Greetings From LovelinessLand : A LOOK AT THE LATEST TREATMENTS--KITTY LITTER FACIALS, AND POLISHINGS AND AROMA TANNING--REVEALS THAT MORE IS MORE IN THE BEAUTY BIZ

So the Southern California real estate market is in the toilet, we’ve lost Star Wars, and the B-2 bomber and the C-17 are hanging by a thread. Relax, we’ve still got the beauty biz. The Cold War may be over, but there’s no truce in the war against clogged pores, drab hair and chipped polish.

Take my beauty regimen--please. I used to get my hair cut at a funky little shop around the corner from my house. Now I go to the largest salon in California: Umberto, a 12,000-square-foot Beverly Hills shrine, complete with a cappuccino bar and costume jewelry boutique, where in addition to offering the usual cuts, color, perms, manicures, pedicures and facials, they will bleach a woman’s arm hair or wax a man’s ears. For this extravagance, I blame my mother, the Manhattan Beauty Maven. When I decided to cut off my long hair, she gave me Umberto’s name. For under three figures, he gave me a cut so sensational that even my notoriously frugal husband urged me to return.

Not that I needed much prodding. Visiting le grand salon is like going to an opulent theme park--LovelinessLand!--where any physical imperfection can be repaired and the raison d’etre is to pamper me. The sheer excess is mind-boggling; from the faux Pompeian frescoes over the reception desk to trompe l’oeil wood beams on the shampoo room’s ceiling. Sixty-five hairdressers, five colorists, 14 manicurists, three facialists, five makeup artists and a scalp-treatment specialist are all decked out in the beauty version of Mickey and Goofy costumes--black, avant-garde ensembles straight out of Elle or Details. They perform magical transformations in 18 rooms, five private suites and endless nooks and crannies. I am given to understand (from a press release) that my fellow pilgrims include Madonna, Shannen Doherty, Janet Jackson, Cher, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and Winona Ryder.

“I figure we have around 600 clients a day, five days a week, who spend an average of $100,” said Babette Beja, salon manager.

I figure it’s more than that, since the shop has sly ways of getting you to spend money. For instance, if an assistant graciously offers you a Diet Coke and you gratefully accept, it later appears on your bill. When my hair was still long, a stylist put it up in a spectacular chignon. I was charged $1.50 for every fancy bobby pin she used (luckily, I passed on the $79jeweled chopsticks in the boutique). And, of course, each operator favors a different miracle hair glop, and the salon carries them all. Retail glop sales alone probably cover the monthly rent.

“Soon a woman will be able to walk out with a fantastic pasta primavera for six to take home for dinner,” promises the courtly Umberto, who is installing a “ tutto Italiano” kitchen next door to his salon. If this seems excessive, over at 2 Rodeo, Jose Eber and his partner, the oh-so-fabulously-French Laurent Dufourg, have spent more than a million dollars on a 10,000-square-foot neo-Rococo temple which is open seven days a week.

PERHAPS MORE IS MORE IN THE BEAUTY BIZ BECAUSE THERE’S SO MUCH competition. In Beverly Hills’ 1.2-mile golden triangle between Wilshire, Santa Monica and Robertson boulevards, there are more than 208 licensed hair, skin and body-beautifying businesses. And Beverly Hills has no monopoly; beauty transcends social, cultural and economic boundaries. In 1992, Southern California’s resources included 51,588 manicurists, 1,434 electrologists, 5,392 cosmeticians and 112,816 cosmetologists (this includes hairdressers)--more than 10% of the national total pampering less than 5% of the nation’s population. Salons in Los Angeles County made more than $100 million in hair and nail care alone. Nationally, salon services were projected to gross $35.5 billion last year with $4.5 billion coming from nails alone.

And to think I went to college instead of beauty school.

The business is not entirely recession proof, according to another Beverly Hills hair-meister. “Clients don’t come in every third week like they used to,” said Giuseppe Franco, whose press kit, with winning understatement, bills him as “the most famous hairdresser in the world.” “They make their color last until the last second. When they have black roots and blond hair, then they come.” Why not skip it entirely? “If you want to live in L.A., you have to keep up the image.”

“In boom times, a salon owner could open 15 or 20 locations,” said Mary Atherton, editor of Modern Salon, a glossy, Illinois-based magazine with articles like “How To Pitch Perms to a Reluctant Client.” “But now rents are prohibitive. And a lot of people are deciding to make the one salon that they have truly spectacular. To survive, you have to have as many people as possible come through the door. So you add more services.”

There are certainly enough to choose from: body sugaring (a variation on waxing), sports pedicures, thermal seaweed wraps, scalp facials, full body mud masques and watsu massage, a form of shiatsu performed in a swimming pool that is supposed to make you feel like you returned to the womb (how would you know?). My vote for most eccentric is Nail Art (whose patron saint, according to the remarkably thick and informative Nails magazine, is Olympic track star Florence Griffith Joyner). For $30, a nail artist will paint Elvis, or your grandchild, or a scene from “Star Trek” on your nail.

Then there’s aromatherapy, which, depending on your olfactory nerves, is the greatest healing force or biggest gimmick of the ‘90s. Proponents claim that a whiff of oils--mimosa, patchouli, peppermint, rose--can do everything from opening the heart chakra to sharpening the wits to aiding sleep. A person wishing to inhale her way to greater health and happiness can indulge in aromatherapy facials, massages, pedicures, scalp treatments, even Aroma Tanning, where you lie on an air-cooled UV bed and are basted with lavender.

“The body responds to scent without any intellectual barriers,” said Susan Dworski, export manager for Aroma Vera, which claims to be the nation’s largest manufacturer of essential-oil-based products. Last year, the L.A. company sold 660 pounds of lavender, 1,100 pounds of eucalyptus, 660 pounds of ylang-ylang, and a ton of petit grain, an oil obtained from the bitter orange tree. They have yet to market the smell of money, though perhaps they should. She told me the Las Vegas Hilton recently pumped a blend of essential oils into the slot machine area of the casino. Fragrant one-armed bandits collected 45% more.

But who am I to judge what’s beneficial? Recently, I indulged in a “Salt Glo” treatment at Burke Williams, a lavish day spa in Santa Monica. I was nonplussed when Frank, a hunk with a towel around his waist, led me to a “wet room,” a large shower with a massage table. He instructed me to lie face down, stark naked, with just a teensy towel for modesty, then tossed sea salt on me as if I were an icy driveway. “The Egyptians called this aura polishing,” Frank explained as he scraped my hull. He claimed to be exfoliating and detoxifying, two of the many beauty verbs I view with suspicion. Whatever, it was fun.

“You wouldn’t believe the people I’ve salted,” Frank said as he turned on the shower to rinse me off. When pressed for specifics, he named cast members of “Sister Act II.”

Name dropping is rarely accidental. Salons boast of movie star patronage the way English businesses flaunt the Royal Warrant (By Appointment to Her Majesty, etc.). Almost every establishment I visited offered me a list of celebrity clients, all the while insisting that they provide complete discretion.

Franco has even decorated his Beverly Hills salon with huge photos of clients such as Tony Curtis and Iman that were taken by “my childhood friend and business partner, Mickey Rourke.” But he assured me, with a straight face, “I don’t brag about them. You know how many TV shows don’t accept me unless I go on and gossip? I lose a show a month. I’ve done Montel Williams, Vicki Lawrence, this is my fifth time. But I don’t say, ‘So and so’s hair is so thin.’ So I can’t do ‘Arsenio’ and ‘A Current Affair.’ ” (Not to worry. Barbra Streisand is also a client. And look where her former hairdresser, Jon Peters, wound up.)

The Beauty Barons don’t just do stars, they are stars, who endlessly promote with books, talk shows and infomercials. Superstylist Jose Eber got his big break when he created Farrah Fawcett’s widely copied shag in the late ‘70s. Today, his star client is Elizabeth Taylor but not, as the tabloids recently suggested, Sugar, Taylor’s Maltese. “You know how that got started?” Eber laughed. “We were shooting a commercial. Elizabeth was on camera and she asked, ‘How’s Sugar’s hair?’ I said, ‘It looks fine.’ Maybe I took the brush and ran through it. But I didn’t tease. Sugar isn’t coming to me on a monthly basis.”

Just give her time. “The one thing women are looking for is to feel good about themselves, to like what they see,” said Eber. “I make them feel good and that gives them great confidence. That’s what it’s all about, the beauty business. It’s not as superficial as people think.”

Barbara Cadow, a USC psychology instructor, agreed. “It’s actually a cheap way to do therapy,” she said. “Women have a constant complaint: They’re not getting attention from the men in their life. They go have a facial, have a massage, get their hair colored. In the excitement of having someone pay attention to you, gushing over you, you feel better. It’s all about taking care of yourself.”

Does anyone really need this much care? Recently, I drove to Encino for a 90-minute Royal Pedicure at A Place For You, a nail tabernacle so clean they could perform surgery on the floor. (According to Nails magazine, sanitation is a big selling point because it’s the only way posh salons can compete with the discount shops.) Donna Marone, the manicurist, or as Nails prefers, the nail technician, installed me on an elevated throne in the “Pedicure Palace” and did everything to my toes except play this little piggy goes to market. But after a seaweed sloughing treatment, reflexology massage and hot paraffin wax mask, I was homicidal from inactivity. I was proud of my crimson toes, for at least five minutes. Then I went to a market in thongs and was run over by a faulty cart.

Time for a retouch?

“PEOPLE NEED A PLACE TO GO TO HEAL FROM THE TROUBLED WORLD AND the salon has become that place,” said Jody Byrne, president of Trends and Sources International, an Ohio company that forecasts beauty trends. “I looked up the definition of a sacred place and it’s one where a prescribed ritual transforms an individual. That’s what the day spa movement is all about.”

Striking a less spiritual chord, she noted: “Baby Boomers are hitting middle age. They have the most money and at the same time, their body is going south at the fastest rate.” Another expert blames our obsession with appearance on evolution. “Go down to the L.A. Zoo and watch the gorillas,” said Norman Freed, a psychologist who specializes in the beauty industry. “Gorillas use grooming for bonding, as an opportunity for interfacing, and as an opportunity to settle disputes.”

Perhaps this explains why beauty has become such a popular social activity. Friends who used to go to lunch and a movie now hang out at the day spa. Mothers and daughters have warm fuzzy memories of shared facials. Just ask Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea, who allegedly (wink/nudge: I have sworn not to reveal my sources) get their pores steamed at Georgette Klinger Inc., a national chain of tony salons.

“People have such hectic lives. To have a place you can relax, where no one can call you--that’s important,” said president Kathryn Klinger, who had her first facial when she was 11 and grew up playing with her mother’s products. She estimates her average customer spends $100 a visit. “Of course, we have clients who spend $20,000 a year, who come with their entire families every single week.”

In exchange, they get a sense of physical, if not fiscal, control. The morning before my $68 “basic facial” I awoke with an enormous blemish. “I give your pimple special treatment,” promised Miss Faina, the Russian aesthetician at Georgette Klinger on Rodeo, dabbing a camphor mask on the spot. While it was drying, I asked how beauty services in L.A. compared to those in the former Soviet Union. “Women there have facials all the time,” she said.

An hour later, my skin was practically healed and radiant. However, if I wanted to keep it that way, Miss Faina recommended that I invest in a half-dozen products (average price, $22 each) and a monthly Line Essential Facial ($98 for my “older skin”). I was reminded of a soothsayer I once met in El Retiro, Madrid’s version of Central Park. She told me that there was a curse on me, then offered to remove it for $5.

I often thought about that soothsayer during my tour of LovelinessLand. The curse on me varied from blond eyelashes to chapped hands to bitten fingernails. But a solution could always be found if I crossed a palm with cash. Not all of these solutions are expensive, but they are habit forming. Start with a simple manicure, hair cut and occasional facial, and pretty soon your schedule is overrun with lash tints, highlights, low lights, fiberglass nail overlays, hair relaxers and whatever else is written up in this month’s issue of Allure.

Many of these techniques work, so it’s hard to know where to draw the line. Technology has finally caught up with vanity. A woman can now buy a perfect set of sculpted unpolished nails, waist-length hair extensions, or smoother skin in one hour, thanks to a glycolic acid peel. And that’s not counting the shopping list available through plastic surgery.

Speaking of which, I went to Christophe (the salon that rushed to President Clinton’s rescue on the LAX runway) for a non-surgical Electro-Myopulse face-lift. A soft-spoken woman in a turban named Ram Prakash (which in the Sikh spiritual language means rejuvenator of Farrah Fawcett, I mean, Radiance of God) handed me a mirror and asked a daunting question, “Which side of your face is showing the most signs of age?”

I reluctantly guessed the left. “I would have said the right,” said Prakash, pointing out lines, wrinkles and folds that I naively had attributed to lack of sleep. I lay down and she ran her magic cell-rejuvenating wand over the left side of my face. Supposedly the electrical current was opening the meridians in my face, like acupuncture. I felt nothing but a tingling sensation and mounting skepticism. Then she handed me a mirror. To my astonishment, the treated side was an inch higher.

“You are going to do the other side?” I asked nervously.

An hour later, I beheld a face I hadn’t seen in several years. Prakash said the $45 treatment would last anywhere from an hour to a week. “It takes a few treatments before your face sticks,” she explained.

My husband’s reaction? “Honey, you look like you’ve been sandblasted.” But a girlfriend was impressed. The results lasted three days and I’m longing for a pick-me-up. But I am trying to remain strong.

Meanwhile, I have plenty of stuff to try at home. Prakash recommended that I bathe in four cups of cider vinegar and water, which will leave my skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom (the universal benchmark for softness). I’m afraid I’ll smell like an Easter egg. Then again, at least I’ve heard of vinegar.

Reading a list of product ingredients these days requires an advanced degree in alchemy. A random sampling of cosmetic ingredients includes: DNA extracted from salmon milt, cactine, silk amino acids, salicylic acid from willow bark, blackthorn oil, hydrolyzed human hair keratin protein, frozen seaweed extract and St. John’s wort oil.

“What’s exotic about wort oil? It’s used for topical healing,” said Jane Kennedy, owner of Palmetto, a Santa Monica boutique overflowing with virtually every fragrant soap, cream and holistic skin-care line on the planet. “Exotic to me would be some unbelievable oils with East Indian attars of sunflower and gardenia and night-blooming jasmine. Not common calendula or mallow.”

Even further out there was Riquette Hofstein, a Beverly Hills aesthetician whose biggest claim to fame is that she’s demonstrated her kitchen cosmetics on David Letterman’s show 17 times. “I teach people how they can take everything they eat and drink and turn it into beauty products,” Hofstein said. “Did you know that you can put a pound of kitty litter in the blender--before kitty gets to it, of course--and add water and apply it as a mask on your face?” And then there was her recipe for canker sores: “Drink urine. Heal the body with its own astringent.”

Pass the salmon milt DNA, please.

Alas, while the lords and ladies of LovelinessLand can make you gorgeous and give you confidence, it’s dangerous to get too dependent. The gods must have known I was researching this article because my beauty karma has gone out of whack. Umberto decided to give me a new look and got a wee bit scissors happy. Friends who formerly regarded my hair with envy now look at me with transparent Schadenfreude and utter four of the saddest words in the English language: “It will grow back.” To make matters worse, I went to a neighborhood shop and had my blond eyebrows tinted with vegetable dye. They turned out a garish brownish black. Meanwhile, my over-cleansed skin is breaking out from one too many miracle preparations. And I reek of lavender.

I’m taking this all as a sign that I must quit dwelling on my appearance and focus on a more spiritually fulfilling endeavor. And I will. I promise.

Just as soon as that woman in the turban gives me one more face-lift.