• 30 years: How long 44-year-old Janet Garaguso has been using a safety-pin to declump her mascara every morning, as pictured above, via this Wall Street Journal article on extreme eyelash junkie consumers. They’re known in the biz as “volume seekers,” which seems to be industry-speak for “people with dollar signs stamped on their foreheads.” Remember when I tried to learn to apply eyelash extensions and nearly blinded a girl? Is anyone else troubled by how this trend is making us obsess over perfecting even the teeny-tiniest parts of ourselves?

• $1100: What you’ll pay to have blood injected into your face via a new technique called the Selphyl System. Yes, blood. (Your own.) It’s the vampire craze meets Botox. The benefits are debatable (surely, no?!) — check out these before/after pics on BellaSugar. To me, “after” just looks like it was taken with a more zoomed-in camera.

• 81 percent: How many of us go to bed without washing off our makeup at least once a week, according to this Telegraph story. Because we’re, you know, human. This is the kind of factoid that Beauty U folks (and Big Beauty in general) love to toss around, mostly to emphasize how dumb consumers are (and thus, how desperately in need of our guidance/services/retail products). It distracts nicely from other health problems with beauty products/services (hello, you can inject blood into your face now! not to mention the scads of toxic chemicals in oh, everything) and it makes me tired.

• HB 1248: And speaking of toxic chemicals… this was the bill number for the Colorado Safe Personal Care Products Act, which died in committee this week. Which I’m bummed about because state legislation like this is an important first step towards getting more regulation in general regarding what the beauty industry can and can’t put into their products. (At the moment, there is no law that requires pre-market safety testing for cosmetics and the FDA can only take action against suspicious chemicals once people start getting sick.) I managed to help tip off a pretty interesting debate on why the bill died raging at Not Just A Pretty Face — go join the fray!

[Photo by Bryan Derballa for the Wall Street Journal.]

Our beloved Miss Jenny — the Brazilian Queen, with her straight talk on body parts and refreshingly honest sales tactics — has clocked her last Beauty U. hour.

She told us earlier this week that she had given notice. I’m in a bit of a quandary about how to explain it to you, since the issues revolve heavily around the kind of interpersonal drama that I try to keep off this blog. It just isn’t relevant to our work here, though I’ll admit, it can often occupy a good portion of our 16 hours per week over there. In some ways, it’s like any workplace; egos get in the way, feathers get ruffled, sides get taken. And in some ways, it’s better — Beauty U isn’t any teacher’s full-time job, so you’d hope that would make the strife easier to let go than when you spend 40+ hours a week chained to your cubicle. And there’s a certain level of guaranteed respect from the students, even if colleagues don’t mix.

But in a lot of ways, it’s worse. The pay is bad — Miss Jenny has said it’s significantly less than $20 per hour; I’m guesstimating $15 or under, which only adds up to around $30K per year even if you worked full-time. And the management seems pretty checked out. Since our school is a satellite campus of the main Beauty U, visits from school owner Mr. G are rare. Miss Jenny gave her notice over a week ago and says he has yet to return any of her phone calls, let alone attempt some sort of conflict resolution. Why should he? At that price, in this economy, his workforce can be disposable. Word has it that two new teachers have already been hired to take her place.

Everyone is saddened by the breaking news. Miss Jenny likes teaching makeup more than the other teachers, so Meg and Stephanie are bummed because that was their main reason for coming to esthetics school. “I just feel like this place isn’t turning out to be what I expected,” says Stephanie. But the senior students tell us Miss Jenny isn’t the first teacher to quit abruptly. “There’s a lot of turnover, especially for the night classes,” Sue says.

Dear readers, don’t be too sad. This won’t be the last you’ll hear of Miss Jenny on Beauty Schooled because I’m hoping we’ll keep in touch. And she features in some school stories that I’ve had to file away for post-graduation publication.

But she’ll sure be missed around Beauty U.

BellaSugar has a good discussion-prompting post up: Why Do People Dye Their Hair Blond?

Turns out, being blond is something that blondes have strong feelings about — probably because it comes with a stereotype attached. Check out commenter Lizzie008:

My natural color is like tree bark and it is gross. I’ve been blond for 2 years and I love it. I never want to be “Lizzie the girl with brown hair” because that could be so many people. Being blond makes me stand out, plus I’m not that smart so I can blame it on a stereotype. I’m blond for shallow reasons, but it’s ok.

I mean, as long as she’s owning it?

I had a brief blond thing in college, but it didn’t last long enough for me to make up my mind whether I was adopting or rejecting the blond culture that comes with it. (I saw photographic evidence of how fake blond hair looks with my dark eyebrows and dyed it back to brown.) So, I’m curious: Is there anything about your appearance or beauty routine that feeds into a cultural stereotype? And does that mean it’s something you embrace, or try to change?

Discuss.

[Marilyn/Gentlemen Prefer Blondes photo via Fashion In Motion]

Tonight we watch the senior students demonstrate a body wrap, then get down to business ourselves — bearing in mind, of course, everything Miss Jenny taught us last week about dealing with our clients’ breasts.

Here’s how it works: Your client strips down to her undies and lies face down on a facial bed, which has been covered by a plastic sheet. You lay a big bath towel over her, and then start “dry exfoliating” her, which means rubbing a rolled-up, dry hand towel in circular motions all over her legs and back, peeling back the bath towel over the part you need to work on and then recovering it as you go.

“I always think this part’s just for show,” says Miss Lisa when I ask what the towel actually does. Improve circulation? Slough off dead skin cells? “It kind of draws the service out a little longer.” Okay then.

Next, you massage your client using a special blend of essential oils. You start at the ankles and work up her legs in long strokes, then move up to her back and shoulders. Once you finish applying the oil blend to your client’s back, she flips over under the bath towel (you can either hold it awkwardly and look away, or leave the room and let her wriggle around by herself) so you can work on the fronts of her legs, her stomach, breasts if requested, shoulders and arms.

When it’s my turn to play client, Meg is too shy to attempt any of that breast business, so Miss Lisa shows her how to lay a hand towel on top of the bath towel that’s covering me from neck to ankle, and then, holding the hand towel firmly in place, slide the bigger towel out from under, so she can access the rest of me.

If you’re thinking “wow, that sound finicky,” you’re not wrong. It takes a few practice runs, and Meg and I are now pretty darn comfortable with each other.

Then she moves on to the stomach massage. To be honest, never having had a body treatment before, I thought this would be the weirdest part of all. We’ll save midriff anxieties for another post, but suffice to say, I’m conscious of having downed half a glazed cruller during our break at Dunkin’ Donuts. And when I watch Leslie work on Sue’s belly, I do think, “Hmm, your stomach skin definitely moves around in ways that aren’t totally flattering.” But it’s surprisingly relaxing to experience, maybe because we don’t often spend much time being nice to that specific part of our bodies.

Loretta wants to know if we can use those wooden back scratchers that look like two ping pong balls attached with a handle. “Wouldn’t that apply more pressure?” she asks.

“I think when someone is paying for a service, they’re kind of paying for your touch,” says Leslie, one of the senior students, as she’s working up Sue’s legs. “Your hands are more soothing.”

“It’s true,” says Miss Lisa. “I felt weirder when I had a body treatment done with a brush, because then it seemed like the esthetician was like, ew, I don’t want to touch you.”

I think Leslie means that when a client pays for a spa service, they want your expertise; they can draft a family member into giving a regular old back rub, or using one of those back-massager deals. But the thing is, we’re not at massage school, so we’re not learning any of the science or theory behind the different kinds of massage. We’re just giving a regular old back rub, then wrapping you up in a heated blanket so the product can penetrate more deeply. Our “expertise” all stems from the product we’re using; a specific anti-cellulite cream or blend of essential oils that claims to solve some problem with the appearance of your skin.

But most consumers know that the effectiveness of those products is highly debatable. So Leslie and Miss Lisa might be even more on the money than they realize.

Because it seems to me that the customer is really paying for us to touch them and act like we’re okay about it — even if they are far from okay with their bodies themselves.