought to yourself, ‘well if my clients are going to do it, I’d rather them come and have it done in my salon so that the bad treatment can be done safely’?
We might think we are doing our clients a favour, but if we take a moment to look at our motive, we might discover the motive is money.
Instead, what would happen if we educated our clients on WHY we don’t offer these particular products and service? What if we shared our knowledge of the treatment or product in question, gifting them the ability to make an informed choice minus the emotional black mail that comes with problem focused marketing.
What if we were a neutral space that helped clients to navigate the marketing BS and remind them not to believe everything they see on the internet? To be a haven away from the pressure sell that pulls on the insecurity heartstrings. What if instead we made it completely ok to accept that the flaws aren’t flaws at all?
We can actually be the antidote. The Light on the Hill that speaks common sense to fads and trends, that seek to create a problem in order to cash in on the solution.
We don’t know who is in that room, making the trends and finding fault in our skin and bodies. If we did, I’d be beating down their door to give them a good stern talking to!
But instead, we can create a new room, in our very treatment rooms, where we dispel the myths, make skin make sense and we run away from the trends that have our clients wandering around looking for solutions to problems they never really had.
Let’s not follow trends but create our own, by being the people our industry needs, who call out the problematic marketing and outrageous beauty standards and remind our clients that just because it’s popular, doesn’t mean it’s worthy of their time, money, and skin!
