On the discipline of skin

The skin is not the surface of the body. It is the body's argument with the world — its weather, its biography, its inheritance. To work on the skin is to enter a conversation that began long before the practitioner sat down, and that will continue long after the appointment ends.

In the European classical tradition, the aesthetician was first a student of anatomy, then of chemistry, then of touch. The hands came last because the hands were what everything else trained. A practitioner who began with the hands, who tried to learn the work by imitating the gesture without understanding why, was politely told to come back when she had read the texts and watched the lectures and practised the protocols on a mannequin until the order of operations was as familiar as the order of letters in her own name.

This unfashionable order is, I want to argue, what made the discipline a discipline rather than a craft.

What the order trained

The order trained patience. It trained restraint. It trained the practitioner to recognize that the face she was about to work on had a history that would not yield to a single visit, and that the temptation to do something visible was, in nine cases out of ten, the temptation to harm.

The order also trained a particular kind of attention. The student of anatomy spent weeks reading the same illustrations of the integumentary system before she understood, in her hands, what those illustrations meant. The student of biochemistry learned, slowly, that a given active ingredient is rarely active in the way the marketing of it implies, and that the lipid matrix of the epidermal barrier is a more conservative architecture than the industry has ever found convenient to admit.

By the time the student arrived at the protocols themselves — cleanse, analyse, exfoliate, extract, mask, finish — the protocols were not a script to be followed. They were the obvious consequence of the training that came before. They were the way a person who knew what she was doing would have arranged the visit, given the time available and the face in front of her.

The first six months of a competent practitioner's training do not touch a face.

What we kept; what we added

Maison Academy was founded on the conviction that this order is still right. We kept the order. The first six months of Le Fondement are, by deliberate choice, six months in which a single hand is rarely laid on a single client. The student studies the integument, then the cosmetic chemistry of what we put on it, then the protocols that will become her grammar for years.

What we added — and the conservatism of the addition is the point — is a fourth literacy: data. The modern practitioner reads patterns the eye alone cannot reliably catch. She reads them in her own clinical history. She reads them in the cohort of clients she has the privilege of seeing repeatedly across years. She reads them, sometimes, with the help of computer-vision instruments that are now reliable enough to be trusted with calibrated questions and never with conclusions.

The literacy of data is not a new discipline. It is the same discipline, equipped with one more sense. The order is preserved: the science before the chemistry before the protocols before the hands. The instrument is added at the end, where it belongs.

What this means for the practitioner you are becoming

You will arrive at the academy with whatever order your previous training imposed. Some of you will have begun with the hands and arrived at the science afterward. Some of you will have begun with the chemistry and arrived at the touch. There is nothing wrong with the order in which you came; we will arrange it again, gently, into the order that the discipline asks for.

You will leave the academy with that order folded into the way you think. Not as a rule you remember to follow, but as a way of seeing that no longer requires the rule. That is what discipline is. That is why we teach it.

— Hélène Marchand, Faculty Chair