The small self-care I skipped for years
On finally booking the small fortnightly maintenance — and what twenty euros every two weeks has done that the products did not.
For most of my twenties I treated self-care as something that happened at home. I bought products. I read articles. I tried, with limited success, to assemble a routine that would handle the small maintenance that a body and a face require.
Two years ago I started booking, every other Friday, a forty-minute appointment at a small no-frills salon in the eleventh arrondissement. The appointment is a simple one: an eyebrow tidy, a hand and nail tidy, occasionally a small facial massage. It costs about twenty euros. The whole experience takes an hour, including walking there and back.
It has been the most useful self-care decision I have ever made. The products at home are still useful. The salon appointment is doing something different, and the difference is the part that matters.
What the appointment does that products do not
Touch by someone else. This sounds slight. It is not. The body in modern adult life can go long stretches without being touched in a non-utilitarian way. The forty minutes at the salon are forty minutes of hands on the body, working slowly and competently, with the only purpose being the small maintenance.
The body responds to this. The nervous system responds to this. I leave the salon every other Friday in a measurably calmer state than I arrived, and the calm holds, slightly, for the rest of the day and into the weekend.
On the no-frills nature
I had tried, before this, the larger more luxurious spas. They were beautiful and the treatments were good and the cost was four times what I am paying now. The luxury was not, for the actual purpose, the part that mattered. What mattered was the regularity, the small competent hands, the absence of theatre.
The small salon in the eleventh has none of the marble and none of the soft music. It has a single quiet woman who has been doing this for thirty years. She does the work. We exchange a small amount of conversation. I pay her twenty euros and I leave. The whole interaction is, by every standard I care about, exactly what self-care is supposed to be.
What I had been avoiding
The cost, mostly. Twenty euros every two weeks is around five hundred euros a year. This is a real number. I had been treating it, for years, as an indulgence I could not justify.
I have come to think of it now as one of the most cost-effective health expenses I have. The calm it produces, the small steady maintenance, the fact that the eyebrows and the nails are simply handled without me having to think about them — these add up, over a year, to a real improvement in how I feel. Five hundred euros for a year of this is, I think, the right price.