H-Bird’s World of Things 1

Everybody is Fat and Hairy, with Yellow Teeth

Once a month I go to a beauty salon at the nearby mall and pay twenty-five dollars for a technician to wrangle my eyebrows into their famous arch.  This salon has recently come under new management, which is marketing its services with a little more aggression than previously.  In the late winter I received a letter in the post, heavy with all-caps and exclamation points, about how the salon’s clients don’t look after their skin, then expect miracles to be wrought for small change.  The only way to avoid the dreaded creep of ageing skin and all the associated wrinkling, flaking and droopiness, the letter informed me, was to spend money now.  Maintenance packages, starting at perhaps one hundred dollars a month, were offered as a solution to this combination of negligence and miserliness.

Now I am fortunate in my porcelain complexion, whose tone has been achieved by the paper-thin skin caused by a long adolescence of topical acne creams, not to mention the general delay in lines and wrinkles that comes from (let us not put too fine a point on it) having plenty of subcutaneous fat.  Long training in the ways of cultural studies meant I could regard this letter as a cultural artefact rather than a They Know Where You Live and Why You Don’t Exfoliate kind of missive (besides which, I do exfoliate, like a skin-care Dalek marching across the bathroom).  Despite all this, however, the salon’s recent Christmas promotion gave me pause.

A single-page leaflet on thin card displayed a white woman, perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two years old, with blonde hair, perfect teeth and a bikini whose improbable smallness of style might last have been seen in a David Lee Roth video.  Along the body of this model, arrows pointed at areas on which you too could have work done, along with a description of the procedure and the cost.  For four hundred dollars a session, you could get as much Botox as you wish in your face and neck.  For nine hundred dollars down, you could have unlimited laser treatments across your thighs and pelvis, until those southern lands resemble the bony hairlessness of the fair-skinned, fair-haired model.* More fistfuls of dollars could also be spent on teeth-whitening.

The treatment that caught my eye the most, however, I find hard to describe.  The précis articulated a submission of the body to a giant roller or rolling pin, the better to break up the fat cells that congregate in those dimply pockets that cause shame to the young and glee to the women’s magazine copywriters alike.  (I’m not going to speak its name because it’s not a medical condition.)

It is an old refrain, but I’ll sing it again: what is the matter with adult women, that we submit our bodies to this kind of painful commerce?  Why do we allow this conceptual continuum between grooming the body and eliminating, permanently and painfully, the signs of our physical maturity?  Are we really such self-loathing fools?  Or do the beauty retailers simply draw on their inner thirteen-year old girl?

These questions are of course rhetorical, as has been my describing of the leaflet’s highlights to my office mates and dinner party companions, to much laughter and appalled groaning.  It helps, I suppose, that I come from a family of big people with teeth in various piratical configurations, who favour bathing suits low cut in the leg and stay out of the face-lining sun.

I suspect too that the leaflet reflects not a beauty norm but a commercial aspiration; the customers who submit their bodies to the full range of zappings, injectings, squashings and bleachings will be few, but they will probably cover the cost of advertising.  Nonetheless; strange days for a strange season.  If you need me, my exquisitely groomed brows will soon be surmounting my botulism-free, wobble-bodied person in my in-laws’ new spa.

[polldaddy poll=1209771]

* I did have a few such treatments on my neck a few years ago, but abandoned it after developing folliculitis, which you can google if you want, but probably shouldn’t.

Tagged as: beauty, commerce