Manicures, Waxes and Victoria’s Secret: The Price of Spring Break Prep

ABC News on Campus reporter Julia Aubuchon blogs: Syracuse University student Dana Smith said she thought a trip to the gynecologist was uncomfortable: “But that was until I got a Brazilian bikini wax.” Smith, like many other college girls, spent last week preparing for the much-anticipated vacation from college life: spring break. It's a process she says costs a lot of time and money.
 
“I’ve spent lots of hours procrastinating doing all of my actual homework, looking at bathing suits online, and ordering them and sending them back, and spending more money on shipping than anything else – and this all started in the beginning of January,” said Smith.
 
Along with those teeny bikinis, Smith has visited the tanning bed, nail salon, and esthetician – indulgences that don’t include the $1,300 she’s already spent for her trip to Cancun. “I don’t even want to think about how much I’ve spent,” Smith said, laughing. “I just got so much. I think I’m going to be in really big trouble when my Dad gets the bill. I want to say, maybe another $1,000, I don’t even know… that’s really bad.”
 
Beauty salons on and near Syracuse University have all profited. “We’re typically a very busy salon, and then you add the urgency of wanting to get ready for spring break,” said Dominick Barbano, the owner of Garbo’s Salon on the SU campus. “So we do hundreds of bikini waxes and Brazilians, hundreds of highlights and haircuts, hundreds of manicures and pedicures – there’s just several thousand students on campus that are going away.”
 
When Barbano was asked how he prepares for this surge in customers, he quickly replied, “Prozac,” before laughing it off. “We bulk up our staff,” he said. “We have about a dozen college students that are assistants here, and they’re on full alert. We typically double the size of them, in terms of how many hours they’re here. So everybody puts their own lives basically on hold. The urgency factor creates a little bit of organized chaos for us.” Noel Aliseo, a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Syracuse, is one of the several thousand going away. She has seen firsthand the amount of money girls spend simply preparing for spring break. “A couple weeks before this week, I know that every girl that’s going on spring break raided the Victoria’s Secret catalogs and were online 24/7, running into each other’s bedrooms, showing them which one they were buying, which one’s on sale, which one’s cuter,” said Aliseo. “We probably had about 30 Victoria’s Secret packages show up on our doorstep.”
 
While Aliseo tried to be frugal with her money this year, she too fell victim to the pre-spring break splurging and spent more than she anticipated. “I’m embarrassed to say,” Aliseo said. “Probably around $500. I mean I really shopped for sales because I knew I was spending a lot of money on my actual spring break. I went on the Victoria’s Secret website and went to the sale section. I shopped at Target and Forever 21, which aren’t very expensive, and really tried to be smart about how I spent my money since I was spending so much on the actual vacation. But even so, I’ll still end up spending around $500, maybe $600,” she added.
 
But the spending doesn’t come without a justification. “This is my one and only college spring break. I travel with my family a lot, and I was abroad last year, so this is my only typical college spring break,” Aliseo said. “I don’t plan on going to Cancun, in this type of atmosphere, ever again. “Well, maybe my bachelorette party,” she added with a smile.