Page 96 - Allure - November 2016 USA

As someone who is constantly resolving to spend less time thinking about clothes and cosmetics, I
remember looking forward to my first reporting trip to Saudi Arabia, in 2007, in the way a compulsive Instagram user might anticipate a weekend stay in a place with spotty cellular coverage: as a period of enforced, but not unwelcome, abstinence. I was, at that point in my life—in my late 20s, and working as a reporter in Syria and Lebanon—increasingly pained by my interests in fashion and beauty, which seemed very much at odds with the serious journalism I aspired to.
Arab society is highly gendered, and though female Arab culture, which can sometimes take the cultivation of beauty and femininity to extremes, had not yet occurred to me as a subject in its own right, I felt its influence every time I set foot outside. Many women covered themselves, of course. But those who didn’t always looked, well, amazing. Arriving in Beirut after a few weeks away, I’d find myself suppressing the kind of acute anxiety about
my appearance that I hadn’t experienced since middle school. I had to do something about my hair and nails, and right away, if possible. I was 26 when a concerned Lebanese friend advised a prophylactic Botox regimen; fair-skinned women like me aged so badly otherwise, she explained. I considered the idea with more seriousness than I’d like to admit. I had to get a grip.
If ever a secular, American, female reporter were disposed to embrace the abaya—the floor-length
cloak that women in Saudi Arabia are obliged to wear in public at all times—it was this self-conscious beauty junkie. It was the fall, and I was heading to Riyadh for one of my first big magazine assignments. The thousands
of pages I’d read about Saudi history and culture all seemed to confirm a picture of the kingdom as a sort of frivolity-free zone. And I couldn’t wait. I would buy a black abaya during my layover in Abu Dhabi, I decided, and that would be that.
At first, the abaya and the hijab did simplify matters. From the moment I stumbled out of baggage claim, trying to keep my new abaya’s trailing hem from getting caught in the wheels of my rolling suitcase, it was as
if women had disappeared from the public space. They were there, of course, swathed in black. But I would
go days without seeing another female face in public, and without other women to admire and emulate, concerns about grooming and adornment began to feel increasingly abstract.
The culture of regulating women’s modesty has a history in the West, too, with bikini bans in Europe as late as the 1950s. In the current political climate, the tide has turned dramatically. Certain towns, like Nice, recently banned the “burkini,” a swimsuit that covers a woman’s body like a hooded wet suit and allows Muslim women to enjoy the sea without compromising their beliefs.
A French court overturned the ban, but the conflict highlighted the discomfort on both sides of the issue.
To say that reality in Saudi Arabia was more complicated than I’d imagined is a gross understatement. I should have been less surprised to find that in
the gender-segregated kingdom, the female culture I’d observed elsewhere in the region reached its apotheosis. When it comes to devotion to makeup, spa treatments, visits to the salon, and other higher- order forms of self-care, Saudi women are major players. Spending on cosmetics in Saudi Arabia has nearly doubled over the last ten years, from
$280 million in 2005 to $535 million in 2015, according to data compiled and analyzed by Euromonitor, a London-based market-research firm. Even in an oil-
rich country with sky-high disposable incomes, those are significant numbers. But they begin to make
sense when you consider the Saudi population’s relative youth (roughly 70 percent are under 30) and the fact that Saudi women are increasingly working outside the home thanks to reforms enacted
under the late King Abdullah, who died last year. Rising female employment rates had sparked hope among women’s rights advocates that financially empowered Saudi women, saving their own salaries in their personal bank accounts, would begin to command greater respect within their families and gain a greater degree of control over their lives.
But at the moment, it seems that supporters of those changes may have underestimated the seduction of the makeup counter; according to a report in Arab News, the Jeddah-based English- language daily, the average employed woman in the kingdom spends between 70 and 80 percent of her earnings on beauty products.
And now, the great irony: Few, if any, of these products may be used or shown in public. Women pursue beauty for and among themselves, as a means of expression, in strictly private, women-only settings. In Saudi Arabia—more than in any other country, and to a degree that seemed inconceivable to me until I observed it up close—beauty is a private pleasure, an intimate, sometimes even secret, pursuit.
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