Anyone who’s had an overtly physical job knows that it takes a toll on your body.
Jobs like delivery people, factory workers, farmers, wait staff, retail workers, coal miners, professional athletes, windmill repair workers, Knights of the Round Table, Hitmen (and women) and of course the people who live in gym punching bags — all come to mind.
One thing that might not come to mind, though, is hairdressers. But maybe it should. After all, they spend their entire day standing up, hunched in weird positions, getting their hands and tools into weird places while they try to do very careful, precise work.
To prove that the struggle is real, and the bodily damage is even realer, a massage therapist named Hitesh Patel shared this photo of one of his clients, a hairdresser:
No, she didn’t get beat up during her shift. Those marks are called Petechiae — small red marks that appear as a result of bleeding into the skin. Patel explains that “because you’re spending hours standing on your feet rotated forward, whilst holding a brush in one hand and a hairdryer in the other angle over your clients head for hours and hours, your muscles develop and start holding your skeletal system in an unnatural off centre position.”
Thus, blood vessels start to break and these types of marks appear. Patel explained that the toll the job takes on your body is also lasts long after the shift ends. “When you finally do you put down your crimping equipment. And try and sit down and a natural neutral position it just doesn’t work,” he added.
Fortunately, there are solutions to this problem you can do at home.
“To reset your muscles we need to gua sha (a traditional Chinese medical treatment in which the skin is scraped to produce light bruising) all the scar tissue, (work into) and stretch your muscles and then re-align your spine,” Patel says.
There’s also just basic stretching. “If you can stretch every day – doing yoga or Pilates – that will definitely help, along with soaking in a hot bath with Epsom slats and getting a regular massage or bodywork treatment to keep yourself in tiptop condition.”
Basically? Give it up for your hairdresser. She or he is doing something that’s a lot harder, and takes a much bigger physical toll than anyone really knew.
