The `desire' industry

Anissa S. Febrina ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 11/07/2009 1:04 PM  |  Lifestyle

Permanent perfection: A beautician at the Cosmobeaute exhibition paints a woman’s eyebrows, hair by hair (JP/Anissa S. Febrina)

Imagine Cinderella as a short plump princess with mousy-brown hair or Hercules an average Joe with a protruding belly and not much muscle to flaunt.

Or comedian Yati Pesek as the face for the latest makeup line or Tukul Arwana a spokesman for a fitness center.

Unimaginable?

Like it or not, no matter how often we are told not to judge a book by its cover, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And those eyes are used to certain standards when it comes to judging physical appearance.

If you had any lingering doubts about the pervasiveness of notions of beauty, the dozens of booths at the recent Cosmobeaute exhibition would swiftly do away with them.

Beauty is youth, beauty is slimness, beauty is fair skin.

And the US$160 billion global beauty industry is selling the desire to be all those things.

Perhaps that's why the industry of looking good, despite technological advancements that have led to thousands of products, still boils down to products that help reduce wrinkles, cut body fat, add a pleasant fragrance and lighten the skin.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with wanting to look beautiful. Everybody does. I do.

And in the 21st century, when the visual media is all pervasive and looks matter more than ever, what separates one person from another is the extent to which they make the effort to look beautiful. The industry might insist there is no reason to be left out, with every imaginable product available.

"This is a newly imported product from France," said Yoda Nova, a former beauty pageant winner turned cosmetic industry player who opened a booth at the exhibition. "It helps brighten the skin using a secret recipe found in the snows of the Himalayas."

Across from her booth was a beauty salon equipment supplier highlighting anti-aging 24K gold serums as its latest product on offer.

"These golden serum molecules can activate vitamin absorption, strengthen the antioxidant powers of the skin and activate cell metabolism to reduce wrinkles," said Icha Kurnia, a beauty consultant at the booth.

"Look at my face. I use it every night and I don't need to use foundation or powder every morning."

For those who do prefer makeup, there's a veritable color scheme of foundation, eye-shadows and rouge.

Unless you fancy something more permanent?

Inside a booth, a Singaporean beautician is painting "hair by hair" his customer's shaven eyebrows, with a small knife and a special kind of ink.

"It will help women avoid the hassle of having to draw on their eyebrows every morning. And it looks more natural than tattooed ones," said a woman accompanying David Chang, the "eye-embroidery artist". "This will last between five and six years."

Relying on the common and fundamental appeal of physical attractiveness, the beauty industry has taken a more prominent position during recent decades.

The August 2007 Personal Products: Global Industry Guide by Datamonitor reported that the global market for personal care products - skin care, hair care, makeup, oral hygiene, personal hygiene and over-the-counter health care - grew to $251.1 billion in 2006.

It forecast a 23.1 percent increase to a market value of $309 billion in 2011.

Locally, the beauty industry is worth some Rp 12.2 billion. It recorded its highest growth of 14.7 percent in 2003, but has since booked a more modest - but still healthy - growth rate of between 5.5 percent and 6.4 percent in the past three years.

Despite the various state-of-the-art skin maintenance products on offer, consumers in Indonesia still tend to favor personal hygiene products, as toiletries contribute some 77 percent of the industry's annual revenue.

"Indonesians are still limited to buying soaps, shampoos and other cleansing products when it comes to the mass market," L'Oreal Indonesia president director Jean-Christophe Letellier said.

"And for the middle-upper to high-end market, there is a difference between those who prefer makeup and others who prefer skin maintenance products," added Invianto Soebiantoro, the company's general manager for luxury products.

Most recently, the company is trying to market products such as skin moisturizers in sachets, to make them more affordable. After all, UV protection and whitening creams are needed more by those who walk under the sun rather than those who hop between their cars and air-conditioned buildings.

Products to enhance beauty are actually nothing new. The earliest known cosmetics, found in the tombs of Egypt, date back to 3,100-2,907 BC.

At its root, physical appearance may be the unconscious recognition that beauty serves to attract the opposite sex for the biological imperative of reproduction, Appearance Research Institute founding director Gordon L. Patzer wrote.

As diverse as the human race is, beauty ultimately tends to be the sum of a certain symmetry of the face, a divine ratio of one's build and a certain healthy glow.

Women - and certain men - are known to be keen on darkening their lashes and brows, outlining their eyelids, dusting white powder on their skin to simulate fairness and reddening their cheeks with rouge.

Both genders tend to seek certain body shapes, with the standards being an hourglass figure for women and broad shoulders and slim waist for men.

This is perhaps because accentuating the eyes and tinting the cheeks makes a woman's face more closely resemble her natural coloring at the peak of her fertility cycle, Patzer revealed. And research has found a link between a higher fertility rate and certain body shapes.

It all boils down again to our inbuilt urge to reproduce, which means attracting the right mate.

But in the modern world, it's not that simple anymore, as streams of images help shape our conscious and unconscious tendency to seek beauty.

It goes beyond skin deep. It has evolved into what contemporary anthropologists term as "lookism - treating people in ways biased by their perceived individual level of physical attractiveness".

And that's why we strive for beauty. Whatever that means and whatever is needed to achieve that - and however much it costs.

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