Beauty School

From recollection, we started beauty school easily enough – brimming with anticipation and excitement. It was a time when the department stores actually hired people to spray perfume as potential customers wandered through the beauty section, and there were so many of them that the air was a potent mixture of scents. Although we couldn’t actually afford to buy any of the perfumes, we collected samples sprayed delicately on white cards as we passed and offered our wrists when asked to receive a sample on our skin. I think at the time we would have been happy to work as one of these ‘spritzers’ as we liked to call them; although our true aim was to work and gain experience behind a department store beauty counter – offering advice and selling products to the abundance of women who passed through the doors every day. The course only ran for approximately 6 weeks, and therefore was not nearly as long as for those wanting to become a beautician. Nevertheless, it was long enough for us to learn the basics of the skin, skin care, and makeup artistry.

As we were not in paid work during the course, we were relying on the savings that we had taken with us from our home town. Yet, despite planning in advance for our financial commitments – including travel and accommodation; our one and only cab ride; public transport; food and other necessities – we were surprised at how quickly our funds were disappearing. It was especially surprising to us given that we were not spending money on going out or other non-essentials like clothes, makeup, etc. We lived quite modestly in the beginning. A lot of the time after we were finished for the day we would hop off of the bus on Glebe Point Road – sometimes walking hand-in-hand down the street – and go browsing through the local grocery store or the bakery for something simple for dinner. Often all we ate at night was baked beans on toast or we would buy a freshly baked large crusty roll which we halved and ate with strawberry or raspberry jam. Looking back, we had never lived on our own or had to pay for everything before, and we had been more protected than we’d thought growing up. So suddenly we were living in an adult reality that did not completely co-exist with our immature and idealised vision of what it would be like, ‘should’ be like in our minds. Therefore, we quickly learned that independence comes at a cost, and when living in a big city like Sydney the cost can be quite high.

Our grandmother bore the first brunt of our financial woes. She sent us some money just to get us through for a few more weeks. When this disappeared, and we were still looking for work, we did not know what to do. Except as an absolute last resort, returning to our town was never truly an option for us, as we were too stubborn and proud. I think we thought that if we went back we would be trapped forever in our small-town gilded cage, never to be released. We scoured the papers for beauty consultant positions, ‘spritzer’ positions, or for anything else that would tie us over until we landed our coveted role. We came up empty-handed. We knew that even if we secured a role – any role – immediately, it would still take at least a couple of weeks to be paid. If we’d had family who lived in Sydney – or even someone that we knew well that we could have stayed with – we could have extended our search, taken our time, and not have been so desperate. However, this wasn’t our reality. On further searching the newspapers though we started to see other job advertisements, and there were so many of them. For escorts.