The Beauty Industry

Gender, Culture, Pleasure

Paula Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415321587
• eBook ISBN: 9781134356409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The beauty industry is now a multinational, multi-million dollar business. In recent years its place in contemporary culture has altered hugely as salons have become not simply places to have your hair cut or your nails done, but increasingly sites of physical and even spiritual therapy.

In this fascinating and nuanced study, Paula Black strips away many popular assumptions about the beauty industry, including the one that says it exploits people's insecurity by projecting an illusory beauty myth. The interviews in this book - both with the beauty industry's workers and its clients - reveal a far more complex and interesting picture, and, in their presentation, Black re-formulates many feminist debates around choice and constraint.

The debates addressed include issues around the body; the construction and maintenance of gender identity; changing definitions of health and well-being; and labour processes.

Chapter 1

‘Ordinary people come through here’

Introducing the work of the beauty salon

Yvette owns a beauty salon in a small city in the UK. This salon caters predominantly to white women who do not have access to large amounts of disposable income. Yvette is adamant that visits to salons are a necessary and pleasurable part of a woman’s life.

I mean we still get ladies in who say ‘Oh I can’t afford that’. My answer is well, I ask them a question, ‘Has he [husband] got a football season ticket?’ and if she says ‘Yes’, ‘Well, spend an equal amount of money on your face’, and then they see it in a different light. Because the man is a bit old-fashioned, you know, ‘Spending all that money on your face, you can’t see what’s happened’.

(Yvette BT)

The discussion from which this quote is taken arose during a period I spent at Yvette’s in the run-up to Christmas. During this time my role was to offer glasses of sherry and mince pies to the women coming into the salon for pre-holiday treatments. The conversation among these women, fuelled a little by the sherry, turned to relationships with men and their views about the amount of time and money women spend on their bodies. The general feeling was that men did not understand the benefits of beauty salon treatments or the effort that went into maintaining a feminine appearance. Yvette herself points out how many men come into the salon at that time of year in order to purchase gift vouchers for wives and girlfriends. She says that the discomfort experienced by older men in particular at having to enter the doors of the salon is often covered by a course humour. Some men refer to gift vouchers as ‘scaffolding and filling vouchers’. This misunderstanding and the guilt some women feel about spending time and money in the salon gave rise to Yvette’s comment above. During the course of this research I spent much time with Yvette and her employees and she never once wavered in her belief in the value of the beauty salon, while at the same time maintaining a healthy scepticism about the more ambitious claims made for some treatments.

During the past few years in every town I have visited, in every part of the world, I have looked in beauty salon windows, received beauty treatments and collected endless price lists for a huge variety of treatments. Yet before I began research into beauty therapy I had never entered a beauty salon; in fact I hardly noticed their existence. The research in the area began accidentally while I was involved in a different research project. Despite being a regular purchaser of beauty products and a self-critical mirror gazer, my feminist politics allowed only a deep suspicion of the activities of the beauty industry. Perhaps due to the legacy of early 1980s feminism with which I grew up, I felt that too heavy an investment in femininity through beauty treatments was somehow a betrayal of my own political beliefs. To some extent I still believe this, and I devote much space in this book to understanding women’s use of beauty salons from a feminist position. However, I have also learned much about what actually goes on behind the closed doors of beauty salons. As Yvette remarked to me, Ordinary people come through here’. The desire of these ‘ordinary people’ is for pleasure and escapism. They wish to ‘make the best of themselves’. They enjoy the atmosphere of a feminised space in the company of other women. They are also unconcerned with beauty. The practices and discourses which intersect in the salon are varied and complex. So this book is not concerned with beauty per se; rather it is an investigation of what is termed ‘the beauty industry’ through the specific context of the beauty salon. Although both of these subjects contain beauty in their title, my concern has been to reflect the interests of the clients and therapists in beauty salons, and their experiences cannot be reduced to the catch-all phrase of ‘beauty’.

The beauty salon

It seems inappropriate to continue with a discussion of the beauty salon without first describing the social space I am focusing upon. A beauty salon has its own ambience. The uniforms of the staff, the decor, the layout, reflect the aspirations of the owner. Some salons give the immediate impression of a clinic where staff dress in white, and where formality is emphasised. These white overalls offer the impression of both cleanliness and clinicisation. They emphasise the medicalised nature of some of the treatments available, as well as the claims to professional status of the staff. In other salons, the staff are required to dress in more flamboyant colours, often matched by the decor and the welcome received by the client. Clothing colours other than white subtly alter the ambience of the salon and the message sent out to clients. Pastel shades are equated with femininity and with friendliness. These are, of course, associated. More contemporary, bolder shades convey a modern salon and a gender neutrality which encourages a specific female clientele, as well as male clients. Walls are decorated with the qualification certificates of staff and membership certificates of professional organisations. Salons generally contain a waiting area with comfortable seating and assorted magazines. These magazines will vary with the clientele of the salon but mainstream women’s magazines such as Marie Claire or Cosmopolitan are examples. Celebrity magazines such as Hello or OK are also popular. The entrance area will also contain a till close to the door where clients are taken after their treatment; a private area for staff; bathroom facilities; screened cubicles or private rooms where treatments are carried out; and if the salon offers nail treatments, there is also a more communal treatment area where manicures are performed (interestingly, in the UK pedicures are performed in the private cubicles). The salon has its own routines and invisible tracks along which staff walk in greeting clients, guiding them to treatment rooms, offering refreshments, and finally leading to the point where payment is made. Salons have their own smell which is that of the equipment and chemicals used for treatments, intermingled with the pleasant aromas of perfumed creams and lotions, cups of tea and coffee, and sometimes too the strong smell of nail products. It is in this atmosphere that the intimate routines of body maintenance are carried out.

This template relates most closely to the case of the UK. In countries around the world the salon varies in order to accommodate localised beauty practices and traditions. In the USA and Caribbean certain treatments are received in communal areas with only those which require exposure of the body necessitating movement to private screened spaces. I once spent more than three hours in a salon in Kingston, Jamaica, while false nails were applied to my fingers. During this time as I sat in the communal area in this small, local salon I had time to chat to the regular clients also receiving treatments. Other shopkeepers came in to talk and to deliver cold drinks requested by the clients. I was able to spend uninterrupted time talking to a relative who had accompanied me on the trip. During the whole of this period there was no time that conversation was not going on between shifting groups of women. At the same time a Hollywood film played continuously on video in the corner. While I was present it began three times under the disinterested gaze of the clients.

In Sudan, traditional salons contain a collective seating area where women sit to talk and receive treatments. In this area, beautiful and elaborate designs in henna are applied to the hands and feet of married women. Single women are allowed only one hand or foot to be decorated in this fashion. A separate area of the salon accommodates a specific type of smoke-based sauna where individual women sit under cloth covers to receive this treatment, away from the communal areas. The heady, musky smell of the smoke permeates the salon, and lingers on the clothes and hair of all who have been present. This smell, when applied directly to the body in this ritualised sauna treatment, signifies preparation for sex with the husband. In this way preparation for sex with a male partner occurs in the company of other women. As more modern salons arrive in Sudan, these local beauty practices have been accommodated into a contemporary and internationalised design. So, for example, hairdressing and beauty treatments are carried out in a large communal space as in salons in the USA, but a small room is set aside for married women to receive their henna treatment. In this way we can see that the international beauty industry is modified at a local level to incorporate specific cultural practices. This in turn affects the types of relationships which develop within the confines of the salon.

Beauty therapy is part of a vast multinational industry. This industry includes cosmetics and skin care products, beauty treatments in spas, gyms, hotels and holiday resorts and salons; an advertising industry which supports this consumption; the cosmetic surgery industry; hair care; the dieting industry, and so on. The value of the professional beauty industry in the UK in 1998 was £366 million, which represented a growth of almost 6 per cent on the previous year (Guild News, 1999). This figure includes beauty therapy treatments in a variety of sites including mobile, hair and beauty salons and health clubs, as well as the conventional beauty salon. In the UK in 2002 there were almost 6.4 million users of beauty salons, an increase of 17 per cent on the previous year (Guild News, 2002). In 2000 the numbers of men using salons in the UK stood at 70,000 (Guild News, 2001). The age range of all clients in 2002 was 18 to 30 (22 per cent); 30 to 45 (4 per cent); 45-plus (36 per cent). This figure comes from an official beauty industry guild, and I find the fact that under-eighteens are not mentioned a little surprising, since therapists have mentioned to me that younger clients do visit salons. In 2002 in the UK the proportion of business type was as follows: high street salon 41 per cent; home-based salon 27 per cent; hairdressing and beauty 10 per cent; health club 7 per cent; mobile 10 per cent and nails/other 5 per cent. Between 2001 and 2002 there was a growth of 22 per cent in the number of businesses in the beauty sector. This increase follows growth in previous years (Guild News, 2002). The increase in business is due partly to the expanded repertoire of treatments available. Salons now not only offer the standard manicures, facials, waxing and electrolysis, but may additionally offer aromatherapy, massage, reflexology and reiki. Despite this diversity the most popular treatments remain waxing and manicures. However, as use of the beauty industry in all its forms has rocketed, measured levels of satisfaction that individuals feel with their bodies and their looks have decreased (Synnott, 1993).

Do beauty salons matter?

Why does beauty matter? Beauty flies in the face of a puritanical utilitarianism. It defies the reductiveness of both the political left and the political right in their efforts to bend it to a mission. Beauty subverts dogma by activating the realm of fantasy and imagination. It reminds us that the enjoyment of ‘mere’ pleasure is an important element of our humanity. And it knits the mind and body together at a time when they seem all too easily divided.

(Brand, 2000, p. xv)

Beauty has been the subject of much debate and conjecture for centuries. It has been a key issue in a range of fields from art theory to philosophy. Politics, art and philosophy may interlink through work on beauty, as, for example, in the work of the performance artist Orlan. She has undergone a series of cosmetic surgery procedures on her face, each time filming the procedures and offering a commentary during the operation (Brand, 2000). Her intention has been to take features of significance from works of art and transplant them on to and into her own face. Beauty too is routinely associated not simply with external appearance but also with positive attributes such as morality and kindness. However, it is not in this sense that I am concerned with beauty here.

The types of salons in which I have conducted my research and drawn my interviewees from range from the city centre branch of a large multinational, through the small local salon catering to white working-class women, to those salons situated in a middle-class area of a large city. Wherever possible, I have also visited salons around the world. What all of these salons have in common, however, is that they are part of the everyday routines of their clients. They offer services which are discreet and professional. These places are not the Los Angeles salons populated by TV stars and the very wealthy. The requests for ‘Brazilian’ bikini line waxes, while not uncommon, do not form the main focus of the business of these salons. At the time of writing, a programme called The Salon recently aired on Channel 4 on UK TV. This is another ‘reality’ documentary showing life in a hair and beauty salon. While I recognise the disagreements, and sometimes camaraderie, among the staff, much of the rest of the programme is unrecognisable in relation to the salons I have visited. TV portrays clients and workers as idiosyncratic, highly fashionable young gossip-mongers. In contrast, I wish to paint a picture of the salon showing how ‘ordinary people come through here’. The clients in this study were generally not high spenders on salon treatments. Although, if taken together, spending on beauty items, hairdressing and salon treatments could form a significant percentage of their disposable income, all managed their budgets carefully. The cost of treatments remained an issue for all of those interviewed. Despite this fact, where treatments were seen as a necessity money would always be found. In order to understand the role of the salon in women’s lives it is important to place it in the context of women’s experience:

When women put on a face, they continue to express ideas of naturalness and artifice, authenticity and deception, propriety and danger, modernity and tradition. Making up remains a gesture bound to perceptions of self and body, the intimate and the social - a gesture rooted in women’s everyday lives.

(Peiss, 1998, p. 270)

These claims are true of using make-up, and they are true of beauty treatments more generally, including visits to the beauty salon. Inside the beauty salon a world exists, which, although closed and intimate, is also open to the influences of the wider world within which the salon is situated. These enclosed social worlds have long drawn the attention of ethnographers and sociologists. However, in 1976, Lofland could claim authoritatively that feminised spaces in particular had been overlooked in the development of social theorising:

As far as I know, for example, there is not a single published study of a beauty parlour, a setting in which many women may undoubtedly develop close and meaningful relationships.

(Lofland, 1976, p. 154)

The attention of earlier ethnographers had indeed been drawn by the social spaces and intimate worlds open to men. The world of the beauty salon, the hairdressing salon, the launderette, has received much less attention. Julie Willett, for example, claims:

For my grandmother and many of her friends and relatives, the church, the front porch, and the beauty shop were part of a larger women’s culture that provided an invaluable source of information and the same types of social networks that historians have been so willing to see in saloons and other all-male institutions.

(Willett, 2000, p. 2)

This omission has been for several reasons. First, and most obviously, because many of the researchers discussed in the sociological textbooks outlining this form of research, or the historians mentioned by Willett, are themselves male. Researchers will always choose to work in those areas where their access and their ‘performance’ in the research role is made easiest. Second, male worlds have stood for social worlds in general. The world of the street corner, the poolhall or the medical training school have been written about as if they were gender-neutral spaces. Third, an uneasy relationship exists between empirically grounded research and more theoretically orientated work. This uneasy relationship within British academia has seen a general elevation of theoretical research and publications. Those involved in empirical research have also at times derided theory without empirical groundings. If ethnographic studies have been wary of the role of grand-scale theory, and in turn theorists have often been dismissive of ‘mere empiricism’, then gender simply adds to these difficulties. I do not intend to go into the history of the debates between qualitative researchers, quantitative researchers and theorists around epistemology and methodology, suffice to say that it is predominantly in feminist debates of the past twenty years or so where gender has served as a key factor. The work of Dorothy Smith (1987), for example, may be seen as a major intervention into this area, and an argument for the possibility of grounding social theorising in the ‘everyday world’ of women.

The question of masculine representations cannot be disentangled from the question of ‘race’. Male researchers have provided us with a rich and vivid description of the world of men at the same time as white researchers have provided us with views of racially specific social worlds. If in 1976 when Lofland was writing, gender had not been foregrounded as important in empirical studies, then this was even more the case with race. As Willett points out at the same time as she is criticising the masculinist bias of historical studies, the world inhabited by her grandmother was exclusively white. Indeed, the small Midwestern town in the USA she inhabited could boast that neither a ‘catholic or a “nigger” had ever spent the night in the town’ (Willett, 2000, p.2). What is striking about so much of the recent research into beauty culture, however, is how this question of ‘race’ is foregrounded. Willett shows how this sense of whiteness is an important aspect of identity for the women in the beauty salons in that small town.

These omissions have to some extent been corrected in more recent research. A number of studies in a variety of countries have focused upon such spaces. One review, for example, boasts the impressive title ‘The great good place - cafes, coffe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Beauty Industry
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: ‘Ordinary People Come Through Here’ Introducing the Work of the Beauty Salon
• Chapter 2: Inventing Beauty the History of the Beauty Salon
• Chapter 3: Just Because It Feels Good Doesn’t Make It Right Identity in the Beauty Salon
• Chapter 4: The Hidden Labour of Beauty
• Chapter 5: Look Good, Feel Better Promoting Health in the Beauty Salon
• Chapter 6: ‘You Feel Better When You Leave’ Some Concluding Comments
• Bibliography