The X Factor

One of my responsibilities at Preston Wynne is helping to ensure that we select the best estheticians. Though the spa business is notoriously high-turnover, I’m proud to say that we have an esthetics team anchored by five, eight, ten year-plus employees. Our grand dame, Laura, a master esthetician, is going strong in her 20th year, developing mind-blowing anti aging programs with endless creativity. (She’s like a great chef, but her medium is skin care.)

Thanks to the growth we’ve been experiencing, we need to find someone special to add to our team. This esthetician will be joining a pretty elite group. Not only does our candidate need to be knowledgeable and skilled, he or she has to have a great personality and superb communication skills. He or she needs to be “relatable” to a teenage acne sufferer or someone like me, a 50-something Boomer trying make peace with her incipient dewlaps. We’ve winnowed the candidates down and now our top pick will be showing us her stuff.

Today, that poor woman will have to give me a facial.

Plunked into a alien treatment room with products she’s never before used, she will have to approximate a wonderful facial treatment. She is going to have to do this more than once, mind you.  I’m just one of the “test subjects.” My challenge is to lie there and try to act like a client, instead of comforting the poor thing, whose hands may be sweaty or shaking, or both.

Even under sub-optimal conditions, the X Factor will usually shine through. A great esthetician is a great improviser. Most are mad chemists, able to decipher an ingredient panel on any product and know what to do with it. As always, I will up the “degree of difficulty”: I can’t use anything containing an alpha hydroxy acid.

I know, sad.

If she passes this test, she begins the whirl of training and orientation that all our new hires, regardless of experience, go through. Learning our protocols. Finding out where we keep all the myriad mysterious bits used by estheticians. Making sure she understands how to prep and break down a treatment room. Making sure she’s able to give the world class customer care that we’re so passionate about.

Wish us both luck!