A friend of mine was at the beauty salon the other day and found something going on that caused an instant retreat behind a copy of Economist. That my friend would be reading something as ‘heavy’ as that rather than the more prescribed fare of Stardust or Cosmopolitan was in itself rather a going-on, but that would make a different story altogether. The place was not a massage parlour with the nudge-nudge wink-wink kind of connotation, and it was not a makeshift country liquor still or a dubious drug dealer den, but a plain, simple and outwardly straightforward parlour where people went in looking less than their best and emerged transformed into what the staff considered to be far better.
What shocked my friend was the fact that the person in the chair next door was getting his eyebrows threaded. What shocked me when I heard about it was the fact that my friend did not shave himself, but had it done by someone else. Also shocking was the name of the salon, but that is a piece of linguistic snobbery that even this blog does not dare to blunder into. Be all that as it may, my friend chose to do a little self-inudlgent pampering on a Sunday evening and found himself, Economist in hand, rather startled in his quest for a greater outward beauty. Even as he told us about it, his voice cracked squeakily in shock, making all of us laugh even as it spurred us on to new heights of descriptive analogy on what a man would do to make himself more attractive.
It happened to me a long time ago, perhaps one of the first times I ever went to a salon unaccompanied by a parent or a close friend who was allowed to see more of my legs than just my knees. In the chair next to mine – I was getting a hair-trim, not my legs waxed – there was a young man getting his face attended to. The beautician was bent over him, her chest pressed astonishingly closely to his nose, working away busily at something that I couldn’t see from my disadvantaged position of not being able to move more than my eyes, unless I wanted to get myself an avant garde asymmetrical hairdo, which I wasn’t quite ready and willing to do. When the girl moved, I saw the young man’s face, glowing red and tear-streaked under the bright lights. Furtively I peeked, then asked, in as much of a whisper as I could manage to be audible above the blasting Hindi film music from the sound system. He was getting his cheeks threaded, I was told, just before I was shouted at for moving my head – purely involuntarily, I apologised, the shock of hearing that a man was willing to undergo pain that was amazingly like that of labour just to save shaving for a day or so making me move more than my stylist would permit.
Over the years, the male quest for beauty has ceased to surprise me. I have seen men wandering into upmarket salons for chest waxing, facials, ear-hair reduction treatment and underarm laser hair removal, among other procedures. And today, when I find that the elderly gentleman sitting in the chair next to mine in the waiting room is going to have his mani-pedi done with a peach blush French polish done, I do no more than blink in response. It is, after all, not that astonishing any more. What still astonishes me is the various names that people give beauty parlours – Sweetie, Cute, Pretty Face, Image USA and much more. What next?
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