Are you a skin care professional or spa owner who loves what you do, makes great money and wants to do it for years to come? Well, state legislators, uneducated “skin experts” and irresponsible journalists want to hang your facial business out to dry, and the time to act is now.
Yesterday, I happened upon a particularly infuriating article by Time titled “You Asked: Do I Need to Get a Facial.”1 While the article isn’t new, its core is one that I see often in the beauty industry’s competitive landscape. Those who see esthetics as a revenue threat challenge its efficacy and necessity. This article is essentially steering those interested in “serious skin improvements” away from estheticians and to a dermatologist’s office, quoting (of course!) a dermatologist.In May, we published an article by Elizabeth Donat that addressed combatting the faux-fessional. Skin care professionals are challenged with a sea of bloggers and at-home “beauty experts” that take away their business everyday. These “beauty experts” see esthetics as a revenue threat and are therefore devaluing your expertise, your education and most of all, your license.
In the same vein, legislators in a number of states are working to reduce the number of hours needed for an esthetic’s license and even deregulate esthetics entirely. For those that may think of this as positive, reduced hours might be less work, but it leaves the skin care professional unprepared and at risk for major mistakes. Deregulation, of course, would allow anyone to claim themselves an expert and do treatments on a client. I don’t need to tell you how much damage this can do both to the esthetics industry and the client. Instead, I am deferring to an industry colleague and friend Susanne Schmaling, who founded the Esthetics Council2 to champion esthetic rights and be a voice for our industry.
“We are at a pivotal time for our profession. Do we work together to show an organized front with a common voice that represents professionalism, standards and evidence-based work, or do we continue to be divided, promote unfounded results that have no proof and continue fighting in social media groups? The choice is ours, and the next couple of years will be the test. So what can we do? Get involved, get educated on areas you do not have sufficient knowledge in, show proof of your skill set and start talking to the consumer. Don’t sell them on modalities that may or may not work but offer skin health coaching that help guide them through the 60,000 plus brands trying to sell them every day.”
I hope this letter lights a fire in skin care professionals. You are valuable, now speak it.
Yours in Education,
Katie Anderson
Senior Managing Editor
References
