Waxing and chemotherapy

[Sj1990]

In the 12 years of being a beauty therapist I’ve never had to come across this till now. I have a lady who’s wanting her eyebrows waxed and tinted on Friday. The day before she’s having her first lot of chemotherapy, I’m just looking for some advice. My gut is to not do it, obviously because she may have sensitive skin after but does anyone think it would be ok doing it tonight instead before her chemo tomorrow? She’s struggling at the moment as it’s still all new for her, I’d hate to say no altogether but at the same time I don’t want to make her situation worse than it already is.

 

[AcidPerm]

No, definitely don’t do any of it.
She’s presumably been diagnosed with a form of cancer and is due to have chemotherapy, so it’s a definite contra-indication.

You certainly don’t want to do anything that might make her skin/body even more sensitive and the resulting treatment more painful for her.

Is there a non invasive service you can offer her instead? Maybe include a goody bag of nice hand cream/nail file, cuticle oil etc?

 

[House Beauty]

Encourage your lady to get a note from her consultation stating exactly the treatments she can and cannot have.

I’ve never heard of any to disagree with beauty treatments, but then I deal with treatments at end of life care, during chemo of stage 4s and those that are survivors. Nobody would take away those small joyful things when going through that.

It can hurt a LOT having just a brow wax, so you could suggest trimming to tidy them for now and you can wax them once she has her consultant note and is on an off week. Depending on what she has it will be x weeks on x weeks off chemo, whereby she will need to avoid beauty on the weeks on as she may feel very ill anyway and it’s not suitable to do treatments, accordingly to all of those i’ve met dealing with it.

The consultants will do the notes for free, unlike many gps that will charge for them. I take a photo of it so they can use it anywhere else without obtaining another, so they can have treatments I don’t do.

But if they turn up and they say ‘my consultant said I can have treatments,’ and they are happy to sign this on consult form, I would personally do it, because there is so much stigma about it and they are already dealing with so much.