Why this emphasis on the “before” and “after” in makeovers? More rarely spoken
of is what happens after the “after” – the aftermath of the “after”, if you
like, from which place I write to you now. It is a week since I returned
from New York, but three or four years from my return to normality, that is
to say such a time when my hair grows back to its silvery-birch grey and
stops resembling a wig.
A word about “before”. I know, you’re looking at the “after” picture and
thinking, the camera never lies (I have a ton of make-up on, remember). And
it is factually correct to say that before I went to New York I was in
several ways the physical encapsulation of the American nightmare. True, I
was not fat. True, my teeth, if not polystyrene white, were a tolerable
shade of cream. But my hair was a matted bird’s nest of tortoiseshell and
grey. It clashed unsettlingly with the mahogany arcs of what could have
arguably been described as a mono-brow. My hands were unmoisturised claws.
The feet I won’t bother to depict here except to say that a speck of pink
varnish still clung to one toe, a memento of a happy time on a beach
(Turkey, in June). But, Tad, in Britain I do not leave the house thinking
that’ll give them a scare. I leave the house caught between three very
British anxieties: 1. Will these heels get caught in the Times House
air-conditioning vents? (Answer: yes. Some moron had them installed in the
floor. Better a pair of flat shoes than a broken ankle.) 2. Will my look
weather the transport system? (Answer: no. Stuff the blowdry. And the
hairbrush for that matter.) 3. How can I both dress for work and embrace
what fashion journalists calls “effortless style”? (Answer: make no effort.
Looking as though you have made an effort in London requires long
disclaimers to friends and colleagues as to why you have chosen to “dress
up”.) Truth be told, I really didn’t have a problem with my face. But the
Americans did. The Americans had a field day with my face.
I had $350 (£175) to spend – but far exceeded it. What on? I deferred to two
New Yorkers. “You’ll be looked down on in this city if you haven’t had at
least a manicure and eyebrow wax,” said Sari.
“You have crazy bag-lady’s hair,” said Roger. “Do you snack from trash cans?”
Roger is 34. He has a 22-year-old girlfriend, whom he’s specifically asked me
to flag up in this article – the 12-year age gap is somewhat of a status
symbol in Manhattan. Roger described to me the revulsion he felt when he
once stroked a British girl’s thigh and found it covered in soft down. It is
his opinion that the Brazilian wax is the best thing to have happened to the
US as the American pudenda now more closely resembles what he’s used to
down-loading on his computer. “Even Christopher Hitchens has had his balls
waxed,” said Roger. His eyes swivelled back to my head: “Jesus, your hair.
Can’t you wear a scarf?”
The preliminary accounts added up like this: leg and bikini wax, $40;
eyebrows, $35; manicure, $9; pedicure, $15; massage, $60; cut, $100; colour,
$80. Plus tips.
Leg wax, manicure and pedicure were straightforward enough. You leave your
hotel, wherever you are in Manhattan, and within five seconds you stumble
across a day spa or divey manicure bar or shop front done up much like a
carwash is in the UK, outside of which huge neon lettering demands that you:
“Get Your Micro-dermabrasion Here, $30”. In New York the number of
manicurists has doubled in a decade. The number of registered waxers has
shot up from 431 to 3,301 since 2000. Are they salons, a minority of New
Yorkers want to know, or are they sweatshops?
Whatever they were, I wasn’t going to have my face sandpapered off by a
vengeful underpaid aesthetician. I had more pressing things to deal with,
such as the manicure I’d just botched. Christ, it’s boring watching varnish
dry. I feared a public dressing down from the angry Korean woman who’d spent
15 minutes sculpting my nails. Already she’d summed up my hair situation
with the words: “Your face not match.”
I got a message from Sari: “You need a Brazilian. There is only one
place in New York to have a Brazilian.” European Nails by Lucy wasn’t one of
them and thus began my descent into flagrant looks-oriented overspending.
When I arrived at New York’s most famous waxing salon, the J Sisters, to
have my manicure cured ($45) and my bikini line tended ($65), my pleas for
leniency were ignored by Janea, the woman who takes credit for having
invented the Brazilian. Janea reminisced about the year she decided “to go a
little farther, from the lips down to the butt” because “New York women work
all day – when they come home, they smell”.
I tried to retain my mask of journalistic impartially as Janea first smeared
wax on then played a violent game of tug-of-war with my crotch.
“Gynaecologists,” I dimly remember her saying through this excrutiating
torture, “send their clients to us.” As she forced my left leg behind my
head and I screamed for mercy Janea said that she had a hunch that The Hitch
would be back any day to retouch his perineum.
The beauty fascist she was, Janea left me with an apt token of her work:
nothing below but a Hitler moustache. When she was done she observed her
work. “Now,” she said proudly, “you can have sex.”
“There are only two places in New York to get your eyebrows waxed,” wrote
Sari. “Mean Christine’s” was one of them. Christine Chin is eyebrow
technician to the stars. Her fee is $35, but I figured it was worth it, with
the pound being so strong. Mean Christine’s assistant gazed at my left
eyebrow and said: “This one is more perfect. I like this one better.” I
asked her how long it would be before that one was perfect too. “Six months
to a year,” she said. “Both your eyebrows so different.”
Mean Christine also does facials. They cost $350. In my defence let me just
say that it is hard to leave a salon in which there are framed pictures of
Rachel Weisz and Gisele Bündchen on the walls inscribed with notes that
read: “Thanks for making me beautiful. Giselle xxx.” It is even more
difficult if Mean Christine appears and says: “I’ll take five years off
you. Let’s make it ten.” Impossible, when she homes in at close range and
says: “Your face is very lumpy.” (Her nickname derives from her reputation
for brutal frankness.)
So I spent $350 on a facial. Big deal. Contextually, it was a bargain. What’s
£172.20 in New York when Mean Christine thinks she’ll charge £1,000 a facial
when she comes to London? And, honestly, it’s the best thing that’s ever
happened to my face. True to her word, Christine has “cleaned out all of
that gunk”. The catch is that I have to go back in two weeks. Which’ll come
to another $350 plus the flight cost. That made me so tense I booked in for
a massage. It cost only $60 so, what the hell, I booked myself in for a
couple more. For two days my tour of New York had taken in no museums, art
galleries or shops, but the interiors of three beauty salons and two massage
parlours. I read only beauty magazines and learnt about concepts such as
“scalp acne” and the possibility that my eyelashes “are ageing.” I read an
ad that claimed: “Swabbing with Nozin Nasal Sanitizer wards off airborne
germs.”
My face was clearer, my fingernails more experimentally colourful, my
personality partially eroded by 48 hours of salon talk.
I could have left it at that. For the aesthetically carefree among you, a
warning. In New York, these people who fix your looks have their own ideas
about what constitutes female loveliness (usually it’s Reese Witherspoon in
slingbacks and a lemon shift dress). Do not, as I did, arrive jet lagged in
a hair salon and utter the words: “Just make me look better.”
First they low-lighted the precious grey in my hair. It’s at this point I had
my “after” picture taken. Then they told me the low-lights were irreversible
as bleach turns white hair blue. Then they said the only way to fix this is
to dye the whole thing “a warm brown”. I came back to London with vermillion
toes, salsa nails and coffin-coloured hair. I’d spent more than $700 and
intend to spend a few hundred more on correcting the mop. Before I left
Roger said: “Your skin is great. And now you have the hair of a Hasidic Jew,
only their wigs are usually better cut.”
In a nutshell: yes, the beauty treatments are dirt cheap in America. The pound
is so strong that you can mani-pedi yourself into a happy stupor there
without having to sell your house as you would do here. The massage joints I
will desperately miss. But there’s an upside to not being able to afford the
primping, I say, and more salient questions to be asked than: “Is it true
that you can have your testicles waxed in New York for a laughable £2.17?”
And the most salient question of all is this: will three days of cheap
beauty treatments make you look any better when you get back? Tad would say
yes. But I quote what my local newsagent, Harry, said to me today: “I liked
you when you were natural.”
