Working in the beauty industry can be truly rewarding. It can also be physically demanding.
If you’ve been in the industry for more than a few years, you may already be familiar with sore shoulders, a tight neck, and lower back aches, to name a few. You may even believe that these aches are just “part of the job,” but they don’t have to be. Pain and injuries are not inevitable for beauty professionals.
Maybe you’re leaning forward over clients all day, keeping arms raised during cuts and color, or twisting your torso every few minutes to pick up products. When you repeat these movements day after day, the nervous system adopts these postures as your new normal, even outside of work.
You may not even be aware of it, but when your body adapts to these abnormal postures, chronic tension slowly builds throughout the body day after day. Over time, the resting level of tension increases in the body. This rise in tension often goes unnoticed until one day you get pain and symptoms and it begins to negatively affect your wellbeing and the quality of work you produce. It can even reduce career longevity. After all, it’s not uncommon to know someone who had to leave the beauty industry due to a painful condition.
To add to all of this, it’s not just the physical demands of the job that take their toll. Beauty professionals often act as confidants, sounding boards, and emotional anchors for their clients. Absorbing clients’ stories of heartbreak and life’s ups and downs adds emotional stress to the tension already transpiring in the body.
Co-founder Heather Hughes, a Somatic Movement educator with 13 years working in the beauty industry, developed the course with her sister Tiffany Hughes (shown), a seven-year professional lash artist, to bridge the gap between career longevity and physical sustainability.
Why Tension Builds—and Why Stretching Isn’t Enough
Firstly, many beauty professionals do not realize that chronic muscle tension is often the root cause of many physical symptoms they face such as carpel tunnel syndrome, neck aches, and muscle knots that never go away. If left untreated, tension can even pull the spine out of alignment.
Secondly, no amount of stretching or massage will create long-lasting change to tension levels. Most available solutions only provide temporary relief before the tension or pain comes back. Because the nervous system controls muscle tension in the body, we must create change within the nervous system by teaching it to release and lengthen muscles for better alignment, improved posture and long-term results.
Somatic Movement: A New Approach for Beauty Pros
But there’s good news in all of this. With a newfound awareness and the right tools, the physical and emotional challenges of working in the beauty industry can be counteracted and even reversed.
At The Balanced Beauty Pro, we teach beauty professionals how to reduce and eliminate muscle tension and imbalanced postures through a unique system called Somatic Movement.
These movements are unlike anything you’ve probably tried before. They are performed on a mat by slowly contracting muscles in a specific manner, and then slowly releasing the contraction. By doing this, the nervous system learns how to let go of chronic tension by relaxing and lengthening the muscles beyond their normal levels. If done regularly, the nervous system learns to relax muscles, reducing chronic tension and preventing it from happening. For someone who isn’t in pain already, doing these movements now is even more beneficial.
Connecting Body and Mind for Better Wellbeing
It’s also equally advantageous to connect with your body. Many go through life not feeling a connection between body and mind. By developing a relationship with your body, you can learn to pick up on its messages and provide it with what it needs each day, which benefits the mind. It’s a nice mood-boosting cycle.
The Balanced Beauty Pro, an online wellness course, launches this September to help beauty service professionals care for their bodies while extending the longevity of their careers.
Protecting Your Most Valuable Tool: Your Body
The truth is, your body is your most valuable tool. It’s the foundation of your career. Beauty pros are taught the skills to perform their jobs, but rarely are they taught the skills to protect their bodies long-term so that they may do what they love for as long as possible.
By prioritizing your body, you won’t just reduce pain, you will gain more focus, more ability and you will produce better work for greater success.
Meet The Balanced Beauty Pro
While dealing with chronic tension and headaches while working in the beauty industry, Heather Hughes often encountered other industry professionals who were also dealing with some form of chronic discomfort while working. After Somatic Movement alleviated Heather’s chronic symptoms, she became a Somatic Movement Instructor with the aim to help others, including her sister Tiffany Hughes, a seven-year professional lash artist.
The Balanced Beauty Pro is an online wellness course created specifically for beauty service professionals, co-founded by Heather and Tiffany. The course is designed to reduce chronic tension, improve posture, increase wellbeing and extend career longevity. With a science-backed approach that blends Somatic Movement, mind-body connection, and ergonomics, The Balanced Beauty Pro empowers professionals to protect their bodies and thrive in their careers.
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