Now, let’s step back from Spa Week for a paragraph and consider this. Most of the beauty procedures you undergo are not one time deals. You brush your teeth every day. You do your nails every few days. You do your hair a few times a week. Also, you exercise a few times a week. You see your dentist and clean your teeth a few times a year. See a pattern? You build a successful relationship with service provider, you build a trust – and then you both use it to a mutual advantage. You get the service, they get the money. If one of you would not be happy, it can surely find a way to make the other one unhappy too. If you don’t pay – your nails don’t get done, your hair is a mess and even your gym may deny you access (duh!). On the other side – if you aren’t happy with your nails – you may leave less tip or even search for another place altogether.

Back to Spa Week and all the complicated laser treatment procedures. The whole idea of Spa Week is to get you into the laser treatment place and attempt to sell you a package of service. If you don’t need a package – you don’t need a treatment at all – and you will not receive a good treatment, that’s for sure. Most of laser treatment places – or should I say, respectable laser treatment places – would NEVER BOOK A REGULAR CLIENT FOR A SPA WEEK. There could be a few exceptions, but if they value you as a client – you will have to press them hard enough to be booked. Why? Because technicians are overworked, tired and pretty much every treatment is being done as fast as possible – because it only earns a technician a lousy 5 – 10 bucks. Barely a good lunch in Manhattan. Which means your experience during a spa week is pretty much useless – you can’t say how good or bad place is during normal hours, because of how good or bad the place was during spa week. Simply because a lot of places hire extra help for a week or two and then let them go. Because laser treatment technicians are overworked with hasty procedures and multiple sales pitches. Because of the enormous pressure on staff overall – most people barely have time to take a sip of water, let alone have lunch. And most of all – because Spa Week isn’t about giving clients a good treatment, it’s about giving spas and salons a higher foot traffic, so that they can get a stab at larger amount of people.

Spa Week is not about you, it’s about the money. Don’t trust anyone who says otherwise.

Actually, by spending quite some time on both sides of laser machine one could easily come up with things to ask. Think of it as of an interview. You are giving this specific technician your skin. Depending on how professional and knowledgeable they are your skin may look flawlessly great or desperately burning for next couple of weeks. Some procedures actually require the technician to give you a controlled burn, so you have to have trust in that technican. Go for a few smaller-scale procedures first, see how that works out.

Particular to Manhattan there are a few places where you really would pay almost nothing, but if you get just nothing in return – consider yourself lucky. This usually happens because of the business model these NYC laser spas are following. They hire one or two knowledgeable people, promising them everything and a kitchen sink. Then they hire a dozen off-the-street girls who undergo some vendor-based training (which would be a few hours at best) and around a week of sporadic hands-on training by those knowledgeable people. Whom they soon replace – in a matter of two-three months. In the next four to six months they keep treating clients, burning quite a few so that the spa is forced to either provide a money back or free sessions. Once the number of disgruntled clients gets high enough pretty much everyone is fired and the cycle starts again.

Most of these so-called “professionals” have little – if any – understanding of the actual physics of the procedure, therefore lacking the basic knowledge needed to determine the proper treatment. In oh so many cases in Manhattan the sale is made by receptionist who have no idea what exactly is that she’s selling. A lot of NYC laser spas and salons don’t let laser technician speak to prospective clients – because owners are afraid to loose clients to technicians’ side gigs. This rises mistrust between technicians and business owners to such a degree that technicians, in fact, do opt out for doing side gigs on owner’s machine. In these cases tips easily outweight salary while leaving owner totally unaware of the situation.

While not making any recommendations, the general advice here is if you find a laser technician that gives you a result you want – stick with her (or him). There’s plenty of laser skin treatment places in NYC so as long as that person is employed somewhere – you should be fine.