From girls to women, the indulgence industry has cast its spell on them all.
My husband contacted me this week from a steamy Washington DC, where the power supply had pegged out after a storm. Dinners across the city were served by candlelight, generators were working overtime and air conditioning was minimal.
During a trip to a local mall to stay cool, my other
half stumbled across young girls lined up for a pedicure; they were in a group streaming out of the local Simply Spa'Riffik franchise. It's a nationwide chain of beauty salons catering to prepubescent girls, perkily promising a "fun, self-esteem-building spa for girls" through pedicures, manicures, facials, makeup and hair services.
This is the logical extension of everything that mass culture has been preparing our young girls for, and it is surely only a matter of time before beauty spas for tweenies join Bratz dolls, padded bras and pole-dancing lessons on the list of modern girl must-do's for NZ under-12s.
It's almost pointless to resist this trend toward younger, more aggressive primping and preening; young girls tend to like doing what their mothers are doing and, according to statistics, we're preening ourselves rather a lot. Even the recession cannot halt the endless capital works programme that is modern womanhood. In America, beauty salon revenues continue to grow year on year. In Britain, a survey of thousands of women across the country showed almost 60 per cent were spending more on beauty items than ever before. Local salon owners confirm business is flourishing even in low wage, low growth little ol' New Zealand.
