Men Face Up to the Facts of Good Skin Care
Stretched out on a salon treatment chair, a white towel covering his bare chest, John Allison was the picture of relaxation as he underwent what has become a monthly ritual.
The 52-year-old co-owner of a Huntington Beach seafood catering business was having a facial.
“It’s totally relaxing--I can fall asleep very easily after a hard day at the office,” sighed Allison, as Vienna-born skin-care specialist Maryka Elliott massaged his face, neck and shoulders to begin an hourlong regimen, which would include the application of various oils to soften his skin, warm steam to open pores, a vegetable peel mask to remove dead layers of skin and the extraction of blackheads.
By the time a gleaming, beaming Allison walked out of Prive, a stylish Newport Beach salon, he not only had undergone the $50 facial peel but had paid $10 extra to have the stray hairs on his ears and in his nostrils removed with wax.
He, nevertheless, draws the line at the $15 eyelash tint--despite Elliott’s ongoing insistence that darkening the light ends of his lashes would make his eyes appear more brilliant.
Protested Allison: “It’s a little too effeminate, isn’t it?”
Elliott smiled knowingly and said, “You’d be surprised, Mr. Allison, how many men are doing it.”
Secret Rites
Indeed, in chic salons from Newport Beach to Manhattan--and points in between--men are delving into what traditionally has been women’s secret rites of beautification.
Once they’ve overcome their initial apprehension--even outright embarrassment--at setting foot in a domain once dominated by women, a growing number of men are discovering the delights of facials, manicures, pedicures, scalp treatments, eyebrow and eyelash tints and even waxing and electrolysis for the removal of unwanted hair between the eyebrows, the back of the neck and back.
“We have a lot of professionals--doctors, lawyers, airline personnel--and we do a lot of salesmen who work right here in the mall,” said Sharon Orr, manager of Aida Grey Salon at South Coast Plaza, where the number of male clients has risen from 5% to about 20% over the past five years.
25% of Clientele
At Prive salon, skin care manager Elliott predicts men may make up to 25% of the clientele by the end of the year.
“It’s difficult for them at first,” she said. “They feel it is not a manly thing to do, so we try to make it as comfortable for them as possible by letting them know other men are doing it.”
Clients are not only executives in three-piece suits.
A number of construction workers, who get “sweaty and grimy” on the job, come in for facial peels, Elliott said. And a lot of men come in apprehensively with gift certificates from their wives or girlfriends and “then get hooked on it,” she said.
Orr believes that the increasing influx of men vying for salon cubicle space is the result of education and media attention on skin care.
“I think you’re seeing more and more cosmetic companies coming out with specific items for men; so, of course, they’re becoming more educated with what’s out there, and they’re just becoming aware of how important it is for them to take care of their skin,” she said. “More men are seeing plastic surgeons today. And those who can’t afford it or are still reluctant are looking for alternatives, so they turn to skin care products.”
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.
‘They Change It’
“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 whittled down by doctors belonged to men, and 45% of the Dumbo-esque ears that were 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.
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 also will fatten the wallets of cosmetics manufacturers, the magazine predicts.
Resistance Runs Deep
Still, resistance to male make-overs 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. And, beauticians say, skeptics might be surprised if they knew how many tough guys have their chest hair waxed away at certain salons,
“There are still a lot of men out there who 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.”
Wishful Thinking
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 affects 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.”
Eyebrows Are Different
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 Walter 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!” Grey proclaimed.
Around the corner, at Aida Thibiant salon, an assortment of men whom you might expect to make a fuss about their appearance--including such fortyish 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.
Attorney 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, 30, 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.”
Dry Skin Condition
John Allison has been coming to Prive salon for a year and a half, motivated by a dry skin condition--and his wife, Joyce. He no longer has the dry skin problem.
“I was using regular after shave, but I don’t use those products anymore because the alcohol that’s in the after-shave products dries the skin all to hell,” he said. “I buy the products (sold) here, and I used the creams after I shave.”
Allison said he doesn’t hide his regular visits to the salon from his male friends, but he does keep it fairly low key.
“So many people just wouldn’t understand or are not ready for it themselves,” he said, “but I have had a few people say, ‘Hey, your skin looks great, what are you doing to it?’ ”
