You and your day

A regular client cancels her monthly appointment for the second month in a row, and on the third call mentions she has lost her job. A new technician you trained has left to set up at home, taking some of her clients with her. A young woman comes in asking for a treatment that a year ago she would never have asked for, because she has seen it on social media. An older client mentions she does not feel comfortable in some of the language being used in the new training program. A migrant nail technician quietly mentions her visa renewal is being held up. None of this arrives labelled as politics, and none of it is helped by reading a piece of legislation.

Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in the 1790s, argued that the social pressure on women to focus on beauty was politically constructed rather than natural, and that it shaped what women could be, do, and earn. Two and a half centuries later, the conversation is still active, but it has changed shape. What has changed is the recognition that the pressure does not land on all bodies equally and does not land only on women. The intersecting positions of race, class, sexuality, disability, and migration produce very different political experiences of beauty work and beauty consumption.

Reading those politics is part of running a beauty business, part of choosing what to offer, and part of deciding who you want to serve.

Your community and clients

Beauty happens at close range with people who are letting someone else work on their face, their skin, their hair, or their body. The intimacy of the work creates a different kind of political space than most service industries. People talk in the chair. They talk about their families, their work, their relationships, their bodies. They talk about how the world is treating them. Beauty workers hear things that no one else hears.

 Different communities have different politics around beauty. A wealthy inner-city clientele has very different relationships to cost, to standards, and to what counts as care than a working-class outer-suburban one. A Sudanese-Australian client looking for a salon that knows what to do with her hair is navigating different politics again. A trans woman trying to find a wax studio that will treat her with care is navigating yet another. A queer client looking for a beauty space that does not assume what she wants is finding one or not. 

When a regular client cancels because she has lost her job, the politics of cost of living are at the chair. When a new client asks for something she would not have asked for a year ago, the politics of social media are at the chair. When a beauty worker is treated dismissively by a client, the politics of class and migration are at the chair. The work is always political, even when the conversation is about lashes.

Your Council and neighbourhood

Local Councils shape beauty businesses through planning controls, signage rules, trading hours, footpath rules, and the politics of which strips welcome which kinds of business. The political composition of a Council shapes how supportive the local environment is for beauty operators, especially for newer arrivals to a strip and for businesses run by women, migrants, and queer people.

A multicultural strip and a wealthy strip and a queer-friendly strip have different politics, and different beauty businesses are welcomed differently on each. The way Councils decide is also political. Established businesses tend to be better resourced for Council engagement than newer ones. Property owners tend to be heard more than tenants. Reading whose voice is being amplified locally, and whose is not, is part of reading the politics of beauty.

Your state

State politics shapes the beauty industry through health regulation, anti-discrimination law, vocational education funding, and worker safety. Cosmetic injecting, skin treatments, and other technical work are regulated at state level, and the rules vary. State governments also shape who can train as a beauty therapist, on what funding, and how migrant qualifications are recognised.

State politics also shapes how clients and workers are protected. State anti-discrimination law shapes whether a trans woman can be served in any salon she chooses, whether a queer client can be confident she will not face discrimination, and whether a worker can refuse a client who is harassing her. The political mood of a state government shapes how those protections are understood and enforced. Reading state politics for beauty means watching health, multicultural affairs, anti-discrimination, and worker safety politics, not just beauty-specific announcements.

The nation

The national politics of beauty in Australia is shaped by gender politics, body politics, regulation politics, and the long-running conversation about who decides what beauty is. The federal conversation about workplace harassment that opened up with the Respect@Work inquiry has reached beauty businesses, and the politics of client harassment of workers is now visible in ways it was not before. The national conversation about cosmetic procedures, about who can perform them, about how they are advertised, and about their effects on clients, is also live.

The national workforce conversation in beauty is also a migration, race, and class conversation. The beauty workforce in Australia is overwhelmingly women, disproportionately migrants, and often working multiple jobs. Different women experience the work differently: a young Australian-born technician, an older migrant nail technician, a trans woman beauty worker, a Black beauty specialist, and a working-class woman with children at home all sit inside the same industry under very different political conditions. The political settlement that produced this workforce is the same settlement that has kept beauty wages low for decades.

The region

Beauty across the Asia-Pacific is shaped by very different political settlements on women's work, migration, queer rights, and informal labour. Aotearoa New Zealand's beauty industry is structured similarly to Australia's but with some important political differences, including a more politically integrated relationship between feminism and labour movements.

Pacific Island migration into Australian beauty raises political questions about who is recognised as skilled and whose hair, skin, and grooming traditions are centred in the products and training sold to the industry. The same is true of South-East Asian and South Asian migration. Many of the people doing essential beauty work in Australian cities arrived through migration pathways that did not formally recognise their skills, and now work in roles below their qualifications.

Regional politics also shapes supply chains. Most of what stocks an Australian beauty business comes through Asia at some point, often via political conditions and labour conditions that few salon owners are paying attention to. The politics of women's labour in product manufacturing in countries Australia trades with reaches the Australian beauty business, slowly and indirectly, through pricing.

The world

Globally, beauty politics is in the middle of a long shift. The earlier feminist critique of beauty as oppressive has not disappeared, but it has been joined by a more complicated conversation about beauty as agency, beauty as labour, beauty as cultural expression, and beauty as racialised. Black women, trans women, disabled women, and women from many cultural traditions have argued that the politics of beauty looks different from the position they sit in.

These global conversations reach Australian beauty businesses through clients, through workers, through products, and through training. The politics of cultural appropriation in beauty, of who can offer which traditional treatments, of who is qualified to work on which kinds of skin, hair, and bodies, are getting louder. So is the politics of digital beauty: filters, AI-generated faces, algorithmic standards of appearance, and the question of what counts as a beautiful face when faces themselves are being generated.

The global political backlash against feminism, queer rights, and racial equality is reaching beauty businesses too. Industries built around bodies the backlash targets are politically exposed. Salons run by trans women, queer-affirming spaces, multicultural beauty operators, and Black beauty specialists feel that exposure first. The next decade of global identity politics will shape what beauty in Australia can be.