How much does it cost to get back on track after the summer when the children are finally back at school?

First school morning. Mishka can’t find his sneakers, Sonya asks why she can’t go to school with her hair down, even though no one forbade it. Without five or eight minutes I drop her off at her school, in ten minutes at his, and here I am in the car in the parking lot with coffee in my hand and for the first time in three months I owe no one anything before three o’clock. I open the camera on my phone to check if there’s toothpaste on her T-shirt, and I see the face that spent all summer at the pool, on the beach in Laguna, and in the car with the windshield down. By nine I have a photo rejuvenation appointment, and it was in the calendar since July because the first school morning in our house belongs to me, not the children.

Regarding the manicure, the root canal and a cleaning by a beautician, I already discussed that last time and I won't repeat it. Now let's talk about what summer does to us and how much it costs to undo it.

Dark spots on the cheeks by the end of August

The California sun doesn’t hide anything. By the end of August, a cluster of spots appears on my cheeks that in May were just little pimples, but by September they have turned into what aesthetician politely calls sun damage. For three consecutive years I’ve tried to get rid of it with a peel, and every time the week of peeling falls exactly on my parent-teacher night at school, when I have to sit in Mish’s classroom among other moms and pretend everything’s fine with my face. Last fall I finally did what my esthetician in Irvine had long advised me to do and went for a photo rejuvenation. It’s an outpatient procedure, flashes of light hit the pigment, the spots darken for a week, then fade away. At the clinic on Keewill Hill, the face costs $150, the face and neck $200, which is modest by county standards. If there are only two or three spots, they can be removed there, $50 per spot, and in the first year I did just that. I haven’t given up peeling; I just do it in October, when all the parent-child evenings are already over, and I pay two hundred and twenty-five for the Perfect Derma Peel at the same clinic.

Hair after the pool and keratin at Baranka

Sonya swims, I swim with her, and Chlorka does to my hair what no hair dye can do. Dry, brittle, and frizzy. Two years ago I found a hairdresser in Barranquilla Parque, he does keratin for two hundred and sixty dollars for short hair and more expensive for long hair, two hours, and after that I don’t know what a blow dryer is for in the mornings for three months. In the area the range is wide, from one hundred and eighty in Santa Ana to four hundred and fifty in Fountain Valley, and the price doesn’t really say much about the result.

Here, Marina from Vienna in Northern Virginia wrote in the chat; she lives across the street from Tyson's. Marina has three children and a schedule that fits everything in, including keratin. She found a master in Annandale for two hundred, signed up for the first school day from nine to eleven, and managed to get to school on the pickup. Her friend goes to Arlington for three hundred and fifty, and Marina considers that a rip-off for parking. It's useless to argue with her; her entire September is scheduled down to the minute.

The eyebrows burned, the eyelashes too

The first person to get their eyebrows done this year was Yulia from Sunny Isles; she just sent me a photo of her eyebrows. Yulia is thirty-six, she lives on Instagram, and everything should be done by the first day of school as if summer hadn’t happened. Under the photo was a price list from a salon on Collins Avenue: one hundred for the eyebrows, one hundred and thirty for the eyelashes. In Avon, across the bridge, they charge ninety for the same thing, but Yulia won’t go there; she doesn’t have any friends at the reception desk there.

After the summer, my eyebrows get burned to a state of «were they ever there?» The hair-dyeing and laminating solution solves this for a month and a half; in the area, they charge from sixty-five to eighty for it, and I go to a master from Tashkent who takes cash upfront and also tells me who among my mutual acquaintances has experienced what. The eyelash-lifting costs about the same, eighty, and I do it once a year, in October, along with the peelings, because the mascara takes another four minutes in the mornings, which I don’t have.

Irra from Chicago is not surprised by anything.

Ira from Chicago has been here for thirty years and is not surprised by anything. To my figures, she replied briefly: her keratin count in Buffalo Grove is two hundred and fifty, the express version is one hundred and fifty, and the figure, according to her, has hardly changed in recent years; it just seemed expensive before. Then she added that after a summer in sandals, the first thing a normal woman does is get a pedicure, and everything else comes later. My pedicure in Irvine costs sixty dollars, and it really does appear on the calendar on the first Tuesday of the month, only two hours later, after coffee with Marina over the phone and before the pickup.

Kirill decided that I bought a phone

Now I’m calculating it. Photofacial, pedicure, and eyebrows cost about three hundred without gratuity in the first week. Keratin, peelings, and eyelashes in October add up to just under nine hundred. Kirill saw the receipt and asked if I had bought a new phone. No. I bought myself a new phone for twenty minutes in the morning. No fan, no mascara, no concealer for blemishes, and I can look in the mirror without squinting. In my opinion, that phone wouldn’t have given me that much trouble.

The distribution by city is so uneven that my figures are only a guide; you’ll still have to look at your own price list. What I was able to compare across six cities is listed in the table below, along with a checklist: tick off what you’ve done and it will add up to the total.