women’s salon
I had never been inside a beauty women salon. I had no idea of the scope of salon use. I imagined beauty salons as highly feminine spaces, with pink decor and floral patterns filling every inch. I felt I would somehow betray my sense of feminist politics to give in to the treatments dangled inside.
Why did I need to go to see a professional who would shave away body hair to indulge in what I had called a fight against signs of aging Secretly, I suspected that my body would be the object of a search and an inspection and come up wanting because I was too big, too hairy, too old to want to fit comfortably into a world comprised of the young, the well-groomed, and the leisurely. These assumptions and fears have their echoes in interviews I have been conducting with salon clients and therapists.
They too, of course, know these images they too know that the land of the beautiful body is somewhere else. It is not where they are where they practice. As a therapist told me. This is an ordinary place. Every day people come through here. I have also discovered that sometimes I had to explain my interest in beauty therapy and justify it as a topic of sociological interest. This is even though in 2000 in the UK there were around about 4.5 million regular users of beauty salons. Of these, 70,000 were men, 45% were aged between 30 and 45, 33% were aged 45 plus, and 22% were between 18 and 30.
The salon is also a space where several competing discourses and practices of the body intersect. The salon sheds light upon gendered employment practices, leisure and consumption patterns, and issues of health and well-being, and it is also a site par excellence for investigating the construction and maintenance of gender and sexuality. In this paper, I will outline the four areas into which I have categorized salons. Treatments after analysis of client interviews. These are as follows pampering, regular grooming, health treatments, and corrective treatments. I will be discussing the type of practices undertaken in each field and also how these practices of the salon connect with external impacts on the lives of the clients.
Methodological issues
This material is from an ongoing study on beauty salons. The research has been conducted over three years and has involved a variety of methods of data generation. Material drawn from 24 interviews with women who are beauty salon clients forms the core of this paper. These are as follows pampering, regular grooming, health treatments, corrective treatments, beauty salon. I also refer to interviews with 17 beauty therapists.
These therapists were either teachers of beauty therapy or salon owners/managers. Both beauty therapists and salon customers were located within either a huge Northern town or a town in the Midlands. In the second place, I conducted participant observations in salons additionally, I spent time at a college, where beauty therapy was instructed, conducted group interviews with lecturers there interviewed officials in two professional associations representing the beauty therapy industry, and read literature and journals associated with these professional associations. I also received treatments in beauty salons.
Pampering It is possibly inside the region of pampering that we stumble upon maximum honesty in the photograph of the splendor salon. Pampering is perceived to be a complement to beauty. There is a certain flavor of pampering treatments surrounding indulgence, luxury, and even vanity. The beauty therapists segregate the sort of women going into the salons for their pampering treatment. Women not taking up any form of paid employment but also who have enjoyed high income can sometimes be regarded as being ladies who lunch.
They regularly visit their chosen salon which is often located in a largely middle-class district and where prices are somewhat higher than those of salons servicing a poorer customer base. Treatments to pamper the person include pedicures, facials, and massages. They are much less possibly to consist of extra painful remedies which include waxing or electrolysis, even though this can be the case in which the time for oneself is the posh as opposed to the treatment.
For clients who come to the salon to be pampered, the ambiance is vital. The salon must be welcoming, friendly, warm, and above all clean. She must feel comfortable and special enough to warrant the economic outlay she is making. A very delicate balance must be achieved before the woman will attend the salon. She must feel that she needs time to herself, that she deserves this time, and that she can justify the expense. Once those situations are in place, the salon and the therapist ought to fit her necessities and he or she ought to set apart the time required for the visit.
Routine grooming
These treatments relate to keeping a general body aesthetic standard, and this is far from vanity and beauty but is part of any regular maintenance cycle. An analogy might be to the servicing of a car and how it tends to increase in overall performance to prevent too great a decline in value. Grooming treatments are more concerned with looking and less concerned with feeling, although of course satisfaction would come from achieving a desired look.
Grooming and appearance achieved are tied to a sense of appropriateness. That is a concept that is vital in understanding the differential relationships that women have had with the beauty salon and desired outcomes. Achieving the right appearance, or retaining grooming to the right level, pertains to over-arching sociological principles and to a feel of space.
Health treatments
Practices in the salon that are described as health treatments may be further divided into those that are accessed to alleviate the symptoms of medically recognized illnesses, and those that the clients describe as contributing to a more general and holistic sense of well-being. Conditions alleviated are often those that can be treated by a medical professional but are not a priority for the NHS. Sometimes it’s far identified via way of means of GPs that remedy via way of means of a splendor therapist is a great alternative.
Two of the therapists interviewed had labored in most cancer wards in hospitals in which sufferers had been given massages, and additional recommendations on makeup and the usage of wigs in instances in which remedy had brought about hair loss. Two therapists had labored for intellectual fitness charities giving remedies to human beings with intellectual illnesses.
Corrective treatments It is possibly right here that we will see maximum surely a discourse of normality operating. Corrective treatments mainly revolve around the elimination of facial hair using electrolysis. The treatment also comprises other therapies including the treatment of acne and eradication of thread veins.
The aim here is not to achieve anything that would be described as beauty by the clients but rather to achieve an appearance that the woman believes will enable her to go unnoticed to achieve normality within the bounds of ascriptive. Heterosexual femininity. In this sense, the desired look is integral to all areas of the woman’s life and overrides all concepts of appropriateness. For those girls facial hair, for example, is usually and anywhere skilled as inappropriate.
CONCLUSION
I have shown how treatments offered in beauty salons relate to several different sociological debates. Pampering is defined in phrases of escapism and time for oneself. It is justified by reference to a discourse of stress. The reassets of this pressure are to be determined withinside the a couple of needs skilled with the aid of using the lady and her tries to stability them.
Grooming pertains to a fashionable experience of routinized frame preservation wherein the preferred final results have to be suitable in phrases of class, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on, however additionally suitable in phrases of the differing social and geographical areas inhabited with the aid of using women. I have mentioned in greater intensity justifications associated with the field of paid employment. In the case of clients, both male and female clients justify their salon visits in terms of grooming. However, the rewards of such aesthetic work in the workplace are unequally distributed between male and female workers. Health remedies are defined in medicalized or holistic terms.
They are used by the therapists to favorably compare their professional knowledge and status with that of certain medical professionals, and complementary therapists. Client accounts seem to be consistent with growing interest in complementary therapies. Involvement in health management practices also feeds into self-surveillance practices. Remedial treatments correspond to a discourse of normative femininity. The forms of treatment are described by clients as a necessity, and their use is a source of embarrassment and secrecy.