Pinched Cheeks, Pert Noses

Our lady who has rapidly moved up the Social Register, and countless others like her with washboard stomachs, disappearing hips, pinched cheeks and pert noses, are the new high priestesses of beauty. They are the latest beauty models on the block. Looking at them, however, it’s hard to imagine that not too long ago, say the early ’80s, feminine beauty was all about undulating curves and round, often blushing faces. Indian sculpture immortalised this ideal with its iconic S or swaying curve. Red cheeks, in the age of the Blush before the age of the Blush-on, were a sign of Beauty. Traditionally, beauty had to do with fertility: the red cheeks and lips were a sign of good health and hinted at good child-bearing abilities. So did wide hips. Indian screen heroines embodied the idea of Indian beauty: think Vyjanthimala, or even Kajol before she lost weight.

The idea of Indian beauty seems to have taken a U-turn. And beauty has become big business. In her well-researched book, The Beauty Game, Anita Anand takes a cogent look at why and how this change came about. Not only does she look at the changing benchmarks of the relationship between Indian women and beauty, she also tries to examine the link between the business of beauty and the frenzied pursuit of it by the Indian middle class.

The concept of what is beauty, according to Anand, has become market-dictated, and market-manipulated. Anand sees the early ’90s as the turning point. It was then that the drawbridges came down and let in the army of beauty peddlers from abroad. Liberalisation was the mantra, opening doors to multinational companies and their beauty products. The door-to-door ladies brigade followed with their kits of miracle beauty products.

Then the Indian FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies diversified into the beauty business. The "corporatisation of beauty" was complete. As Anand points out in great detail, the turnover in the cosmetic industry went from Rs 2.311 crore in 1990 to Rs 18,950 crore in 2000. The leap continues, with mushrooming neighbourhood beauty parlours and multinationals flooding the market—even small town India—with cosmetics and hair dyes.

The burgeoning beauty business found a convenient handmaiden in the media. Airbrushed divas declare the latest canons of beauty from the pulpit of the glossies. Seductive or admonitory, the advertisements in the mushrooming and increasingly thick and laminated lifestyle and women’s magazines tell you how to achieve those canons. The plain and fat are becoming invisible. The nouveau credo of existence: I look good, therefore I am.

If your face is your destiny, it’s being rewritten in the proliferating beauty parlours, gyms and clinics. Don’t like the colour of your skin or hair, buy any of the myriad whitening creams and hair dyes now flooding the market. You can even go blonde like Britney Spears. Don’t like that bulbous tummy, get a liposuction. Don’t like the downward drooping mouth or that long nose, get it fixed. The days of the long knives are now upon us in India. Plastic surgeons now chisel, cut and tweak faces and bodies to ideal standard size.

The problem is there’s so much beauty these days that it’s become a bore. Everyone seems to be out of the same mould—Indian beauty queens, models, veejays, deejays and plain janes, sporting that monotonously "international look", with their capped teeth, pert noses and endless legs.

Beauty is not just big business, it’s empowerment. Corporate ladders become less slippery if you are well-groomed. So do social ladders. Witness the ambitious moms dragging their young girls off to beauty parlours and on to beauty contest ramps, even in small-town India. With Indian beauty queens notching up crowns the way American athletes harvest gold medals at the Olympics, India has now displaced Venezuela as producer of assembly line beauties.

So, is the Indian woman a victim of the Beauty Game or is she a player, liberated and empowered by its accessibility? Anand plays devil’s advocate for both sides, without really taking a stand. She goes over the ground covered by American feminists like Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth and Susan Faludi in Backlash. The book is studded with interesting facts. And the author’s inclusion of her own weight and skin problems lends the book poignancy. The writing, however, lacks flair: Anand should have integrated her material better and hedged her bets less.