Five Ounces of Beauty, Please

Once upon a time –when I was in college – we had beauty parlours. Now – never mind what institute I’m in – we have beauty salons. In my addled understanding of the world, the term ‘beauty parlour’ had a more honest ring to it. It immediately brought to mind the Spider going ‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ to the optimistic Fly. With the context that clearly laid out, those of us who chose to walk into the parlours, knew what we were in for – if we didn’t, too bad. We should have paid more attention to the rhymes they taught us in school.

We knew that the benign expression on the proprietor’s face would last only till the door shut behind you. We knew it would be replaced by a brooding sorrow as she surveyed your topography and began to enumerate the myriad shortcomings of each body part till you were literally screaming for help – Her help; if the lady was too busy, or had more important clients to be beautified, then you were willing to settle for help from the lesser angels who would work their own lesser magic upon your self-esteem, till it rose – hopefully - like the proverbial phoenix. And in this alchemical experiment, you were willing to brave a little discomfort: facial hair screaming in agony at being plucked out unceremoniously; head reeling inside a heat-spewing contraption that had you wondering whether they were sending you to the moon to get some help with your hair. All this and Hell too, for the value-add at the end of it all – hair arranged in jaunty curls, skin that didn’t look as though somebody had scribbled over it (I understand that with the dawn of the Tattoo Age, this is no longer a concern), and eyebrows that arched at just the angle that was considered fashionable that week.

Basically, you walked into a parlour where they put you through some pretty horrible stuff, and at the end of it, you hoped that the version of you that walked out would be a minor upgrade of the version that had walked in. You weren’t certain that this would indeed be the case, but then there was always hope that all that torture inside had cancelled out some bad Karma and that the reward would be about five ounces of what was generally accepted as ‘beauty’. 

The term ‘salon’ suggests a more genteel world – a world of gracious hostesses, good food, enchanting music and scintillating conversation – where dainty ‘Salonistas’ make your warts disappear painlessly, eventually turning you into a work of art, all ready for public display.

With all these possibilities swirling around in my optimism-soaked mind, I stepped into a beauty salon the other evening. The lady at the reception gave me a dazzling smile and gestured toward a voluminous chair. The optimism meter inched up. I looked around. Corridors of steel and chrome stretched out in all directions, most with yet more corridors branching off from them. Like an intricately woven web. The Spider beckoning? The optimism meter began to fluctuate.

A booklet appeared magically in my lap. It had two parts: The Body and The Mind. The Body had these sections: Facial Engineering, Nail Modelling, Hair Management, Skin Centre and Posture Specialists. The Mind had these: Beauty Meditation, Practicing Wakefulness, Breathing for Beauty, and Thinking Your Way to Beauty. Each section had several sub-sections; the sub-sections had tertiary sections and each sub-heading and sub-sub heading was followed by nuggets of wisdom that my feeble brain found hard to digest.

I walked over to the receptionist and asked her if I could just get a simple hair-cut.

She gave me another brilliant smile, this time, somewhat tinged with pity, and told me that their in-house beauty expert would like to offer me some free advice. Before I could turn down this generous offer, a firm hand was guiding me into the glass-walled cubicle of the beauty expert.   

Half an hour later when I crawled out of her office, I knew what an enormous task the salon had on its hands – my skin, my face, my hair, my posture, my breathing, even my attitude to life, had to be treated if I wanted to lay claim to anything remotely close to what is now accepted as ‘beauty’. A simple hair-cut would do me no good. They would have to correct all that was wrong inside, before they could begin tinkering with the outside. As the wise in-house expert told me “We don’t do patch-work jobs. We give you a holistic beauty treatment.” In other words, they wouldn’t sell beauty in ounces. You had to get at least a gallon - maybe ten, if you were me.

My optimism meter had exploded and I needed some fresh air to clear the pieces from my mind. I walked out of the salon and headed towards a side street, where I located one of those old-world beauty parlours. I walked in and, in a voice emptied of all optimism, murmured, “Hair-cut.” A dour-looking girl pushed me into a high-backed chair and launched into the familiar litany about how thin my hair was, how damaged, how dry, as the scissors went snip, snip, snip. But I didn’t care. Here was a place that still sold beauty in ounces. And five ounces was all I needed.

Just five ounces of ‘beauty’. Just a teeny-weeny upgrade of the old hardware, thank you. Not a completely new eco-system fashioned by the Beauty Merchants.