So, tonight, a Beauty U student brings in the newspaper because the front page story is “Local Madam Arrested for Terrorizing Sex Slaves.”

“I can’t believe I went into that place!” she says. “I didn’t know what it was!”

She thought it was a nail salon. Because that’s what it said on the sign.

Our teacher has already seen the newspaper and is more world-weary. “You have to know the signs,” she tells us. Front windows painted up? A back room for “massage?” And — this is the part nobody quite says but we all know it anyway — Asian-owned and operated? Check, check, and check.

Let’s back up for a second. There’s a long history of racial tension in the beauty industry, mostly centering around the nail salon market, where 60 percent of workers are women of color: 10 percent Hispanic, 8 percent African-American, 2 percent Korean, and a whopping 40 percent Vietnamese, according to the 2010 industry survey by Nails Magazine (that’s a PDF link, btw). Being a nail tech requires the least amount of education (250 hours in New York state versus my 600 and a cosmetologist’s 1000), so it seems like a pretty good gig if you don’t have much cash to invest in training, don’t speak much English, and need to start earning money sooner rather than later. White-owned nail salons have seen their market share shrinking in response to this influx and it creates a lot of animosity. “It’s like a cold war between us,” one Vietnamese nail tech told me, a few years ago.

Around Beauty U, I hear a lot of cracks that suggest the war might be even a little hotter than that. Our golden rule of waxing is that you never ever double-dip your stick in the wax once you’ve touched the client’s skin. “Not like at those Asian places, where God only knows what’s in the wax,” one student says. (Side note: One teacher confessed that she too double-dips if she’s just doing “like an eyebrow or a lip/chin.”)

Same thing when we learn massage techniques. “I like how much pressure you use,” another student told me. “I was at a nail salon last week and I thought the woman was going to break my neck.” (For those of you who don’t frequent nail salons: A post-pedicure neck and shoulder rub is often included while you’re waiting for your polish to dry. Oh and also, a lot of them offer waxing services in addition to nails, to explain the quip above.)

“It’s not like they really know what they’re doing there,” someone else said. “A lot of times, they aren’t even licensed.” This devolved into a conversation about how infrequently “those people” clean the pedicure baths and how you’ll probably get a staph infection from them.

There’s also a lot of disappointment that we can’t get free mani/pedis because Beauty U has yet to recruit enough students to fill a nails night class. “It’s because it’s mostly an Oriental thing now,” the admissions director told me when I asked about it during my Interview. “They have their own schools. We don’t get the interest.”

And as I’ve mentioned before, there’s the whole “what are they saying about me?!” anxiety.

So, that’s the (not very pretty) landscape. And it’s not just Beauty U — it’s everywhere. That’s why I’m keeping names out of this post; I’ve encountered this same stuff throughout my beauty industry travels, as a customer and a journalist, too.

Now here’s the thing: Even beyond the local tabloid crap, there have been a handful of media reports (like this four-part NPR series) about Vietnamese and Korean-owned nail salons being used as fronts for money laundering and human trafficking. Workers that paint nails by day (often for as little as $50 per day plus tips even in a totally legit business) are forced into the sex trade by night — or whenever a client goes into the back room for a massage and leaves his towel in place after, which one Beauty U student’s husband accidentally discovered to be the Happy Ending code. (He got dressed and left.)

Okay.

To the degree that this is happening at all (and I’m sure it is, though perhaps not as much as the media suggests, since even NPR couldn’t seem to come up with any hard numbers), it is horrendous. Both in terms of what’s happening to these exploited workers, and because it fuels two ugly stereotypes: That you can’t trust Asian people, especially in nail salons. And that “beauty worker” is synonymous with “sex worker.”

The truth is, being a nail salon worker is no cake walk, even without the whole sex trafficking issue. You work incredibly long hours inhaling incredibly toxic fumes. (Please watch and share the video above, for more details about all of that.) Many of your customers are condescending at best, rude and suspicious at worst. And your beauty industry colleagues are downright hostile.

If prostitution is happening at nail salons, I want us to help those women and girls get out. But along the way, I want to talk about ways low-paying beauty jobs exploit the women (and some men) who perform them in far more subtle and insidious ways. And I want us to stop blaming the victims and to stop talking smack about Asian nail salons in general. Enough already.

Because I think my Beauty U girls are operating under the assumption that it’s a good idea to make jokes about what goes on in those “Happy Ending-type salons” to help underscore the differences between us and them. But at the end of the day, we’re all wearing the same kind of aprons and waxing the same kind of body parts. So it really feels like we need a little Tina Fey/Mean Girls kind of scene right about now. You know, like when she tells all of the girls: “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.”

Like that. Only replace high school girls with beauty industry workers. And replace “guys” with “the whole world.”

Must Read: The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work, in which women studies professor Miliann Kang studies the nail salon industry and finds that “while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.”

Then I went to school and Miss Susan told us that we forgot to count snow days. Which Beauty U “doesn’t hold against you,” (as in, charge you extra money for) but does require you to make up by pushing your graduation date back a day for every snow day missed. State rules about how you have to have precisely 600 hours to qualify for the state board exam and what not.

I only dimly recall it now that we’re in the height of summer sweatiness, but we had six snow days between December and February.

Which means, my graduation date rolls back a whole week and a half. (Plus those pesky 9 hours that I’m still chipping away at in Make-Up Time.)

Oops.

I was pretty grouchy about it last week because I had my one graduation date (August 17) so locked in my head and it was really keeping me going. But now it’s July 26, which means my new graduation date (August 26!) is now exactly one month and 20 Beauty U days (80 hours + 7.5 make-up hours!) away.

So I’m feeling more Zen about the whole thing. And wanted to update you so you don’t feel anxious.

From the Department of Crazy Beauty U Rules, it should be noted that even though they don’t hold snow days against us (and thanks, by the way, for not considering me personally responsible for nature), they didn’t so much clarify the snow day policy until I thought to ask. Six months after the fact.

And they don’t allow us to make up the snow days the way we make up the days we miss for personal reasons — so you have no choice but to watch your graduation date push back. It would have been nice to have had the option to chip away at these days as we went along. A bunch of us are planning vacations as soon as we’re set free, so there are all kinds of life, work, whatever plans that will have to be reconfigured accordingly. It’s a drag.

But hopefully it’s a drag with only a month left now. Unless the graduation date changes again — we’ve been warned by teachers and other senior students to keep a close eye on our hour tallies from here on out. Remember how they screwed up Leslie’s math and she had to come back for an extra two hours? And pay extra for them? Yeah. Like that.

So it’s pretty much a big downer.

Because we haven’t much progress on this (the numbers are almost identical to the stuff Naomi Wolf talked about in the Beauty Myth oh, almost twenty years ago) and in some ways —Heidi Montag, Heidi Montag! — things are getting worse. (If you’ll recall, a lot of us feminist bloggers cottoned on to that back at the end of last year.)

There are two solutions, says Newsweek:

1) Join the club, concludes Jessica Bennett:

When it comes down to it, people get jobs because they “know somebody” all the time–is embracing our beauty premium really any worse? It might be shallow and it might not be fair, but the reality is that whether or not we decide to buy into it, whether or not we spend a lifetime keeping up with an ever-changing, ever-more-disturbing, plasticized ideal, we’re being judged already. So why not use what we’ve got while we still can? Cause we won’t be beautiful or young forever—even with a round of feminist-approved Botox.

2) Tell everyone to go shove it and life your (not so beautiful) life, says Raina Kelly , who counters that we’re getting ahead just fine thankyouverymuch, whether we measure up to cultural beauty ideals or not:

Beauty bias notwithstanding, there are still opportunities for people who aren’t hotties—lots of them. Virtually all the women I know have come to terms with the fact that their self-esteem cannot be tied to Photoshopped 15-year-olds on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. Never in the history of the world have women had so many amazing opportunities, and it makes not a whit of sense to squander them obsessing over our looks. We do not yet reap rewards equal to those of men. But we can either succeed in the breathtaking arenas that are now open to us—and work to enter more of them—or we can spend our days competing with fashion models and movie stars. In other words, you can be Hillary Clinton or Heidi Montag. It’s your choice.

Obviously, I started off liking Raina’s idea best. Don’t let that sh*t define you! We’re so way stronger than that!

Only problem is, having read the rest of the package (plus this excellent XXFactor post by Amanda Marcotte on how all the stories about women dominating the workforce now are ignoring how we’re still earning less than our male counterparts and making up the majority of the working poor) I don’t buy this for a hot second.

I’m really happy that Raina (who graduated from Yale, has a job she doesn’t hate, plus a husband and a kid) is doing so super, but it doesn’t change facts for the rest of us. Newsweek has it right there in the lead story, where over 50 percent of hiring managers say prospective employees should spend as much time and money on their hair and makeup as they do perfecting their resume — yet 47 percent also say that women are penalized for being “too good-looking.”

So more from the department of nothing’s changed: Women are damned if we Botox and damned if we don’t.

What’s worse is that we spend so much time damning each other for making these different choices. If you don’t Botox [or insert your favorite/least favorite beauty treatment here], you think the woman who does is at best shallow and at worst, a traitor to the sisterhood. If you do, you think women who don’t have given up, let themselves go, or become a hairy-legged feminist who will never get a man.

Those are extreme positions, I know. So, story time:

There’s a girl at Beauty U who has long, bleached blonde hair, tattooed eyebrows, pretty-sure-they’re-fake boobs, plus is visible ribcage skinny and orange-y tan. She is Our Heidi Montag.

And we hate her.

And I say “we,” because I’ve been just as guilty of this as the rest of the class. (And teachers, too.) When she’s not around, we comment on what she’s wearing that day, how crazy her blue eye shadow looks, how low-cut her shirt is, how tight her pants are… you get the idea. You know exactly what I’m talking about because you’ve gossiped about other women’s bodies in the same way with your own girlfriends. (If you haven’t ever, once, in your whole life said, “I can’t believe she’s wearing that!” then please, feel free to start judging me now.)

We defend our position because Our Heidi Montag is not all that nice. Or at least, she came in for a leg wax once and complained the whole time. But that’s not what this is about.

Our Heidi Montag is so overworked that up close, she is not beautiful to me — she is disturbing and it’s kind of hard to look straight at her. But when I catch her at a safe distance, I think, yes, I see why she wants her waist to be that tiny — I wish MY waist was that tiny! — and her skin to be that tan. Everything about her is, on paper, meeting a culturally-prescribed beauty standard. It’s like she’s been doing Jamie’s Seventeen Magazine Project for her whole life, following every rule in the Beauty Handbook to a carb-free, bleached blonde T.

And yet, she’s failing. Because when all the beauty standards come together, they add up to a hot mess. A mess that other women just can’t deal with because Our Heidi Montag’s insecurities are so out there (and yet she seems so unnervingly proud of them) that she becomes this weird walking reminder of our own insecurities, our own failure to meet the standards.

And so we say, “Why would she want her eyebrows to look like that?” When what we mean is, “I’m better than her, because even if I’ve failed, at least I wasn’t trying that hard in the first place.”

Newsweek does speak to this issue in the main piece and in Tony Dokoupil’s essay, Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful. But to my mind, it’s The Missing Link in each of the two solutions they offer. Not everybody wants to embrace Botox, and that should be more okay, so we’re not fighting the beauty bias so hard at every damn turn. And not everybody wants to reject the notion of beauty standards altogether either.

But right now (like always) we’re determined to stay stuck at this crossroads — instead of exploring the millions of other options that fill up the space between us.

• Client Twelve: Is a middle-aged woman with red hair, who comes in for a European facial. I leave her to change and step back in a few minutes later. “Don’t be alarmed — I took my hair off!” she says cheerfully, now wearing the kind of black nylon head wrap I usually associated with a more, shall we say urban asthetic? Tips me $6. Comes back three weeks later for a salt scrub where she tips me $10.

• Client Thirteen: Tells me she has MS when I ask if she has any health conditions that might contraindicate an eyebrow wax. We agree that’s not really relevant here and proceed. She’s very sweet and gushes over what I do to her brows; “They’ve never looked this great!” I like her a lot. No tip.

• Client Fourteen: Comes in for a cellulite wrap and spends the whole time telling me about how she volunteers with her church and was called to adopt two children from Ethiopia. Plus she needs to lose weight. Is a size zero. Tips $10.

• Client Fifteen: Is a very old and deaf man who has come in while his daughter gets a haircut. She asks me to trim his brows. They are crazy old man brows. I do my best. She tips me $3.

• Client Sixteen: Is an Italian man who has come in for a haircut and wants his brows trimmed. He is very nervous that I not “make him look like girl.” I do my best. He doesn’t tip.

• Client Seventeen: Turns out to be the daughter of Client Seven, how about that? And here I learn a lesson about assumptions, because while Seven painstakingly tipped me $3 for a heck of a lot of work, Seventeen tips $10 for a European Facial and eyebrow wax, and spends the whole night telling me about her yacht club membership, her son’s fancy private school, and how, when she goes on cruises, she packs her own booze in Listerine bottles so she doesn’t have to pay cruise ship bar prices. The next night, Seventeen comes back with Seven, who tells me all about her latest diet while I give her a European. This time I get $4.

• Client Eighteen: Comes in with her daughter for European Facials. Are perfectly lovely and enthusiastic and tip Meg and I each $5. After we wave them off, Meg says, “Why can’t they all be like that?” And we go for doughnuts.

Oh and on the subject of tipping: A lot of you have asked me what’s considered an appropriate tip, from the esthetician’s perspective. I’m sure it varies place to place, but at Beauty U, we hope for 20 percent, so $5 on a $25 European Facial. If we get more ($10 tips are not unheard of!), we are completely jazzed. If we get less, we complain.

And if you have a coupon, or the service itself is discounted in some way, it is classy to still tip based off the regular price, especially if you’re in a setting where workers are really tip-dependent. At Beauty U, we don’t get paid anything else and in fact are paying gobs of money for the privilege of working on you. At many “discount” salons, workers are paid a pretty low day rate on the assumption that they’ll make it up in tips. I don’t think that’s happening.

Tip Jar Total: $138-ish. Which keeps me in Diet Coke and Mac Snack Wraps during break. And that’s about all.

I’ve been writing this post in my head for a couple of weeks now, ever since this whole Al Gore/massage therapist scandal broke. Whatever the true story is there (Tipper says it’s false, yo), it brings up some big, troubling questions about this whole Business We Call Touch.

Jezebel has talked before on the specific issues facing massage therapists, who are trained and licensed, and would prefer you to not use the term “masseuse,” because it has the front-for-prostitution connotation, and they’re already fighting an uphill battle on that because their work is still classified as “adult entertainment” in some parts of the country. I know. And if you’re surprised by that, check out JJG’s comment posted right on this-here blog about six months ago:

I have received a professional massage once in my life and plan on getting many, many more. They feel great and everyone should do it. Did the happy ending cross my mind? Of course. It was my first massage and for all I knew, they were complimentary. Like fennel seeds at the Indian restaurant. I was actually wondering if she would offer at some point during, because I though that was what happens. I know, I watch too much Entourage. But nothing happened except for receiving an awesome massage. And now I know what to expect next time.

Digest that for a second… Because massage therapists aren’t the only ones fighting ‘em off. We talk about it all the time at Beauty U.

Story time:

Miss Jenny once had a client come in for a back and chest wax. When she entered the room, he had taken off his shirt (that makes sense) and his belt (that does not) and put a wad of extra cash on the counter. Which she ignored.

Before I started, Miss Stacy and Miss Lisa had been dealing with a dude who was a Beauty U regular for body treatments. (I am not saying that guys can’t enjoy a nice salt scrub or mud wrap. But I am saying the number of men coming in for these services on a normal day is about -15.) When he lay face down on the bed, he had to fold his legs under him and stick his butt in the air “like a frog,” because, they realized, he was too excited to be able to lie flat. Miss Lisa solved the problem by standing in the room with the students working on him and eyeballing him sternly until he finally stopped coming back.

Miss Bethany, one of the day teachers, had a male client come in for a Brazilian (note: I am putting a firm kibosh on the term Manzilian) when she ran an esthetics practice out of the spare room in her apartment. To put it bluntly: He kept getting erections. And asking her if she liked working on men and if she talked about it with her husband when he came home. She told him in no uncertain terms that she did not.

I don’t know what makes me sadder: That guys like JJG are walking around with this faux affable golly gee whiz “for all I knew it was complimentary!” attitude. Or that other guys take it one step further and assume any woman paid to touch them must be willing to do more.

But what’s most sad is that we’ve received exactly zero Beauty U training on how to handle these situations beyond the above anecdotes, which only ever come up because students ask if this kind of stuff was ever an issue. The lesson seems to be “this is inevitable and you should stand up for yourself when it happens,” mostly because it certainly hurts the professionalism of the industry if you don’t and even more people walk around assuming estheticians are sluts. And because, as I’ve discussed before, there’s a lot of bravado among estheticians that we’re professional enough and tough enough to handle the less savory sides of life (pimples, pubic hair, you know).

But running through every story is also an undercurrent of uncertainty. There’s that understandably delayed reaction of “is this really happening to me?” but there’s also the fear/denial part.

“I don’t even want to know what that wad of cash was about,” said Miss Jenny.

“We couldn’t just refuse to work on him,” said Miss Stacy. “It’s not like he tried something.”

“I didn’t want to make him mad because I didn’t know if my neighbors were home,” said Miss Bethany.

Because these situations are intense and scary, all the more so because making the wrong call means alienating a customer, which means bad word of mouth and/or an angry boss, which means you’re out of a job.

Tonight we’re talking about a recent graduate who has set up her own esthetics practice, complete with a Facebook page. I don’t know this graduate and I haven’t seen her page, but Miss Lisa tells us that the woman posted about a recent Scumbag Client Encounter, saying she told the jerk where to go (I’m assuming in language more colorful than that).

“That was entirely unprofessional,” says Miss Lisa. Everyone nods in agreement. “I guess it’s okay to say that kind of thing happened, but don’t talk about it like that — it just makes us look bad.”

You know. Like we’re the ones taking off our belts and putting extra cash on the counter.

© Photo of Amsterdam’s Red Light District courtesy of Amsterdam.info.

Even though it’s been sunny for days, it turns cloudy as I drive to school, in that hazy summer way that makes you notice all the cigarette butts in the corners of the parking lot, and the way the chain link fence that divides our strip mall from the highway behind is so busted and kind of folded in on itself in places.

The wipe-off poster board propped on an easel by the front door of Beauty U still says “Congratulations, June Graduates!” even though it’s now July. And nobody has bothered to reorder supplies or update the chart in the break room that tracks the progress of our 600 hours, sorted by student ID.

In other words, welcome back.

The inertia settles over us like the humid clouds outside. There aren’t any clients, so it turns into a workbook kind of night, because nobody can be bothered to make hot towels or fill up the steamers and actually do stuff. I kind of love the workbook, because as long as you follow along in the right chapter of the textbook, it’s pretty uncomplicated and satisfying to fill in all those blanks. I’ve started doing it in cursive because it makes it take longer and I love the way the pages look when they’re all filled up.

Then Miss Stacy reminds us that us senior girls are almost down to our last 30 days. Which means lazy workbook nights are all well in good, but we also need to start planning for What Comes Next. She passes out a long checklist of supplies that we need to gather for Our Kit, which is everything you need to sit for your practical exam at Beauty U and then for your state board exam six months later. Meg estimates that it’s going to cost us at least $100 to get everything, so we start planning a dollar store field trip to hunt up cheap makeup brushes and Q-tips and such. We also have to get busy actually finishing the workbook, so Miss Stacy can go over it with us next week.

And then we take a practice version of the written final exam, which consists of 100 randomly generated multiple choice questions on all 21 Milady’s chapters, and is also supposed to mimic the state board’s written portion of the licensing test.

We decide to do the practice run cold, so we can see how much we’ve retained. I work my way through, check my answers, and count up 19 questions that I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten wrong, but I have no idea how to make them right. Don’t scoff. Do you know the name of veins that supply blood to the head and neck? Or the purpose of iontophoresis? Without rushing off to Wikipedia now, just off the top of your head.

Anyway, you can get 30 questions wrong before you fail, so I figure this is a good starting point — except then I get it back, and I do have 19 questions wrong, but they’re a different 19 than the ones I thought. (Random nerd moment: In almost every case, the right answer was one of the two I was deciding between. SAT coaches and Beauty U teachers alike tell you to “go with your gut” in either/or situations. So I did. And it kept ending up being the other choice. Why is my gut so not trustworthy?)

So we’ve got about five weeks to close the gap on that margin of error, plus finish the workbook, get all our signatures and pass the practical exam. Oh and figure out what comes after Beauty U.

And yet, things feel kind of stalled.

When we go on break, I order a McDonald’s snack wrap on autopilot, completely spacing on the fact that I packed a granola bar and a bag of cherries for once and don’t have to eat (so very tasty) crap.

We complain, yet again, about how the day students never do the laundry, forgetting that in a month, this really won’t be our problem.

We talk obsessively about our plans for graduation itself (it involves various kinds of alcohol,  the water tower at the opposite end of the Beauty U parking lot and possibly a ritualistic burning of the infamous black apron). But even though you get a temporary license the day you graduate (like a learner’s permit before you take the State Board), nobody says much about how they’re interviewing for jobs or building up their client roster or what not.

I think it’s some pretty understandable digging in, in the face of uncertainty and change — as much as we gripe about the aprons and the day students and the ever-weirder rules, we’ve gotten comfortable here in our strange little 6 pm to 10 pm world of pores and cellulite and unwanted body hair.

But I’m also surprised by how little Beauty U is doing to prepare us for this next stage. It advertises “lifetime job placement” on all of its promotional materials, but so far that seems to have consisted of Simon Scott’s workshop and a couple of nights we spent looking at the resumes of other Beauty U graduates.

Miss Stacy showed us hers, which featured an objective line: “To find a challenging and rewarding job in the field of Esthetics.”

It sounds nice in theory.

*That turned into a bit of an unintended blog week off, too and thanks for letting me be a slacker, by the by. We’re back now, in full force.

This doesn’t happen very often round these parts, but when it does it’s because I feel like I’ve crossed the very fine line I walk around here in terms of reporting from the Beauty U trenches. Because my goal is to bring back tales and observations that relate to the beauty industry as a whole, using Beauty U as a microcosm. When I tell you about say, upselling, it’s not because I think my teachers are oh so crazy, it’s because I think the Beauty U experience of upselling reflects what’s happening at beauty schools, salons and spas, industry-wide. (And that’s important because the upselling phenomenon has quite an impact on the way beauty industry workers are perceived and feel about their work and the way female consumers are perceived, and feel about their appearance.)

Meanwhile, as fascinating as I might think it is, I try really hard to keep gossipy things like rumors about people’s personal lives, or turf wars between students, or what have you, off the blog. Beauty U is like any school or workplace, so we have plenty of that kind of intrigue going on — but it’s not relevant to the big picture issues so it would be hugely unprofessional, unethical and just plain mean of me to blog about it.

But it’s a tricky balance. Being embedded can make it hard to see anything but the trees. I did a lot of big picture research before I started school and will continue to do so (there’s a little hint for you about what happens to Beauty Schooled after August’s graduation.) but right now, I’m focused on getting the ground level view. So sometimes I get all riled up about something, like this weird rule about how nobody can see the client schedule anymore, and think “Ahhh! This story must be told!”

And then I step back and think, oh wait, bosses are weird in every workplace. I once had a boss who would only write in pink pen (and wrote the meanest pink penned messages to you, too). Maybe this rule is like that, just a little Mr. G idiosyncrasy and while those idiosyncrasies can have a big impact on our quality of life over at Beauty U, for sure, they don’t always have any bearing on the industry as a whole.

I do think lack of autonomy is a common issue for salon workers. You tend to work in close quarters with your salon’s owner, which could create opportunities for micromanagement. Milady’s often mentions what I call the McFacial; how you should expect to have to perform services exactly the way your spa tells you to, down to the number of massage strokes used. This is frustrating for estheticians who want to take creative pride in their work and hone their own style and techniques because it reduces the job to an assembly line gig.

And it troubles me how little confidence I see in the teachers at Beauty U. They enforce school policies largely out of fear, constantly saying, “we’ll get in trouble if you do that wrong.” It takes weeks of bolstering and pleading before we can get them to talk to the managers about a policy that frustrates us (like the problem of junior students working on clients and missing instruction). And no wonder; the one teacher who did push for changes was pushed right out of her job. I suspect this kind of workplace culture is also an industry-wide problem because this is a field with many part-time workers and very little job security.

So when I think about the new “hands off or you’re fired” policy about the appointment book in that context, it seems important. But I’m willing to concede this is some murky gray territory. And as always, I value your input on whether something is hitting you as an Important Revelation or more Virginia Should Get More Sleep Before She Blogs. The beauty of blogging all this primary reporting is that I get your real-time feedback. And you all can see the forest, while I scurry about in the trees.

So, we had Monday night off because it was a Beauty U Staff Development Day, which means tonight, Miss Stacy and Miss Cheryl have a long list of new rules and reminders for us:

When you greet a client, always make eye contact.

And smile.

And say your name and their name.

And give them a double handshake, where you tenderly — dare I say, reverently? — cup their one hand in both of your own.

And the biggest deal: Nobody, but nobody, is allowed to know in advance what clients we’ve been assigned, or when they’re coming in.

Stay with me here.

Up until tonight, when we arrived at Beauty U, we would clock in, go to the classroom, and look at the night’s appointment book, writ large on the flat screen TV monitor that is hooked up to the main computer. The appointment book program is basically a big Excel sheet with the names of the senior students running along the top and the hours of the day down the side, with each appointment plugged in accordingly.

Then we would pow-wow with Miss Stacy and say things like, “Oh can I do the cellulite wrap that was assigned to Brooke, because that’s on my Jeans Pass list this week?” or “Wow, I have a really bad headache, does anyone else feel like doing that Brazilian instead of me?” Or sometimes Miss Stacy might say, “Stephanie doesn’t have any eyebrow signatures yet, so let’s have her do that eyebrow wax at 8:30.” Then, once the schedule has been worked out to everyone’s satisfaction, we’d go off and start setting up for clients.

I’m the first to admit, it wasn’t a perfect system. Sometimes you’d feel peer-pressured into trading away a service you really wanted to do, or taking on something you’d really rather not. Sometimes it enabled Service Hogs, where people who are really gung-ho about getting their signatures would push to do more, and people who are a little more wimpy polite would end up with not enough to do. One student, who has been working hard to build up her own base of regulars, and manages to upsell every one of them to the high-end facials, would generally find a way to get out of doing the more mundane European facials that bore everyone to tears.

Realizing this, Miss Stacy instituted a rotation a few weeks ago where she wrote our names in alphabetical order on the white board and just assigned out all the services that way, giving each of us a check as we took a client, and then starting over at the top of the list when everyone had their turn. That seemed pretty fair to me, and still allowed for the occasional “oh hey, can I trade you this facial for that lip wax?” kind of bartering that is so essential in the never-ending quest to collect Jeans Passes. (You don’t even know. Some weeks, they are our Whole World.)

But now, those days are done. The list has been erased from the white board and is now kept by Iris, who is the receptionist up at the front desk. She, and only she, has the power to decide who does what service.

We’re not allowed to see the list.

Miss Stacy is not allowed to see the list.

In fact, Mr. G reportedly told the staff that if any teacher asks to see the list, she will be fired on the spot.

We’re allowed to know that there are, say, three European facials, one salt scrub, and a lip wax coming in tonight. As a class, we get everything set up for those treatments. Then we wait for the clients to arrive, at which point, Iris hands the assignment sheets off to Miss Stacy who comes back and tags us, Oprah style: “And YOU get a facial! And YOU get a facial! And YOU get a lip wax!”

Why the secrecy? It’s all rather unclear. Miss Stacy says, “Mr G had smoke coming out of his ears about this,” and the only explanation they received is that he doesn’t want people being skipped “because they’re slow, or because they haven’t gotten good at that service yet or because of the color of their skin.”

Now I’m only the messenger (of the messenger) here. I have not personally witnessed or heard tell of any racial profiling when it comes to client assignments. I haven’t even seen a teacher pass someone over in a “hey she needs more practice with highlights on their mannequin before I give her a human head” kind of way. But I’m deducing that there have been some doings of this kind afoot.

And since Mr G is rarely on hand to get to the bottom of such an issue himself, I guess instituting a school-wide policy designed to prevent miscellaneous prejudice makes some degree of sense. And if you’re going to have a new policy like that, you’re going to need some dire consequences (like firing teachers) to ensure it gets implemented. That’s all making a certain kind of sense.

Things that make less sense include the fact that Iris (the receptionist) doesn’t get invited to the Staff Development Day. So she walks in for her shift tonight and nearly has a nervous breakdown when all of these new responsibilities are dumped on her with nary an explanation or a pay raise. It’s also harder to prepare for your client if you don’t know who she is and what she wants done. We’re supposed to input painstakingly detailed summaries in the computer’s client files at the end of every treatment, so the next person who works on that client can get her whole life story. Now there’s no time to go read those summaries, so you run the risk of asking “is this your first facial?” to a regular who comes in every three weeks.

But what I think I’m most weirded out about is the way it strips our teachers of their authority over the clinic. Why can’t Mr. G trust his staff to distribute client assignments fairly, using their best judgment and making their own game-time decisions, perhaps rearranging things now and then to better suit the needs and talents of the students they know far better than he does?

Of course, if a teacher has been abusing this power and discriminating against students, she needs to leave. But what’s up with a management style that assumes such behavior would be the norm?

[Image: The newly top-secret appointment book software looks a lot like this one, from Salon Iris.]

Meg gives me a bikini wax tonight both because hey, it’s swimsuit season and because she has “1 Bikini Wax” written on her List. and I like to help a sister out. Every week, the teachers write us out a grocery list of services to try to do that week — if you complete everything by the end of the week, you score a Jeans Pass. And you know how we all feel about jeans passes. Which means by Wednesday/Thursday, we’re all scrambling a bit in a “please-can-I-just-wax-your-arm-hair-for-my-jeans-pass” kind of way.

Anyway, I’m just going to say it: You are never going to feel more unattractive than when you’re splayed out for a bikini wax. Forget the part about your waxer seeing your business. Tonight all I can think about are thighs and how you have to contort into all these angles that are extremely unflattering to them, under what just might be the brightest light ever. This is the first time I’ve been back on the client side of the table in awhile — so strange because just a few months ago, I was the client and had no idea what it was like on the waxer side of things — and I completely zero in on how very vulnerable you feel. And how much you have to trust your waxer to be cool with things.

But here’s a pet peeve I have about many spa clients/some people I tell about this project/probably a lot of privileged white people: When they say things like, “I wish I spoke Korean/Vietnamese/whatever so I could understand what those nail salon ladies are saying about me.”

Okay, let’s break this down.

1) You are not that interesting.

2) Spa services, especially manicures and pedicures, are increasingly performed by Asian people. 40 percent of nail technicians nationwide are Vietnamese, according to the latest Nails Magazine survey, and in some areas, like California, it’s closer to 80 percent. Nail tech training requires the least amount of hours (250 hours in my state to esthetics’ 600 and cosmetology’s 1000), which means you can get through school and start earning money more quickly, which is important when you have a family to support. And while wages are low, they tend to be better than many other jobs available to recent immigrants who aren’t yet fluent in English.

Now, being non-native English speakers, they quite naturally converse with each other in their non-English native language. So listen up, because I’m only going to say this once: When people talk to each other in a language you don’t understand, it does not mean they are talking about you.

3) You are not that interesting.

In fact, I’ve been interested by how rarely we talk about our clients at Beauty U. If a client tells a funny story, maybe we’ll reprise it. If a client is really mean or doesn’t tip, well, okay then. You gripe about your day too.

I’ll admit, earlier this week, Miss Marci came out from helping Brooke negotiate a particularly tricky leg and bikini wax and said, “That woman is so hairy! She even has hair on her stomach, like a man. This is going to take all night!” So yes, it does happen when we’re faced with something extreme.

The rest of the time, we talk about the funny thing someone’s kid said, or who has cramps, or what’s up with our skin. We bitch about the ongoing esthetics-cosmetology rivalry (which boils down to the fact that we give them facials and such all the time because we need people to work on, but they never give us haircuts or blow-outs because there’s a Beauty U rule against students getting free cosmetology services during class time — don’t get us started!). We talk about blind dates and fights with boyfriends and the merits of the various vending machine offerings.

And in between, clients come in and we go to work. And that’s the deal.

So back to the bikini wax: I think it’s probably impossible to be in that situation without wondering, “Oh God, what is she thinking about this?” I know all of the above, and I still have that moment. If you have a language barrier, I get how that adds to the confusion because it creates more uncertainty in what is already a highly uncertain situation. And the many vagaries of human nature mean that I can’t guarantee that your waxer/hair stylist/nail tech doesn’t talk about you behind your back (or within earshot in that Secret Code otherwise known as the language she can speak and you can’t — you know, like how spending every day in America surrounded by fluent English speakers probably feels to her). I absolutely can’t guarantee she doesn’t think something in the privacy of her own brain. In fact, you might as well assume that she does. Because she’s human and entitled to her thoughts.

But I think it’s worth noting that even though you’re naked (or barefoot), you still might not be the most vulnerable person in that room.

[Photo by the constantly brilliant Molly Surno, from her "Smallest Canvas" series that I just cannot get enough of.]

Esthetician's Lab Coat from Salonwear.com. Wait, what does she remind me of?

At Beauty U, we’re told this all the time. Like, don’t think that you can diagnose a mole as skin cancer. Just suggest your client see her dermatologist for a check-up. And, don’t expect to learn lasers or Botox — those have to be administered by a doctor, or an esthetician working under a doctor with advanced training. (Read: Well beyond the scope of Beauty U.)

Some of the time, I find this reassuring. Anatomy, cosmetic chemistry, skin physiology and basic electricity each get a dedicated chapter in our Milady’s textbook. That adds up to maybe three weeks, tops, that we spent learning straight-up science and they are everybody’s least favorite chapters. Last week I was waiting for a client in the classroom while Miss Lisa and Miss Stacy led the current crop of freshmen through their chemistry chapter (this involves the students reading off a PowerPoint lecture while the teachers interject every now and then with their own knowledge and expertise). When it came time to figure out the difference between a solute and a solvent, everyone got so stumped that we turned to Wikipedia for a better explanation. I’m not saying these women are dumb. They are quite smart. I’m just saying: Med school, it ain’t.

But some of the time, I also find this whole “you’re not as smart as doctors” approach to be pretty patronizing. American Spa posted a story a few weeks ago about an esthetician who spotted a sketchy looking mole after the client’s dermatologist had refused to do anything about it for two years in a row. The mole came off and the verdict was: basal cell carcinoma. Score one, esthetics.

On the other hand, there are these times when we are taught to act like doctors. When we escort a client out after her spa service, for example, we’re supposed to say, “I’d like to see you for another facial in four weeks.”

“It’s like going to the dentist where they just automatically schedule you for your next cleaning in six months,” Miss Susannah explains. “This way, the client just thinks oh, I should just rebook now, because, she needs to see me again in four weeks.”

Miss Susannah also uses the “I’d like you to do X” phrasing when she retails products, as in “I’d like to see you using a moisturizer with an SPF” or “I’d like to try a night cream, to see if that helps the puffiness under your eyes.” Just like when the doctor says, “I’d like to try a course of antibiotics.”

Except we’re not like the dentist where getting your teeth cleaned every six months has been medically proven to prevent cavities and other oral health issues. And you’re not sick. Getting a facial every four weeks might make your skin look prettier, and be a really nice treat…but it isn’t medically necessary.

Because we’re not doctors. But we are kind of okay with you thinking that we are.