Look good, feel better: Beauty therapy as emotional labour

This article is based on research among beauty therapists in two cities. Th erapists saw their work less in terms of what it does to make women look be tter, more in terms of what it does to make women feel better. They describ ed 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 underst ood 'as an instance of occupational rhetoric'; the interviewees stressed th e emotional work they performed as an argument for a better and more profes sional perception of beauty therapy than it actually enjoys. But it can als o be read as a description of aspects of the labour process in which they a re engaged. Like much emotional labour this expenditure of effort on the pa rt of the beauty therapists is not reflected in pay and conditions, being t o a large extent socially 'invisible' in a highly gendered (but not sexuali sed) occupation. Therefore the claim to perform emotional labour may be a s omewhat risky strategy in terms of developing a 'professional project' for beauty therapy.