I’m a big fan of imperfection. Believe it or not, I view imperfection as the ultimate goal of a professional skin care practice. This may come as a jolly surprise to my employees, who know that my management style is hardly laissez-faire. I have a fixation for hospital-cleanliness, for instance. To paraphrase the great Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now, I love the smell of Windex in the morning. Clutter bugs me, and I don’t know how otherwise reasonable people can work in it. Until quite recently, I could not tolerate denim worn in the office (I’ve never been a fan of “Casual Fridays”), because I thought it brought out the most slovenly tendencies in people.
We were not rounding up escaped hoof-stock, after all.
So by saying that I embrace imperfection, I am not talking about sloppiness or carelessness. I am talking about going beyond mastery of mere studied technique. If you look at the skin care treatment experience as a product, I think that in our pursuit of refinement of the product, we can lose sight of its soul. So the treatment becomes slick, perfectly practiced, but a spiritually anemic void.
Sticking with the product analogy, look what’s happening in the trend-sensitive arenas of fashion and food. Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers have striven to give us products with factory-finish, as far removed from the homelier versions made by hand—no irregularities, no flaws, no surprises (like, say, botulism). But the pendulum has swung.
Becoming a great therapist versus a superb technician means recognizing that you can never really give the same excellent treatment twice—and you shouldn’t even want to. If this is your driving passion, then you have turned yourself into a machine, or at least a mechanic. Mechanization in every area of modern life has been offered to us as a preferable alternative to low-tech methods of creating and manufacturing things, but now we see a backlash. People are knitting themselves big, lumpy ponchos and shaggy sweaters rather than wearing a flawless but characterless, mass-produced garment. We’re snapping up rough-hewn, “artesanal” breads and cheeses at farmer’s markets rather than the robotically uniform equivalents produced by major food manufacturers. Why? Because we hunger, literally, for authenticity—products which connect us emotionally to their makers.
That said, I do support perfectionism when it comes to manufacturing skin care products. This has cost me, and many, many people on my team, many sleepless nights.
But a skin care treatment is not really a product in the same sense. It is more like singing a song. Your delivery will be a bit different each time you sing it—faster, slower, sweeter, jazzier, sadder–and in the case of the skin therapist, it should be different each time, since you are accommodating the needs of the particular client’s skin on that particular day.
Strictly speaking, this would mean that you are not in absolute control of your medium. There may need to be adjustments, and you cannot anticipate these. And if you simply tighten your grip on the techniques you spent so many years learning, then you will lose your ability to improvise in order to connect with the client.
Client A is unique, and utterly different from Client B. It’s arrogant, or perhaps simply naïve, to think that a treatment which perfectly suits the needs of Client A is also ideal for Client B. From the beginning of my career as a professional skin therapist, this is why I have rejected the notion of skin “types”. There are no permanent types, there are only skin conditions, and I view these as moving water. The therapist is navigating her craft, no pun intended, through these moving waters. While of course it’s essential to our professionalism to be able to deliver consistent work, it’s also the big wake-up call of our careers to realize that each day, each skin brings new challenges and potential rewards. In other words, your air-tight formula isn’t air-tight. Your perfect strategy isn’t perfect. Your flawless petrissage may be all wrong for tomorrow’s 4:00 pm appointment. Now what?
This is the power and beauty of what the Japanese call “Wabi-Sabi”. In his “skinny” volume on the subject (Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 1994), Leonard Koren says, “The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become.”
But words ultimately fail when we’re trying to express the impermanent, the imperfect, the incomplete. Have a look at Becoming Being Passing (Verba Volant Publishing, 2005), where German photographer Sabine Pankert records the life-cycle of a bunch of white tulips in a vase, from plump green buds to just a powdery smudge of dry pollen.
As with Pankert’s tulips, it’s a life-cycle. It may take the skin care therapist many, many years to understand that the journey does not end with technical mastery. Perfection of technique is only one step in the process. I am the first to say that mastery of the skills of professional skin care treatment, ranging from the painless extraction to the scream-free Sphinx wax, is a very important plateau to reach—but it’s probably also the most dangerous place in the process of becoming a truly inspired skin therapist. Because you can get stuck on that plateau indefinitely.
Therapists tend to view the science, craft, and art of our work as a competition, and an extreme sport. We emphasize results in our profession, and once again, there is no one more committed to getting results for clients than me. But here’s the punch-line to the huge Zen joke of it all: it’s actually the imperfection, I believe, that makes for the most effective treatment, and builds the most vibrant, lifelong professional practice.
Only machines can perform the same task tirelessly again and again. Unless there’s a circuit misfire, a machine will never shuffle the order of the treatment steps, try a new approach, add or eliminate a step, or introduce a new product. This requires letting go of the literal definition of what we do, and seeing what happens next when we listen to intuition instead.
The other day, I admired a ring that a friend of mine was wearing. It was obviously an old ring—I could tell by the patina of the delicate gold setting. The setting held a smooth, rounded oval of the coral which is called angel-skin, and as I touched it, I felt a little chill. Bear in mind that I have spent my entire professional life touching human faces, mostly female faces. On the surface of the ring, I could barely trace the outline of a small, left-facing profile, human, female. The ring had once been a cameo. Now the woman’s carved face was no more than a soft, pink blur, nearly erased by time and perhaps a century of wear. It was simultaneously haunting, mysterious, melancholy, and exquisitely tender to touch the memory of what had once been a sharply chiseled portrait, a bit like watching the tide take a sand castle back to its source.
When we were students, we improvised all the time. We had to. We were just learning our craft. Then, we got good at our jobs, and stopped questioning how we did things. Too often now, we think that in order to keep performing well, and to protect our success, we must cement our practice into place so that nothing can ever go wrong, or so we hope. If our favorite back-bar product is discontinued, we fly into a tizzy. If something disrupts our rigid approach to our work, we snap into a tailspin. We hang onto the winning formula we’ve worked out, because it gives us a feeling of being in control. It’s a nice feeling—but it’s a trap.
I’m not talking about taking imprudent risks in the treatment room. I am talking about sensing tension, fatigue or sadness in the trusting skin of your client, and adding a little essential oil of Lavender to the steamer because it’s been used to relax and lift the spirits for more than a thousand years. It might mean adding reflexology to the treatment when you sense it’s needed, even though it’s not how the protocol was taught to you. Or perhaps you feel moved to respond to something in the face or even the feet (they tell the entire story, don’t you know) of your client, at which point you depart from the perfect script which you have worked for so many years to embed indelibly into your neurons and fingertips.
This is the moment I call freefall, when science and craft give way to art—and whether you know it or not, it’s the moment you’ve been moving toward since your first day as a student of skin care. May we always remain students!
Jane Wurwand, established The International Dermal Institute, a postgraduate skin and body care training center, in 1983. Jane teaches her innovative education and product philosophies throughout the world. Under Jane’s continuing direction, The International Dermal Institute is the research and development center for the Dermalogica professional skin care line, introduced in the U.S. in 1986 and currently distributed worldwide. Jane can be contacted through The Dermal Group at 310-352-4784, or by e-mail at janewurwand@dermalogica.com. .
