• $55-58: How much you’ll pay for the new Spanx for Men undergarments line. Dudes, read Broadsheet’s helpful tips on navigating shapewear before you buy, so the extra ten minutes you’ll need getting them off to go to the bathroom don’t take you by surprise.

• 175,000 New Yorkers are employed in the fashion industry, making clothes and selling them in stores. Bet most of them make a lot less than the 50 deemed “most fascinating” by the New York Daily News. Breaking news — Anna Wintour at #1. Are we still fascinated by her, or can we admit to phoning it in yet?

• 4: The dress size of model Coco Rocha, who is out of runway work this season because the designers claim she can’t fit into their clothes. But kudos to DoubleX’s Jessica Grose for pointing out that Tyra’s so-called success stories aside, the exploitation of models goes way beyond the weight debate.

• 25 pounds lost in eight weeks is how fast Playmate Kendra Wilkinson claims to have reclaimed her body (without dieting, duh!) post-pregnancy, for this entirely unrealistic OK! Magazine cover. As my new-mom-friend K. puts it, “This kind of crap makes postpartum women feel like dog poo.”

[Photo via Jezebel.]

Here’s the secret to have a successful salon or spa in one word:

Upselling.

Our goal, as soon as you walk in the door, is to convince you that hey, actually, a more expensive facial would be more beneficial for your skin than the bog-standard European facial you signed up for, or that in fact, you’ll extend the benefits of the facial much longer if you buy a bunch of products for home use, too. And by the by, did you know we also do hair and nails here?

At Beauty U, we’re getting ready to work on real, live clients soon, and learning to fill out a form for every customer where we have to write which treatments we suggest as an upsale, whether they decided to go for it, and which home products we recommend. The part that creeps me out is that we’re then supposed to hand this form to the client at the end of the service. They bring up to the receptionist so she knows what to charge them — which means the client can idly flip it over and see the back where the word “upsell” is printed right there in black and white.

Now I don’t know about you, but if I were the customer and I saw that word on my receipt, it would pretty much make me want to down-sell and never buy anything from that salon ever again.

I first learned about upselling when I worked in retail during high school and college, so it’s not like the beauty industry invented this term. (I worked at a book store and we were encouraged to persuade customers to add on a cute bookmark at the cash register, or maybe consider grabbing a favorite author’s latest in paperback along with the hardcover.) But while I get the bottom-line-business of it, I still feel like it’s nice to protect the customer, just a little bit, from the dollar signs in our eyes. Especially because we’re taught over and over at Beauty U that selling products and services is our responsibility as estheticians — our moral imperative, in fact, because customers need our help. They’re presenting us with “problems” (frizzy hair, acne, age spots) and asking us for “solutions.” And that means giving “tips” on how to take better care of their skin and hair. Every good tip should include a piece of advice about “what to do,” and a piece of advice about “what to use.”

“I hate the idea of upselling because I feel like it makes customers uncomfortable,” says Meg, as we read aloud from tonight’s PowerPoint lecture on making sales. “What if they can’t afford to buy a bunch of products?”

The PowerPoint has an answer for that: “Customers thinking they can’t afford it is the number one reason they’ll give you to avoid buying something,” it explains confidently.

And then: “Customers who think that are delirious.”

This is because our high-as-kites customers don’t understand that salon products really cost them less, because the ingredients are more concentrated, meaning you can use less and the bottle will last longer than the drugstore crap you usually buy. (Anyone who has ever bought a salon bottle of hair conditioner knows this is a tremendous lie.)

But whether that’s actually true is irrelevant, as we learn on the next slide, which explains that if we’re not sure what a product really does, we should feel free to follow the MSU rule.

MSU stands for “Make Stuff Up.”

As the PowerPoint explains, “If [the customer] wants softness, your product gives them softness.” Personal testimonies are also strong selling tools, so we’re encouraged to tell customers that any given product we’d like to sell is what we use ourselves.(Again, what we actually use being fully beside the point.)

Now, before you all get in a lather, let me state for the record that Miss Jenny is horrified as I read off this slide. It’s her first time teaching the Business Skills unit, and she wasn’t expecting this kind of advice. “Are they kidding me?” she asks, flipping back and forth through the PowerPoint lecture to see if the MSU rule is some kind of Beauty U practical joke. “You can try that tactic maybe once, but if you make a sale that way, it will be the last time you ever sell to that customer.”

But there it is, in black and white on the screen in front of us. So much for the customer cult I was worrying about last month. Apparently at Beauty U, the customer is always right — but also, as far as we’re concerned, kind of a moron.

[Photo: "Stylist Chair So Chic Salon Dream Dazzlers Play Set," $74.98 via Amazon. Because "now you're the stylist with your own stylist chair!"]

Well here’s Robert Pattinson on surviving the cover shoot for the March issue of Details:

“I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vagina. But I can’t say I had no idea, because it was a 12-hour shoot, so you kind of get the picture that these women are going to stay naked after, like, five or six hours. But I wasn’t exactly prepared. I had no idea what to say to these girls. Thank God I was hungover.”

And yet — here he is, manning up to shoot rape fantasy images like this one, despite this naked model presumably having the offensive lady part in question.

I love when actors are even creepier than the repressed, blood-sucking control freaks they play on the big screen.

(Via Salon’s Broadsheet, which sums it all up just perfectly. Second photo via Details.)

But this experience reminded me that when it comes to beauty standards, Brazil is known for a lot more than its disdain for body hair. My friend Melissa of I Heart Daily, was in Rio de Janeiro a couple of weeks ago to cover their Fashion Week and sent me a handful of runway beauty shots so insane, I obviously had to share them with you all.

Runway fashion is so odd and other worldly, I have a hard time getting it to fit with the kinds of beauty standards (be skinny/free of all body hair and pores) that I’m learning to enforce over at Beauty U and that we more generally encounter from the fashion industry. Is this art? Cracked-out designers grasping at straws to get attention for their clothing lines? How to reconcile the above versions of beauty with the pressure these models face to stay clothes-hanger-skinny?

I’m still digging out from under over here (we just moved house, hence the BSP radio silence* over the past few days!) so I’m going to let these pictures say thousands of words… and encourage you all to provide a caption for your favorite (or weigh in on any of my musings above) in the comments.

*Never fear. I’ll be back up to usual blogging speed later this week — and have oh so much beauty school news to report. Stay tuned!

[Photos: © AGÊNCIA FOTOSITE.]