Walked into a spa in downtown Austin and nobody was wearing gloves during extractions

I stopped by a new spa near 6th Street last week to check out their vibe and maybe pick up some tips. Watched two estheticians doing back facials without a single pair of gloves on. Made my skin crawl honestly. How hard is it to grab a box of nitrile before you start digging into someone's pores?

4 comments

4 Comments

the_drew16d ago

Made my skin crawl" is EXACTLY how I'd put it too. I'm not even a skincare guy but even I know you don't go poking around someone's face with bare hands. Honestly I've gotten facials before and I always assume they're wearing gloves until I see otherwise. Now I'm gonna be paranoid every time. I've had enough random pimples pop up on my own face that I reflexively wash my hands like 50 times before touching anything near my skin. These estheticians must have immune systems of steel or just don't care. I bet a box of gloves costs less than their lunch downtown.

craig.olivia16d ago

Nail on the head @the_drew, except gloves aren't actually the standard for every single step in a facial. Some places use bare hands for the massage part because you need that skin-to-skin feel to actually work out tension, but they should be gloving up the second anything extraction-related or product-related happens. Even then, fresh gloves for every client is the bare minimum. A box of 100 nitrile gloves is like eight bucks at the drugstore, so yeah, there's zero excuse for skipping them.

juliaa658d ago

Is it just me or does this laziness show up everywhere now? I swear I walk into a grocery store and see someone handle produce with the same hands they just used to scroll their phone on the toilet. It's like people forgot basic hygiene exists outside of a pandemic scare. The gloves thing with estheticians is honestly no different than a fast food worker not changing gloves after handling raw meat. It's that same mindset of "this is fine, nothing bad ever happened before." And what really gets me is how cheap and easy the fix is, like you said a box of gloves is nothing. But people would rather save a buck than have any ounce of respect for their customers health. I notice the same thing with people reusing the same gym towel for a week, or waiters refilling my water glass with a hand that just picked up a dropped fork off the floor. It's just this whole attitude of cutting corners where it really counts.

wadejenkins16d ago

My barber once told me he uses the same comb on every customer and hasn't washed it since 2019, so I feel your pain.