Hair-removal machines at centre of row
From Hugh Schofield in Paris

President Nicolas Sarkozy may boast that France is no longer a country of strikes and street-demonstrations, but one group of workers seems intent on proving him wrong - albeit for an unconventional cause.

Last week thousands of French beauticians downed tweezers in a protest over the correct way to remove body hair. Angry members of the National Artisanal Confederation of Beauty Institutes (CNAIB) staged a rally at the health ministry in Paris, demanding the right to use modern epilation techniques such as are current in the rest of the European Union.

The protest - noisy but impeccably turned out - followed a series of cases in which beauticians were fined for professional misconduct after being taken to court by rival groups.

The problem stems from a 1962 decree setting out the regulations under which the country's estimated 20,000 esthéticiennes must operate. Since Napoleon's time, every aspect of French working life from the presidency down to rat-catching has been governed by an official code.

The beauty industry rules state that practitioners can remove body hair "using tweezers or wax", but it makes no mention of the laser and light-based methods that are now considered standard elsewhere in the world.

Several beauty workers who invested in so-called "flash lamp" epilators in order to attract new clients have recently been sued by dermatologists, on the grounds that only medically-qualified personnel should be allowed to wield them. In each case the courts have found against the beauticians.

CNAIB president Michele Lamoureux said: "French beauticians are the only ones in Europe not to have the right to use light treatments, even though we are by far the most qualified - no-one can work as a beautician here unless they have three years of training.

"We are forced to use techniques that date from the time of Cleopatra."

The row is made all the more bitter by the amounts of money at stake. The beauty industry is growing fast, with hundreds of new high-street outlets opening each year. And hair-removal represents the biggest chunk of the business.

"Hairs are our stock-in-trade. They don't belong to the dermatologists. 80% of my customers come to have hair removed," said Priscilla, a 28 year-old beauty parlour owner from Moulins, a town in the centre of France, who took part in the protest.

"Yet the dermatologists are the ones allowed to use the only truly effective epilation machines. Me, I have got to make do with wax and tweezers. Legally I am not allowed to modernise," she said.

Flash lamp or Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) treatment consists of firing a focused beam of light on a patch of skin. The light is converted to heat and destroys the hair follicles. An IPL machine can cost the equivalent of more than £15,000, but at around £500 for a series of 10 sessions the money is quickly recouped.

Beauticians have also been successfully sued for using the latest massage machines - known as Massu M6 - for battling cellulite. This time it is the country's physiotherapists who are crying foul, arguing that they alone have the right to wield them.

"In my salon I don't have a flash-lamp and I don't have the Massu M6, because I am afraid of being taken to court for illegally practising medicine," said Priscilla. "But this is what our clients want. If things don't change, I'll be driven out of business."

Some doctors say there are sound reasons for not allowing beauticians to use sophisticated modern machinery. According to Luc Sulimovic, of the Union of Dermato-Venereologists, flash lamps can also be deployed to treat skin conditions such as blotchiness or rosacea.

"Beauty workers are not trained to diagnose problems like that, which can be linked to cancer or other diseases. But the risk is that they treat the aesthetic symptom, without understanding the reason behind it," he said.

However, for Lamoureux of the CNAIB, it is another example of French corporatisme - each sector desperately defending its interests against the threat of modernisation and change.

"They say it is all about public health, but really it is just about money. The specialists don't want to surrender their monopoly. It's all very French," she said.