When I was a preteen, I was the “odd kid out” at school. With my often-torn hand-me-down clothing from the 80s, I didn’t exactly personify the ultra-wealthy town I grew up in. My parents invested almost all their cash into moving there so that I could get a good education.
The end result? I was a little tatterdemalion who looked upon my classmates’ 90-dollar Abercrombie jeans with envy. My classmates always looked so stylish. Truly, they were the epitome of the middle of the 1990s school fashion.
I also looked at the makeup counters at the mall’s department stores with envy. I wanted, so badly, to just get a smudge of eyeshadow on me, a dollop of foundation, or a smear of lipgloss to myself. It was just out of price.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t occasionally try to get glamorous. I tried to paint my hair silver blue with some lipstick I found lying out in the sun on the ground. That almost got my head shaved because it turned into a foul-smelling glue that stunk up my classroom so bad, my teachers had to send me home early.
My attempts at looking glamorous weren’t always from makeup found on the asphalt. I sometimes tried to wear makeup at the mall so that I could maybe convince the cool kids to speak to me for more than five seconds.
This often led to problems. Once when I was 14, I saw my school crush walking through the mall. I slowly made my way to a makeup counter and tried to put on some eyeshadow with a cotton ball only to hear the dreaded phrase:
“*Ahem* Can I help you?”
The lady at the counter looked down her nose at me. She wasn’t smiling. She was glaring and letting me know that, no, I do not need help and that I should leave the premises as soon as possible.
I got startled and immediately felt the “know your place” stare boring into my young soul. Feeling judged, I ran away from the counter with only one eye done in a deep purple shade. Needless to say, it didn’t give me the glamorous look I thought it would.
Time passed. I glowed up.
By the time I was in my early twenties, I was able to occasionally afford makeup. This led to a new passion-turned-career for most of my adult life—including today. I became a fashion, makeup, and runway model. Later, I became a plus-size model, but that’s a different story.
Once I glowed up, things changed. The makeup ladies at the department store were a lot more amenable to my presence a. They smiled and would subtly gesture toward their stands, but I still felt that chill of judgment from when I was a preteen.
I never really went to department stores for makeup because I always felt so out of place there. I ended up doing a lot of online orders or sticking to Ulta and Sephora because they let me play around with the makeup there, no judgment involved.
If you are a salon owner, this story can be a major teaching point.
In “glamour” industries like salons, fashion houses, spas, and makeup counters, there’s a certain assumption that being snooty gets you good clients. There’s a certain old-school prestige that comes with saying that you’re going to the ritziest, snootiest, most A-list spa in town.
But is it always that nice? Not really.
As a person who worked in fashion, I can tell you that most models do not really care where they go for their services. As long as the work is good, they’ll be happy to spend their money there. And as a rule, the local “in crowd” will always try to go where the glitterati goes.
People who are on the “out” crowd will pay top dollar to be serviced by people who look them up and down, give them a judgmental look, and add a side of snobbery to their service. The funny thing is that they generally don’t stay loyal customers. After all, they’ll always be chasing the next trendy thing just because they can.
So what do the glamorous people really want?
It’s better to ask what they don’t want and work backward from there.
What most influencers and models don’t want to deal with is pretenses. They don’t want to deal with people who are snobby or fake. Keeping up your looks is a lot of work. It’s also expensive and most models don’t have the interest to splurge on treatments that cost less if they just travel 20 minutes further.
Since upkeep is expensive work, the last thing we want to do is deal with people eyeing us like a fat paycheck or trying to make us feel like we’re not worthy. Most models I know want to go to a salon that acts like a welcoming, stress-free oasis that serves a bonus of glamour with it.
And really—is that such an unreasonable request? Not at all.
Be upscale, but welcoming.
Contrary to what old school business owners might believe, upscale does not have to mean snobby. This is not the 1970s, it’s not a French restaurant with a snooty British waiter, and you don’t have to have a gold statue in front of your venue to flaunt that you’re for rich people.
Upscale can be modern. Upscale can be clean. Upscale can be friendly. Above all, upscale should be a place where people can rely on great service—even if they don’t always look like your ideal customer at first glance.
