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Photo: R.Ashok

Make over Very much in vogue

Join the bandwagon of this new breed of women in the city who unfailingly include the expenses of beauty regimens in their monthly budget. The look-good-and-feel-good mantra has driven women to indulge in beauty, spending not just to keep the physical signs of age at bay but to upkeep their good looks.

Boxes of fairness creams, beauty packs and moisturisers form an integral part of beauty economics of women and spending cuts through economic strata. Tall and slender Ushanandhini, 35, makes it a monthly routine to spruce up her looks with facial, eyebrow threading, waxing, pedicure and manicure. She doesn’t mind spending five hours and Rs. 5,000 every month to ‘maintain’ her looks. “Women don’t come to blow out their hair once in two days as in metropolis. But they certainly are looking ways to groom themselves better with a little help from us,” says Priyanjali Anand of Utpalaa beauty salon.

Women in the city pay out, on an average, Rs. 2,000 for monthly vanity procedures. The scale varies with social strata, with the bare minimum being Rs. 750 for makeovers.

For those who don’t mind loosening up their purse strings a bit, a coterie of professionals pitch in their help for a better look.

It takes hardly a while to burn your ugly pimples with a spooky glass electrode but don’t forget to fatten your purse before you get in for any of these pimple treatments. Getting rid of unglamorous acne, not surprisingly, tops the beauty upkeep regimen of most girls. If you want to fade your acne scars, you have to spend an hour and Rs. 500 for one session at the parlour. But the difference will be felt only after 10 sessions that works up to Rs. 5,000 and 10 hours of treating your skin with umpteen anti-pimple creams.

Undoing the damages that occurred on your skin due to extreme sun exposure would cost you a little more than Rs. 2,000. Beauticians bleach the skin, exfoliate to get rid of those tiny blackheads and refresh the face with a cool facial massage that ends with deep moisturising of the skin. The facial regimen to flesh out steadily layered dead cells and dirt remains to be the best of beauty fix among women.

If you fancy the scale-straight hairstyle you see in flicks and think it is easy to maintain, all you need is couple of hours and Rs. 7,000 for a permanent re-bonding of your hair.

Mallika Srikand, who specialised in beauty therapy but now a homemaker, finds the beauty-driven trend in the city matching with that of metropolis. “For working women, it’s an image business. You have to look good to compete with others who are receiving similar professional help.”

The beauty spending graph, she says, is skewed towards women in mid-30s, who want to boost their confidence by looking younger. “Unlike household things we buy, spending for beauty is not calculated. It’s not like clothes that stack up in your wardrobe, reminding you of how much you have spent so far. Women tend to spend much more than what they intended to do,” she observes.

When it comes to looking good, men are in no way behind. If it is pedicure-manicure routine for women, their male counterparts de-stress themselves with head massage, hair colouring and fruit facials. “A tier II city like Tiruchi promises a potential market. Cheap services galore too but clients look mainly for add-on facilities and stickler treatments,” says Nabin, State Area in charge of Green Trends, a unisex chain of salons that entered recently into the city.

Not long before women sneaked into parlours after seeing off their children to school. However, soon beauty consciousness began to cut across sexes and sprucing up one’s looks sitting beside men is no more an embarrassing affair.

Rayaka Jayasuriya, Managing Director of Salon Rayaka Academy of Hair and Beauty, who was in town to hold a hair-care seminar, says social pressure to look good drives men and women, together, to spend their fortune on beauty-enhancing treatments. “It is no more mere face make-over and concealing chipped toe-nails with closed shoes. Everyone wants to look good from head to toe and spending increases proportionately,” she says, sectioning off her client’s hair in foils. Sangeetha, proprietor of Pretty Queen parlour, foresees dawdling growth towards the trend of unisex salons. “Though unisex salons offer services in separate sections, women in Tiruchi need time to catch up with the drift. Women still don’t want their husbands to accompany them to salons,” she says.

Ms. Rayaka has a point when says, “men or women, when it comes to beauty spending, cost is strictly no bar.”

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