Male Mystique--Not Just Another Pretty Facial

“Give me a break. “

That’s how Greg Nicolaysen’s brother in New York City reacted when he heard about the latest form of aberrant behavior California had inflicted upon his once street-smart younger sibling.

In previous phone calls, the brother had mocked Nicolaysen, a 30-year-old attorney, for wanting “ to share” his thoughts. And Greg could almost hear his brother’s sneer when he mentioned the yoga lessons. But the kicker came when Greg revealed he had experienced his first, well . . . facial.

Mask of Goop

A facial ! Nicolaysen tried to laugh as he recalled his brother’s disdain, but the tight mask of transparent goop constraining his features only crinkled.

“It looks ridiculous, doesn’t it?” he said a moment later, as a Romanian cosmetologist at a posh Beverly Hills beauty salon began whapping his face--the next stage in a procedure at least as complex as most civil litigation. “It’s absolutely hilarious, isn’t it? But I really think that for a trial lawyer, this is a must.”

He is not alone. Just when the legal profession conquered its fear of styling gel, along came “L.A. Law” with a male cast that magazines and newspapers have proclaimed “THE SEXIEST MEN ALIVE” to raise jurors’ expectations and start the spiral of self-consciousness all over again.

But attorneys aren’t the only professionals who are delving into what had effectively been women’s secret rites of beautification.

An underground of men now pamper themselves with facials, scalp treatments and pedicures at the chic salons in Beverly Hills and--as Nicolaysen might inform his brother--Manhattan. If the cosmetics industry has its way, powder room may soon become a unisex term. The days when men could wrinkle their noses at the vanity of face lifts are long past.

“There’s a whole generation (of male professionals) who aren’t afraid to say ‘I’m displeased with aging or with this facial feature,’ and to the extent they’re able to afford it, they change it,” said Susan Mac of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons.

For example, men were peering through 14% of the eyes surgeons debagged in 1984, Mac said. Twenty-five percent of the noses doctors whittled down belonged to men, and 45% of the Dumbo-esque ears they nipped and tucked were on male heads.

Last year American women spent $4.9 billion on cosmetics, $3.2 billion on hair products and $2.9 billion on fragrances, according to the latest survey compiled by “Product Marketing Magazine,” a New-York based toiletries industry trade journal. American men (or their wives and lovers, by proxy) forked out more than $1.2 billion for all such products.

Variety of Products

Most of this money went for such standard items as shaving cream and cologne. (“A lot of men do use it, just to get rid of the Christmas gift,” one image consultant said.) But men also spent about $154 million on hair products and an additional $28 million on hair coloring. The $20 million or so they paid for skin treatment products marked an 18% increase over the previous year, and this year a slew of men’s shampoos and ointments that supposedly thicken hair will also thicken the wallets of cosmetics manufacturers, the magazine predicts.

Still, resistance to male make-over thinking runs deep. Phrases like self-consumed and effeminate come up in conversations on the subject.

But the cosmetics industry is growing impatient with such misguided machismo . Skeptics might eat their words if they knew how many actors they watch on the movie screen had their chest hair waxed away at certain salons, beauticians say.

“There are still a lot of men out there that don’t feel comfortable with a full grooming regimen,” said Bette Popovich, publisher of Product Marketing Magazine. But the “long process of educating the man,” which began with football star Joe Namath’s hair product crusade, is building momentum, she said.

In 1985, cosmetics companies spent $91 million marketing their men’s products in the media. Of that, $25 million went to ads in magazines ranging from Esquire to M--and a deluge of articles such as Gentlemen’s Quarterly’s recent “Are You Man Enough For Mousse?” are fueling the movement.

Now, Popovich said, it’s time for the cosmetics industry to make its pitch to “the blue-collar worker, the ethnic man”--to that 80% of the male population that “doesn’t shop at Bloomingdale’s.”

For a long time, John Molloy of New Jersey, who “made image a macho subject” with his best-selling “Dress for Success,” concluded that the alleged boom each year in men’s cosmetics consisted of wishful thinking by the industry and sales to homosexual men. But Molloy’s latest “image research” suggests that a bona fide boomlet is at hand in straight male America.

“I’m not suggesting that everyone’s putting on powder and rouge. They’re not. But there has been some use, particularly among top executives, of traditionally feminine products,” he said.

Molloy, 50, had always discounted whatever negative career effects graceful aging might have on men. But his most recent research has him waffling about whether to dye his own salt-and-pepper hair.

“I did a research project about top executives having plastic surgery, particularly before they go to a new (work) environment. I found looking young and vibrant is important. . . . (Corporations) want someone with the experience of a 55-year-old who looks like a 40-year-old,” he said.

As a tangent to that research, he also found that hair in particular effects the “image filter” through which colleagues and clients perceive what a man has to say. So even as he vacillates about his own hair, Molloy offered this advice: “If you want to get ahead, to be more credible, you had better dye it. And you’d better dye it carefully and not let roots show--the research shows that.”

On the other hand, Aida Grey, whose best-known client is the First Lady, still believes a head of salt-and-pepper hair imbues a man with a dignified Cronkite-like air. But eyebrows are a decidedly different matter.

“Nothing is more demoralizing than gray eyebrows,” she said.

As Grey tells it, “virtually every actor on television” has his eyebrows and lashes tinted at her Beverly Hills Institut de Beaute--and now professional men are flocking in as well.

“Light eyebrows devitalize! They drain power from you!” the diminutive woman said, grappling a skeptical visitor into a pink beautician’s chair in an attempt to transform his sun-bleached brows into awe-inspiring red arcs.

Around the corner, at Aida Thibiant salon, an assortment of men whom you might expect to make a fuss about their appearance--including such 40-ish rockers as Rod Stewart and Bob Seger, according to the salon--come in regularly to get spruced up. But men in lower-profile fields also have the salon’s cosmetologists work on their mugs.

Those who get various facials offered at Thibiant find cosmetologists poking, scraping, squeezing and slapping their faces; smearing them with exotic cleansers, masks and potions and zapping their pores shut with sizzling bolts from a glowing purple lamp that looks and sounds like a patio bug killer.

Oddly enough, such seeming torture is deeply relaxing, clients of Thibiant and other salons said.

Greg Nicolaysen, for instance, emitted involuntary gasps of pleasure as his regular cosmetologist at Georgette Klinger Salon massaged his face.

“Your first reaction is, ‘What kind of narcissist would do this?’ ” Nicolaysen said, “But it’s not just cosmetic. It’s almost meditative. It’s very soothing. I think that’s an important part of the reason so many men enjoy it. It gives (them) the opportunity to feel totally nurtured on a physical level. . . . These women are all from Eastern Europe, and they’re like little nurses. They take care of you for two hours.”

Nicolaysen got his first facial a year ago, after some Mexican shell fish gave him hepatitis and his skin “turned yellow and crusty.”

“The facial presentability of a trial lawyer is as important as any other external feature. Jurors notice a lawyer’s skin,” Nicolaysen said. He gave his new regimen six months. Now he is an enthusiastic convert, spending about $1,500 a year on skin care alone.

“There’s a certain reticence among professional men to openly discuss these kinds of grooming indulgences,” he said. “My female colleagues think it’s wonderful; my male colleagues think I’m slightly eccentric. I think that sort of illustrates a humorous contrast between men and women.”

Roy Silver, a Grammy and Emmy award winner, managed legends ranging from Bob Dylan to Tiny Tim before he began promoting Roy, wife Linda’s line of men’s skin-care products. He said he notices an interesting phenomenon when he peddles his regimen in exclusive men’s stores.

“Wives and girlfriends stand there and say things like, ‘Oh, come on darling, you know you won’t use this. You won’t even wash your face before you go to sleep,’ ” he said. But he thinks women have ulterior motives for dissuading their men from good skin care.

“Men age better than women, and I’m not sure women are willing--subliminally, psychologically--to pass on to men the fact that there’s something that can make them look better.”

Especially when that something is as simple as 1-2-3 (shave with his Fabulous shaving cream each morning, then apply toner and collagen “to plump up those lines and preclude closed pores”) . . . 4-5 (put on day moisturizer and then eye balm “so that those little lines go away”) . . . 6-7 (apply a pre-shave moisturizer each night and then a honey-almond mask for 20 minutes “to open up your pores,”) . . . 8 (apply a mint mask for another 20 minutes--”think of it as a wax job while you’re washing your car”) . . . and occasionally Step 9, Roy’s Egyptian Thorne Mask (“It comes from the root of the acacia tree--you put it on when you have a hangover or aren’t feeling good”).

All of which may have created a new front in the war between the sexes. As one woman said: “I’ve had to make a rule. My boyfriends can’t spend more time in the bathroom than I do.”