Two Questions Nobody Asks Out Loud
Ring around this city for a male Brazilian and you will hear a lot of no. Some of it is polite, some of it is a hung-up phone, and almost none of it comes with a reason.
Ask a man why he drove across Toronto to a studio run by a bloke rather than walking into the salon at the end of his street, and you will get a shrug and something vague about being more comfortable.
Both of those get filed under squeamishness. Neither one is squeamishness, and after twelve years in the room I would say the real reasons are more interesting and considerably more defensible than the industry lets on.
I want to take both halves seriously, since I sit at the exact point where they meet. My clientele is roughly ninety per cent cis and trans male. Every one of those clients had the option of going somewhere else, and a fair number of them tried first.
The Thing Underneath All of It: Nobody Is Protecting the Practitioner
Start here, because every other part of this makes sense once you see it.
Esthetics is not a regulated profession in Ontario. There is no college. There is no complaints body. There is no standard of practice, no mandatory boundary training, and no disciplinary process. Waxing, facials, lash and brow work, general esthetics: none of it requires a provincial licence. What does apply is your local public health unit inspecting the room against the Infection Prevention and Control in Personal Service Settings standard, which is about autoclaves and single-use applicators rather than about anything that happens between two people.
Electrolysis is the outlier, and only voluntarily. Certification comes through the professional associations rather than through statute, which is precisely why I hold mine and why I spent years on the board of the Federation of Canadian Electrolysis Associations. Voluntary is better than nothing. Voluntary is not a regulator.
Now look at the regulated profession next door, and notice what its rules do not cover. Massage therapy in Ontario is governed by a real college under the Regulated Health Professions Act, with a zero tolerance framework reinforced by the Protecting Patients Act, 2017. Sexual touching of a client's breasts, anus, genitals or buttocks by a therapist triggers mandatory revocation of their certificate. The College's own position is unambiguous: a client can never give true consent, and the therapist carries the entire responsibility for ensuring abuse does not occur.
Read that framework looking for the practitioner and you will not find her. It protects clients from therapists. It says nothing at all about a client harassing a therapist. Not a standard, not a process, not a mechanism.
So the most protective regime in personal-service work runs in one direction only, and the trade I am actually in has no regime whatsoever.
That is the whole answer to why a woman working alone in a treatment room declines male clients. She is not delicate. There is no institution standing behind her, no board to report to, no licence at risk on the other side of the table, and nobody coming if it goes wrong. Refusing half the population is the only risk control she has been given.
MY TWO CENTS
I have never once heard a female colleague describe it this way, and I think that is because the conversation has always been framed as her personal comfort rather than as an industry failure. Framed as comfort, she sounds fussy. Framed accurately, she is doing unpaid risk management for a trade that never gave her a policy.
I get the easy end of this and I know it. A six-foot man in black scrubs is not lying awake about the eleven o'clock booking.
The Numbers, Which Are Worse Than People Assume
No survey of harassment against estheticians exists in Canada that I can find. The closest proxy is massage therapy, and the Fédération québécoise des massothérapeutes agréés published figures from a survey of its members that should stop anybody in this industry cold.
- Sexually harassed at work: 73.4%
- Sexually assaulted during work: 19.2%
- Received sexually suggestive phone calls: 67.4%
Be careful with that data and I will be careful with it too. Those are massage therapists, not estheticians, and the professions are not identical. What is identical is the setup: one practitioner, one client, a closed door, a person undressed, and hands on skin. Nearly three in four harassed, and one in five assaulted, is the closest honest read available on the room I work in.
The third row is the one I want to point at. Two thirds received suggestive phone calls. That is before anybody arrives. The screening problem starts at the booking, which is exactly where a solo operator has the least information and the least support.
Abuse in this industry runs both directions and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Large chains have faced allegations from well over a hundred clients about their own therapists. Both things are true, both need naming, and neither cancels the other.
Dialling It In
There is a category of enquiry that is not about hair removal. Anybody who has run a treatment room for more than a year can spot it, and nobody writes it down, so here it is written down.
The tells, roughly in order of how often I see them:
Asking who will be doing the treatment before asking what the treatment is. A legitimate question if somebody has a preference for good reasons, covered further down. A tell when it is the first question and the price never comes up.
Refusing to name the area. People are shy, that is normal, and shy people still answer a direct question. Somebody who will not say the word after you have said it twice is not shy.
Negotiating the draping. The towel is not a matter of opinion.
Pushing for the last appointment of the day, combined with any of the above.
Asking whether the room is private, then asking again.
The word "full", deployed vaguely and repeatedly. In this trade it means a full area. Elsewhere it means something else, and the ambiguity is doing work.
Anything about what the practitioner will be wearing.
MY TWO CENTS
I turn these away and I do it early, on the phone or by message, before anybody has driven anywhere. Nobody gets a lecture. It is a variation of the same sentence: I do not think we are a fit, all the best.
The thing I would say to newer practitioners is that you are allowed to be wrong. You will occasionally decline somebody who was only awkward, and the cost of that is one lost booking. The cost of the other error is not one lost booking.
I would also say do it in writing where you can. A message thread is a record. A phone call is your word against theirs, and this industry has already established that nobody is coming to check.
Erections, Which Everybody Fears and Almost Nobody Handles Well
This is the single most common reason men give me for not booking anywhere at all, and the second most common reason estheticians give for not taking men.
The physiology is boring and it deserves to be treated as boring. Deep relaxation is a parasympathetic state, and so is an erection. Sustained touch on a relaxed body in a warm quiet room can produce one with no arousal, no intent and no thought involved. Massage therapy has treated this as a normal autonomic response for decades. It happens in dentists' chairs. It happens during long-haul flights.
Two completely different things get confused with each other, and separating them is the whole skill.
The first is involuntary. It arrives, it is nobody's fault, and the correct professional response is to carry on and say nothing. Commenting on it is the error. A practitioner who reacts has made it an event, and the client, who was mortified already, now has a story that stops him booking anywhere for a decade.
The second is performative. It comes with commentary, with movement, with a hand that wanders, with eye contact held too long. It is not the same thing wearing the same clothes, and it ends the appointment.
I wrote a whole post on the first one, because the fear of it keeps more men out of treatment rooms than the pain does: what happens if you get an erection.
MY TWO CENTS
Twelve years, thousands of appointments, and the number of times an involuntary erection has caused an actual problem is zero. The number of times it has caused a problem for the client, in his own head, on the drive over, is close to all of them.
The way I handle it is that I do not handle it. No pause, no glance, no reassuring speech, since a reassuring speech is just a slower way of pointing at it. Whatever I was doing, I keep doing.
If it is the other thing, I stop, I step back, and the appointment is finished. I have done that a handful of times. It is not dramatic and nobody argues, mostly because a person doing that already knows what they are doing.
A Lot of Estheticians Were Simply Never Taught
Here is the part that gets missed entirely, and it turns out there is authoritative evidence for it.
In 2019 the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal heard expert evidence on exactly what Brazilian waxing training covers. The finding was that standard industry training covers vulva waxing only. Waxing a scrotum is a different technique, involves prolonged contact with male genitalia, carries its own injury risks, and is marketed and taught as a separate service under names like brozilian or manzillian.
So when a salon says it does not do men, that statement is very often literally true rather than a dodge. Nobody trained them. The course they paid for did not include it, the additional training costs money and time they are not being reimbursed for, and the technique is genuinely different rather than the same job on different anatomy. I have written about the technique itself in the brozilian post and there is a reason it needed its own post.
Anybody who has waxed a scrotum badly does not do it twice. It is loose, mobile, thin-skinned tissue over something you cannot afford to get wrong, and the margin for error is far smaller than on a vulva. Declining to attempt it untrained is competence, not prejudice.
MY TWO CENTS
There is a market sitting right there and the industry keeps handing it to me. Male grooming has been growing for twenty years and the number of Toronto practitioners properly trained to do the intimate end of it is small enough that clients drive in from Oshawa and Hamilton.
If you are an esthetician reading this and you want that market, get the training, then charge properly for it. The reason I can run the pricing I run is not nerve. It is that the supply is thin.
The Law, Which Is More Careful Than Either Side Pretends
This subject gets shouted about online by people who have not read the decision, so it is worth being precise.
The Ontario Human Rights Code covers goods, services and facilities as a broad category, and it protects against discrimination on grounds including sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation. Where another law conflicts with the Code, the Code generally prevails. A private salon is a service provider under the Code, not a private club.
The leading case on hair removal specifically is Yaniv v. Various Waxing Salons (No. 2), 2019 BCHRT 222, decided 22 October 2019 by Tribunal Member Devyn Cousineau. The reasoning is careful and it is the sentence that matters most in this whole post:
"A person who customarily waxes vulvas cannot discriminate amongst their clients with vulvas, and likewise for a person who customarily waxes scrotums. However, human rights legislation does not require a service provider to wax a type of genitals they are not trained for and have not consented to wax."
Read what that actually does. It draws the line at the service rather than at the person. Offer a service and you must offer it to everyone. Do not offer it, or lack the training for it, and nobody can compel you to perform it on a body you were never taught to work on.
That single line protects the female esthetician and the trans client at the same time, which is why it is the right line. A salon cannot decline a trans woman for a service it provides. A salon can decline a service it does not provide to anybody.
The tribunal also found several of the complaints had been filed for improper purposes, including targeting racialized and immigrant women, and awarded two thousand dollars in costs against the complainant to each represented respondent. That part gets left out by whichever side is quoting it that week.
Two caveats, said plainly. The decision is from a British Columbia tribunal, so it is persuasive in Ontario rather than binding. Nothing in this section is legal advice, and if you are an operator facing an actual complaint you want an employment and human rights lawyer rather than a blog.
MY TWO CENTS
My reading, as somebody who has sat on a board and holds certificates in labour law and negotiations rather than a law degree, is that this decision is good news for everybody except the people who wanted a fight.
The practical version for a studio is short. Publish what you do. Publish it by area and by technique rather than by who the client is. Train for whatever you list. Then treat whoever books it.
Where I think a lot of salons quietly get it wrong is the middle ground: they do offer the service, they just do not want to offer it to men, and they use the training answer as cover. That is the version the Code has a problem with, and rightly.
Why Some Men Will Only See a Male Esthetician
Now the other half, and it is less about safety and more about being looked at.
Modesty and faith. Preference for a same-sex practitioner in intimate care is well documented across healthcare and is not remotely unique to this trade. For plenty of my clients it is simply not a negotiable point, and it does not require a justification any more than a woman requesting a female physician does.
Being judged, which men expect and are usually wrong about. There is good research on this. A study in the Journal of Consumer Culture interviewed thirty-nine men about grooming and found a persistent stigma the authors called invisible consumption: the product leaves no visible trace, and the man will not discuss using it either. One industry participant summarised it perfectly. He would use it, and he would not be seen to be using it. Another respondent put the whole thing in nine words: it is just not really a boy thing to talk about.
There is a clear age gradient in that research. Younger men are relaxed about grooming. Older men still read it as unmanly. The men who arrive at my door most braced for judgment are consistently in their forties and fifties.
Being explained to. A specific and very common complaint. Men who have gone to a general salon often describe being talked to as though they had wandered in by mistake. Everything gets explained twice, in a softer voice, with an implication that this is unusual for a man. Nothing hostile happens, and they never come back.
Being the only man in the room. Waiting areas in this industry are almost uniformly designed for women, down to the palette and the magazines. A man on his first Brazilian has already spent a fortnight talking himself into the appointment. Fifteen minutes on a pink sofa is enough to talk him back out.
Gender-affirming care, where it is individual rather than a rule. For some trans men, being handled intimately by a woman during pre-surgical clearance is the wrong signal at exactly the wrong moment. For some trans women, a female practitioner is precisely right and a man would be the wrong signal. Both are correct and the mistake is assuming either one generalises. This is why I ask rather than guess, and it is a live question across the donor site clearance and facial clearance work that makes up a real share of my week.
Sexual orientation, where the mapping is not clean. Some gay men prefer a male practitioner. Some gay men specifically prefer a woman, so that nothing about the appointment could be read as interest by either party. Some straight men prefer a man for the mirror image of that reason. There is no rule here, and every attempt I have seen to build one has been wrong about somebody.
MY TWO CENTS
The reason given at the booking is almost never the real reason, and that is fine.
Men tell me they came because I am closer, or cheaper, or had a slot. Six months in, the same client will mention offhand that he tried two other places and left one of them without being treated. Nobody leads with I felt humiliated. It surfaces sideways, later, once he has decided you are safe.
So I do not push for the reason. I just do not do the thing that caused it.
Talking, and Why the Chat Is Part of the Treatment
People want to be comfortable, and a lot of them get comfortable by talking. That is the single most underrated thing about this job. Somebody who is nervous, half-undressed and about to have a genuinely difficult service done will very often talk their way through it: jokes about the situation, questions they already know the answer to, running commentary on how much it hurts. It is how they hold their nerve, and it works.
The industry instinct is to read all of that as something to shut down. My honest view is that instinct does more harm than good. Warmth is most of what makes a first appointment survivable, and a practitioner who answers every attempt at conversation with clinical silence makes an awkward twenty minutes considerably worse.
So I meet people where they are. Some clients want to talk the whole way through and some want nothing said past the instructions, and reading which one is in front of you is a real skill rather than a personality trait. Neither is a problem. Both are the client managing their own discomfort in the way that works for them.
Where it stops being comfort is not subtle. It stops when the conversation stops being about the situation and becomes about the person, when it needs a particular response rather than an easy answer, when it keeps going after the moment has passed, or when it escalates because you did not give it what it wanted. That has a completely different feel to it and I have never once had trouble telling the difference.
One line I hold regardless of the mood. I do not start it and I do not carry it further than the client took it. Being easy to talk to in a room where I am holding the wax, setting the pace and running the appointment is a different proposition from being easy to talk to anywhere else, and the difference is who has the power. Keeping that straight is the actual professional skill, and it is what lets me be warm rather than stiff without it ever becoming a problem.
MY TWO CENTS
This is the part a lot of my colleagues would not put in writing, which is exactly why it is here.
The pretence that a treatment room is a sterile encounter between two professionals is not true, and everybody in the room knows it is not true. It is an intimate, awkward, occasionally funny, entirely human twenty minutes. Denying that does not make it safer. Being clear about where the line sits, and holding it without being cold about it, is what makes it safer.
What to Do With All This, If You Are Booking
Ask for the practitioner you want, by gender, without apologising. Any competent studio has heard the question a thousand times and is not offended. A studio that makes you feel awkward for asking has told you something useful for free.
Say the area plainly. Use the word. The person on the other end has said it forty times today and would much rather you were specific than that you both discover the misunderstanding with your trousers off.
Ask what they are actually trained in, not just what is on the price list. Those are different questions and the second one is the one that matters.
Ask who else is in the building. A reasonable question, and the answer tells you how the place thinks about safety.
If somewhere declines you, it is very often training rather than judgment. Ask them who they would send you to. Most will tell you, and it is frequently the fastest route to the right person.
What to Do With All This, If You Are an Esthetician
Declining male clients is a legitimate choice and you owe nobody an explanation. The law protects the shape of that decision as long as it is about the service rather than about the client.
Say what you do and do not offer, in writing, by area. It removes the awkward phone call and it puts you on the right side of the line the tribunal drew.
If you want the male market, go and get trained properly, then price it as a specialty. The supply of properly trained practitioners in this city is thin enough that clients drive an hour.
Write your scripts before you need them. The decline, the boundary, the ending of an appointment. Nobody improvises well under pressure and having the sentence ready is most of the work.
Screen in writing wherever you can. A message thread is a record and it costs you nothing.
The Honest Summary
Half this industry not treating men, and a good share of men not being treated by women, both come back to the same missing piece. There is no framework in personal-service work that protects the person doing the treatment, and there is very little in the training that prepares either party for how exposed the encounter actually feels.
Everybody involved is improvising a solution to that. A woman declining male clients is improvising. A man driving forty minutes past three salons is improvising. Neither of them is being unreasonable, and both of them would prefer the trade had sorted this out at the institutional level so they did not have to.
Until it does, the workable answer is unglamorous. Say what you do. Train for what you say. Ask people what they need instead of deciding for them. Then be warm about it, since almost nobody walking through that door for the first time is as relaxed as they are pretending to be.
If this is your situation, these go together. your first Brozilian, start to finish, what a BROzilian actually covers, erections in the treatment room, who my clients actually are, how hair removal is regulated in Ontario, what a medical esthetician is qualified to do and laser hair removal for men.