Happy Friday! Here’s the last installment from Virginia’s Beauty Schooled guest series. Don’t miss her earlier musings about what happened to her hair and her poor face at beauty school.
I can’t say I had much of a body beauty routine before Beauty U, but I did use shower gel and body lotion daily, especially in winter when my skin gets pretty dry. Once we got into body treatments, that all changed, as again, we played guinea pig and gave each other salt scrubs, mud wraps, and other get-naked-slather-stuff-on-yourself treatments at least once a week. But, twist! At Beauty U, the body treatments were the cleanest spa services on the menu, chemically speaking. Our salt scrub contained only grapeseed oil and sea salt. Our mud wrap used a vat of Dead Sea Mud, which if the ingredient label — and extremely pungent smell — could be believed, really was basically just that. We also had a shelf of pure essential oils that we would use to make treatments smell nice and add aromatherapy benefits to our facials. Even the Cellulite Detox Wrap — where we slathered you up, wrapped you in heated blankets, and let you sweat until you lost an inch or more around your waist, hips, thighs and arms — was made with just essential oils mixed into a carrier oil.
Now, sweating in heated blankets for half an hour is pretty much my idea of hell. You get uncomfortable and lightheaded and start to see through time. And I have major concerns about the idea of doing that as any kind of weight loss strategy. So. Flawed.
But with all of this stuff, my skin did feel butter soft and smooth after I finished. Of course, you can give yourself a heck of a good salt scrub right at home in your own shower. Which is what I do now.
For more on how my beauty routine changed during beauty school, check out my four-partBeauty Labor Series. Have you ever had to overdose on toxic beauty treatments? Are you recovering from any hair or skin product panic attacks? Tell us all about it in the comments.
Here’s part two from Virginia, who is taking us inside her beauty school experience. Yesterday she talked hair and today we’re going to find out what happened when beauty experiments were launched on her face. You can read more of Virginia on her awesome blog Beauty Schooled.
Before Beauty U, I washed my face during my morning shower, slathered on some SPF moisturizer, and left it at that. And my skin was pretty awesome. I got the occasional breakout around my period and kept a tube of benzoyl peroxide on hand to dab on the odd trouble spot (not clean, I know!) but otherwise, I’ve been extremely lucky to have the kind of skin where strangers would stop me in stores and ask me what I used on my face. And be annoyed when I would say “ummm, whatever is in my shower?”
Then, on my very first night at Beauty U, Miss Jenny demonstrated the Daytime Face makeup application using me as the model. She stippled on a thick liquid foundation from the school’s motley cosmetics collection. “I don’t even know what this stuff is,” she said. “I prefer mineral makeup, but we’ll work with what they give us.” My skin looked like it had been spray-painted. I went home and scrubbed it all off the best I could with my random drugstore brand facewash—and woke up the next morning with a pile of monster zits on my forehead. Which proceeded to go forth and multiply all over my face for the next 10 months, because four nights a week, I would have to pile on yet more skanky makeup, cleansers, toners, glycolic peels, mineral masks, you name it.
My skin’s panic attack became the focus of many a class—Miss Jenny forbade me from using what we all agreed was a super questionable liquid foundation, used me to demonstrate the school’s fanciest acne-fighting facial (think masks that smelled like synthetic dog poo and led to yet more breakouts), and even tried zapping my zits weekly with glass electrodes from the high-frequency machine. This is a gadget (like this one) that uses a sinusoidal electric current of 60,000 to 200,000 Hertz frequency to vibrate the water molecules in your skin, producing heat that manufacturers claim will stimulate circulation, oxygenate the skin, and kill acne-causing bacteria. In reality, it does nothing whatsoever except buzz loudly and sting like hell when someone turns the current up too high. I was also everyone’s favorite guinea pig for extraction practice since I had so much to squeeze out. This resulted in my developing an abnormally high pain threshold for pinching.
And I wasn’t the only one struggling with skin troubles. While the teachers liked to attribute my breakouts to my infrequent hair washing, frequent phone use, and not changing my pillow cases often enough, it was a widely accepted fact among the students that the process of learning professional skincare would result in a period of weeks or even months of hardcore skin rebellion. “We’ve all been there,” the senior students would say as they painted the synthetic dog poo mask on my face. “You’ll get better once you can practice on real clients instead of each other.”
Stay tuned for part three tomorrow!
We are so happy to have Virginia back as a guest blogger. This week she’s taking us inside her beauty school experience, talking about her hair today, her face tomorrow and her body on Friday. Enjoy…
Hello again! It’s Virginia from Beauty Schooled. Last time I visited y’all, we talked about how toxic cosmetics and body image woes sometimes feel like different issues, but actually add up to One Big Beauty Problem. I can personally attest to this because I spent 10 months in beauty school, slathering myself with all manner of toxic goo, and watching my body image get kinda warped in the process. So I thought I’d give you a rundown of just what kind of chemical-laden beauty stuff I dealt with every day at Beauty U—and how they wreaked havoc on my hair and skin.
HAIR:
Full disclosure: My hair has always been my chemical-laden pride and joy. So before beauty school, I was regularly slathering it in all manner of silicone-based anti-frizz creams and shine serums. l also heat styled it straight almost daily for a good 10 years—but about a year before I went to Beauty U, I suddenly decided to embrace less frequent washing, air drying, and my natural waves. My hair was happy and healthy, and a little argan oil was pretty much all it took to keep frizz at bay.
Then I got to beauty school and the esthetics teachers told me over and over again that infrequent hair washing would lead to breakouts. “All that grease is just sitting on your scalp!” they’d exclaim. “It’s just seeping into your pores!” Every time I’d get a facial, they’d extract multiple comedones (that’s school-speak for pimples) around my forehead and hairline and tell me to wash my hair more often. So, I went back to washing it daily. Which meant my hair was dry and frizzy, which meant using gobs of conditioner and styling products to combat that. And even though the bottom half of my hair looked like straw, my scalp went into grease overdrive because I was stripping away all my natural oils with harsh shampoos. Which meant my hair looked dirty the day after I washed it. And so, I wanted to wash it even more.
To be continued tomorrow!
Hello! I’m Virginia of Beauty Schooled, a blog where I investigate the price of pretty. I’m so excited that Alexandra and Siobhan asked me to guest post, because I am obsessed with their book to the point that I carry it in my purse when I go to the store to stock up on conditioner and face wash (that’s not weird, right?) and also, they are totally awesome people.
A little while ago, I bullied these ladies into guest posting on my blog, and we started talking about how cleaning up your beauty routine can lead to you also feeling maybe a little bit free from all those “you MUST look like [insert-whomever-in-Hollywood-here]” beauty standards that we all hold ourselves to, often to a pretty major degree.
And it was a little bit of a light bulb moment for me.
