The independent esthetician is a force to be admired – the kind of person, often a woman, who ventures through licensing exams and training under chaotic management to decide that the risk (and how great the risk is) will be worth the reward of small business ownership. Each represents a more tactile version of female professional success than the Harvard-educated COOs gracing magazine covers. Networks and technologies continue to enable the ambitious to strike out on their own. Sola Salon Studios, whose business model centers around housing individuals in personal, equipped rooms within a larger community of salon owners, has made independent small business ownership more palatable. Other technologies for payment and appointments, like Square and Mindbody, offer solutions to the business-side of owning a salon. 

Still, in pandemic times, a virus that preys on close contact does not comport with an industry built on personal, in-person relationships. When the lockdowns began, hair and nail salons were singled out in California as high-risk businesses that would be some of the last to reopen. Newsclips showed rows of chairs, clients reclined side-by-side, and workers under one roof diligently tending to customers. A hotbed of intimate, less-than-six-feet connection. Implicit in the shutdown of hair and nail salons has been the closure of other services, like waxing, facials, and microblading, and singular estheticians in private studios. As a result, the personal studios I had booked appointments with closed up shop with the March mandate, left to an ensuing uncertainty. 

The barbershop kinship of being in an esthetician’s studio and having someone know you and your skin like a long-term relationship is a comfort. One that feels so long lost now. My esthetician has known me in the thick of final exam stress, through college graduation, and in the hardest parts of the job search. My skin has matured and undergone pubescent mood swings undulating between oily and arid. These past six years, pores have clogged, popped, and pocked. I’m left with pits that remind me of being young and lacking the self-control to leave my skin alone. Blemishes feel gritty, dirty. There is an irresistible urge to associate imperfections with personal failure and impurity when uncontrollable factors like genes, hormones, and age have as much to do with skin resiliency. To lie on the table as an esthetician feels the grooves and scars on your face is vulnerability incarnate. 

I miss having my face touched, examined, and extracted. As I await our world to open again, there’s a stillness in the hope that the landscape of the society I knew before will have altered in only the slightest of ways afterward – the private studios and women I’ve met reappearing with it.