Notable Noticeable's

The amount of money dancers pay for clothes and makeup is kind of staggering. It never ceases to amaze me. I joked in a previous blog post about the similarities between fishing and dancing. I know a dancer that had a tool box for all her MAC makeup and other goodies but how much do these things really payoff? What do us customers really notice?

I can only comment from my position as a regular and these are just my observations: recently I was sitting with a dancer who was complaining that she hadn’t been tanning recently and felt she looked pale. I did a quick comparison with myself and her. I always use myself as the official standard of pale. I’m about as pale as you can get and still have pigmentation. Imagine the Pillsbury dough man with glasses. I simply just don’t tan. I just go from white to red and back to white. If I do start to get a tan something has gone horribly wrong. I always put on sun block when I go out into the sun. Not just any sun block, but 90+ stuff. I want the lights to dim when I walk into a room. I know over a certain sun block number I’m just wasting my money, but I don’t care.

Getting back to the dancer I really couldn’t tell if she was really pale or not. We were currently being bathed in red and blue LED light. She actually had a rather nice complexion for a smurf. The red and blue light resulted in a really lovely shade of purple. You can't really judge skin tone in most strip clubs. Between the lack of lights (it’s dark in most strip clubs) and what lights they do have are all either colored or flashing. Most of the time you can’t really tell how pale a dancer is.

Some dancers will intentionally create tan lines for the copper tone girl look. I spent one evening at the club trying to estimate what skin tone dancers actually had. The only generalizations I could make are dark hair girls tended to look paler than blondes. The outfit also make a difference, dark clothes made the dancer look paler. Light clothes made her look tan. The real conclusion is that if you don't have any sort of benchmark to compare against it’s really difficult to tell how tan a dancer actually is. It’s easier for dancers to judge each other because they see each other in the dressing room. That gives them a reference point.

This leads to another question, if the typical customer can't tell how tan the dancer is why should she be spending money on the tanning? If it makes her feel more confident about her looks then she should. Attitude is huge when it comes to a dancer’s money. Lots of drop dead gorgeous girls make terrible money because they just sit at the bar, drink and don't approach customers. If tanning makes her feel more attractive and more positive than it’s definitely worth the money.

In my opinion clothing makes a big difference. This may sound kind of odd coming from a guy paying to see clothes being removed. My first impression of a dancer is when she is wearing clothes. I'll probably decide in the first 30 seconds if I'm going to spend more money on her. I've always found it odd that some dancers treat clothes like fishing lures. If customers aren't biting with one outfit she'll "upgrade the slutwear" and change to something else. While I initially didn't give this much credence, there may be something too this. Different days and times draw different crowds. What a group of twenty something hipsters might find attractive late Friday night is probably different than a group of forty something mid life crisis guys would find attractive early Saturday evening.

Another important factor about clothes is most customers’ first impression is at a distance. Most customers’ first look at a dancer usually comes at a distance, usually from across the room. Dancers have the really difficult problem of being scrutinized from both really close up and from over 30' away. Clothing can greatly enhance that first impression.

I've notice that tattoos don't always work so well with clothes. I admit that being older that my biases toward tattoo's are different the people younger than me. While I tend to be ambivalent towards tattoos after I've gotten to know the person, my initial impression is always a little negative toward them. Growing up tattoos we're pretty rare. If somebody had a tattoo they we're probably either a Hell's Angel or career Navy person. My expectation is not to see a tattoo on a person so I'm always a little shocked when I do. One criticism I have of tattoos on dancers it they don't look good when viewed from a distance. I have to admit I’ve looked at a few girls thought to my self “I hope that’s a tattoo”. Most tattoos are very detailed works of art. How they look up close is very different from across the room. At a distance they tend to look like bruises or other skin maladies. I suspect for younger people who are used to seeing tattoos this isn't the case, they don't have the same expectations that I do.

Again, these are all my observations. What’s important to me won’t be important to another customer. I don’t think there is the “right” look for a dancer. The important thing is that she thinks she looks good.