If you have curvy, larger legs, one beauty salon in the UK will charge you extra to wax them. Is this legal? Apparently so.
The Sun UK reports that The MM Bubbles salon in South Kensington has begun enforcing extra charges for women who are size 12 and above. Women sizes 12-16 get charged an extra £5 for a 45-minute leg wax, which is about $8 USD. Women who are a size 18 and above get charged an extra £10 ($16 USD).
The average British woman is a size 16, so this means this salon is basically charging a bulk of their customers an extra fee because they have larger legs. The reason? They feel that since the use of more materials is required, the customer should have to pay extra.
The Sun UK did their own investigation to confirm these additional charges by sending a size 22/24 model to the salon to get a leg waxing. The model, whose name was reported as only “Helen”, was actually charged £26 ($42 USD), which is an additional £5 ($8 USD) over the advertised price. A size 14/16 woman visiting the salon was reportedly charged an extra £10 ($16 USD).
The newspaper reports that Christina Damela, one of the salon’s beauty therapists, confirmed that additional charges for leg waxes are applied to larger women.
Huffington Post reached out to the salon for a statement and this is what they had to say:
“Please note that this is quite common in beauty salons in London. Our waxing prices are advertised as ‘starting from.’ I don’t see this approach as a discrimination against larger persons, is just common sense. If we use more time and products on one particular customer we need to add a small surcharge. We cover our extra costs in this way. The same logic is applied when someone is going in a hairdressing salon. He/she will be charged depending on the length of the hair.”
What do you think of salons imposing extra charges according to size and weight? Do you think their comparison of body size versus hair length is an accurate way to justify the extra charges? Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.