Look Good, Feel Better: Beauty Therapy as Emotional Labour

Abstract

This article is based on research among beauty therapists in two cities. Therapists saw their work less in terms of what it does to make women look better, more in terms of what it does to make women feel better. They described the treatment as offering stress relief and greater self-confidence, but also described the work they do to manage their own emotions in the salon. Beauty therapy could, therefore, be seen as a form of what Hochschild has called ‘emotional labour’. The authors argue that this claim can be understood ‘as an instance of occupational rhetoric’; the interviewees stressed the emotional work they performed as an argument for a better and more professional perception of beauty therapy than it actually enjoys. But it can also be read as a description of aspects of the labour process in which they are engaged. Like much emotional labour this expenditure of effort on the part of the beauty therapists is not reflected in pay and conditions, being to a large extent socially ‘invisible’ in a highly gendered (but not sexualised) occupation. Therefore the claim to perform emotional labour may be a somewhat risky strategy in terms of developing a ‘professional project’ for beauty therapy.