ESTHETICIAN
A
n esthetician is someone specializing in skin care — facials, hair removal, laser treatments, chemical peels, makeup, medical-spa treatments. The focus is usually on the face, but you can also do body treatments. I primarily work with machines. I do a bunch of skin tightening and laser hair removal, for the full body. Not every esthetician gets in to skin tightening. You have to have a separate certification. I use something called a Venus Freeze, which is a radio frequency machine with magnetic pulses.
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JULY 4, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES
On your face and neck it restores collagen, restores elasticity and tightens you, and gets rid of wrinkles. For your body it’s a circumference reduction and cellulite reduction. It performs a type of lipolysis on the cellular level, so it’s shrinking the fat in your cells. It looks kind of like a probe. It feels good — it’s like a warm massage. A big part of what I do is enhancing vanity and I know that. People want to look younger, feel younger, and I provide that. But I also have women come in with full beards and they’re 25, and that can be horrible for them. I
get rid of that, which is a really rewarding part of my job. They don’t have to feel humiliated every day. Or I have acne clients come in and they’ve been on Accutane and dermatologists don’t know what to do with them. We do acne treatments that really help their skin and they don’t feel so miserable, they’re not in pain. We help people and I feel good about that. I went to esthetician school — nobody knows what that means so I just call it “skin school” — for four months. We studied the science — chemistry, anatomy, learning all the
bones and the arteries, learning about the different layers of skin, skin analysis. Skin type is based on the size of the pores, and each skin type has to have a different treatment. And the other half is the practical part, learning how to do treatments and facials, learning how to work with clients. We practiced on creepy mannequin heads, then on each other. My hands were rigid and awkward at first, but the more I did it, the more it flowed, and my hands were like Gumby. That’s a big part of it: the feel of your hands for the person. You want to make them comfortable. It’s all about them. Facials are a luxury and you want to enhance that experience for them. My school was very traditional but sometimes I worried about new-agey mumbo jumbo. One teacher told me she cured her friend’s cancer with her brain. I complained to the director of the school. Skin school’s not cheap! You want to make sure it’s legit and that you’re not getting duped. Moving from mannequins and other students to real clients was terrifying at first. In skin school, it’s people coming in straight off the street to get services cheaply, and it can be anybody. The school was in a nice neighborhood and I thought I’d be working with uppity people, but it was super rough. People would come in on drugs, or with crackpipe burns on their mouths, or they wanted a bikini wax but hadn’t showered in weeks. That kind of killed my sparkle a little bit! But in my job now, I don’t have to worry about stuff like that. A big part of what I do is provide a luxury experience for well-to-do women. Most of them are older. The skin tightening and facials, they feel good. A lot times it’s partly therapy for these women. Some women come in to see me and I’m honest: I don’t really need to do anything with them. But they don’t care, they have the money, and it’s just a time for them to treat themselves. I really had no idea that this world existed. It’s all about youth. People like what I do because it’s non-invasive. They’re avoiding all these facelifts. But people are willing to put in their money and invest their time into trying to stop the clock or reverse it. It’s like working your way backwards. People are in it to win it — blood, sweat, and tears — they spend the money and they look amazing. It’s totally worth it. Do I ever feel ridiculous? I think at first it was like, “I can’t believe I do this.” Now, I feel good about it. These CONTINUED ON PAGE 16