How, without sampling, are you supposed to decide between Lancome's four types of "cleanser with water," two "without water," four toners, two makeup removers, four exfoliators, and three hand creams? Certainly not from their names, which are a ludicrous jumble of pseudo-science and quasi-French. What is Hydra Controle? Is it the same thing as Primordiale Nuit? Do I wish to ask the Cool Girl? No, I do not.
Later, I learned from Lancome's Web site that Primordiale Nuit results in "soft and appeased skin" due to the cream's unique delivery system of "nanocapsules" of Vitamin A. I did not learn the price.
Underhill has done a study of women's behavior in drugstore cosmetic aisles and determined that female shoppers like to study the information on product packaging before they buy. (And you wonder why.) Perhaps for this reason, more and more cosmetics companies are going on-line, where women can ponder the offerings at their leisure.
Also, according to Underhill, some makeup retailers have been persuaded by market research to switch to an "open sell" strategy, in which the lipsticks and shadows are available for handling and sampling, rather than being locked in cases as if women were dirty toddlers not to be trusted.
Cosmetics bazaars are still nowhere near the level of comfort you feel in some record stores now, where you can listen to CDs entirely unobserved, potentially for hours. But if they were, you wouldn't be too intimidated to ask the price, now, would you? Ah, the beauty myth— exploiting it can be such a tricky job.
Shave and a Haircut
I had my hair cut in a barber shop the other day. I know that's a bit of a transgression for a female. But I needed to do it. I finally just refuse to fork over seventy-five dollars plus tip merely to lose two inches straight off the back.
I have been envying my husband for years on this count— the way he just strolls home with a spontaneously acquired haircut, as casually purchased as batteries from the corner store. He gets his hair cut without thinking about it twice, as if out to mow the lawn or sheer a sheep. "Less hair, please. Thank you, here is eleven dollars."
By contrast, I find haircuts to be a deeply tormenting experience. I never find the right stylist. Every six months I begin all over again by carefully scrutinizing the hair of every woman I know, then interrogating them about their stylist until I'm satisfied that the stylist in question will actually do something competent to my head in exchange for a great deal of money.
I arrive at the hair salon, which reeks of aromatherapy, and check in with a receptionist who sports a nose jewel and has some wholly indefinable way of making me feel as if I do not belong to her club because, well, just look at my dorky hair. Then I have to change out of my clothes and don a cranberry-colored robe, as if I'm about to undergo a CAT scan. Thus stripped of whatever personality I can project through personal fashion, I discuss numerous haircuts with a sycophantic stylist, who is really just pondering my face in his hotly unflattering lights and thinking that it's irredeemably loaf-shaped.
Having arrived at some inscrutable decision about how, precisely, he is going to cut two inches off the back of my hair, he turns me over to an eighteen-year-old in three-story-high platform shoes, who starts massaging my hands with aromatherapeutic almond-scented oil, making them so slippery that I can't grip my coffee mug.
I get escorted to the sinks to have my hair lathered with Product, even if I have washed it already that day, and for the ensuing hour, the highly fashionable stylist clips microscopic strands of hair from all over my head while engaging in forced banter.
"Who trimmed your bangs— they look fabulous."
"I did, with nail scissors."
Silence.
"So, what do you do?"
"I'm a writer."
"Oh cool."
Silence.
"Do you ever dream," I ask sometimes, trying to hotwire the conversation, "that you're cutting someone's hair, only instead of using scissors, you find that you're holding a stalk of asparagus or something?"
"No, not really."
Silence.
I can't read because the stylist wants my head up straight, so I have to stare into the mirror at all times. It's like the stylist is shouting "Look at yourself! Look. At. Yourself." It reminds me of that classic Saturday Night Live skit, in which a drill sergeant is haranguing his recruits by calling them names; he says to one of them: "You! Yeah, you. You with that . . . hair . . . on your head. Know what I'm gonna call you? HAIR HEAD."
I walk out with a "hairdo" that falls apart as soon as I wash out the conditioner/touch of mousse/finishing spray that has propped it up like egg white in meringue.
Some women love going to the hair salon, I realize, so I should point out that I have straight super-fine hair. There is simply nothing you can do with straight super-fine hair that makes any difference if you don't have a one-inch wide face. If your cheekbones aren't apparent, and your chin doesn't end in a piquant point like Gwyneth Paltrow's, then this kind of hair is going to be the bane of your existence no matter how much cash you have. I always leave feeling disappointed and shafted, and over the years, the intervals between salon visits has been lengthening.
Finally, the moment of eureka. I went to a barber. Mind you, this was easier to conceive of than to execute. It took me weeks to pluck up my courage. But at last I felt bold (or desperate) enough to walk into Enzo's Hairstyles for Men, a plain room in Toronto's Little Italy, which was truthfully and indeed very clearly marked Enzo's Hairstyles for Men. I sat down in an old vinyl chair beside a stack of Sports Illustrated magazines and waited my turn. Enzo, barber and proprietor, nodded at me courteously when he spied me on the chair. He didn't seem to balk at my presence. It was all about my own confidence, I felt certain. All I had to do was get over the feeling that I had walked into Enzo's Hairstyles for Men, and I would be free. Free at last!
Enzo was attired in pale yellow work shirt and gray pants. He could as easily have been a hardware store manager. He was using a straight razor on a sallow young man with round wire-rimmed spectacles who was dressed all in black and seemed penniless, perhaps scribbling away at a novel. Another fellow waiting for a cut was burly and macho in his soiled white T-shirt— perhaps a mechanic. It occurred to me that the last thing these three men had in common was an interest in fashion. On the other hand, they were having a great, animated conversation about who was destined to win the World Cup.
"Spain," vowed Enzo.
"Argentina for sure," offered the burly man.
"I think Somalia might stay in the game," said the probable-novelist, just to be provocative.
They all pooh-poohed the Portuguese, who were just then cruising by with horns a-blazing, having beaten the Poles in a match.
"So what?" said the burly fellow.
"They're going to start a fight with the Italians around here." Enzo seemed worried.
The walls, I noticed, were festooned with posters of Italian soccer players and Canadian hockey stars. None of them had visibly styled hair. A tinny radio played Golden Oldies somewhere in the back, primarily for the entertainment of Enzo. He was smoking. That was how the room smelled— faintly of smoke, then more strongly of coffee, and the breeze of a fine June morning.
When my turn came, I hopped into his worn-leather barber chair, and Enzo covered me with a linen cloth.
"Two inches off the back," I announced.
He swiveled the chair away from the mirror, calmly and gently combed my dry hair, and snipped. Snip, snip, snip. It took five minutes. Cost fifteen dollars. Praise the Lord, I'm free at last.
Buy Toothpaste, Call Dad, Plan Funeral
for Self
Lately, I've been getting these flyers in the mail from local funeral homes that cheerfully encourage me to come in and arrange my own burial. I find this a bit disconcerting. I have many things on my to-do list: Enroll daughter in summer camp, buy husband birthday present, stop skipping yoga class, read Tolstoy, figure out why God made dinosaurs. "Plan funeral for self" isn't one of them.
Obviously the funeral i
ndustry thinks that it should be, because I get these flyers, and I noticed a big ad in the paper recently that promised anyone who bought a cemetery plot the chance to win a Carribean cruise. Pay now, die later! But, for God's sake, pay now.
Trying to figure out how this would benefit me, as opposed to the funeral industry, I went on the Internet and found a helpful Web site prepared by the Preplanning Network, an association of North American funeral homes engaged in the business of getting you to come in bursting with health and vitality to finalize the details of your death.
The site has a Procrastination Help Center, which never actually mentions the words death or funeral. Instead, it gently points out that "people who procrastinate to excess are prone to nagging guilt, self-downing, anxiety and a numbing feeling of powerlessness."
Empower yourself: Rot your own way!
Not convinced?
Well, consider that the desperate fear of confronting one's own mortality—" I'm too young!"— is just one of "the most common excuses not to preplan," according to the Preplanning Network, whose members appear to have lost perspective about what motivates most of humanity. "The younger generations are the ones who will benefit the most from preneed funeral arrangements," the site argues. "With increasing funeral costs your services will be locked in."
Maybe they will. But surely the funeral people can come up with a more compelling incentive.
I decided to visit my local funeral home to find out what on earth they were trying to accomplish. Two "advance planning administrators" greeted me graciously in the silent beige-toned front parlor of Earle Elliott Funeral Home on Dovercourt Road in Toronto. They wore shades of gray and black, as did I, so we were all very appropriate. Funeral homes are nothing if not appropriate, which is why they have a hard time engaging in self-promotion: It's hardly appropriate at times like these.
"Funeral homes didn't traditionally advertise," Crystal Middelkamp told me, speaking in hushed tones, out of professional habit, "but they have become very concerned about educating the public."
"Educating them about what?" I asked in a normal voice, which somehow sounded like shouting.
"The value of having a service," she replied. For a while there, people were opting for simplicity, and that didn't work out. Not for them, and not— I presume— for the funeral industry, which is engaged in a frantic scrabble for business at the moment, with huge corporate chains like Service Corporation International (SCI) and The Loewen Group aggressively focusing on profit while small homes like this one fight back with their own competitive push. Or have you not been watching Six Feet Under?
According to the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) in Hinesburg, Vermont, the Houston-based SCI distributed a company memo recently advising staff to bag one "preneeds contract" for every actual dead person. At several funeral homes, staffers now work on commission. Part of the issue is an industry out of kilter with demand: In New York State, 661 funeral homes are necessary to handle the population of deceased people every year, according to FCA. But the state has 1,981 homes in operation. The ratio is similar in most other states, and probably also in Canada. How do you drum up nonexistent business? You get people to pay up before they're even dead.
"We offer a wide variety of services," Middelkamp went on. "Burial, cremation, church service, location of the ceremony, if you want to have a service on top of the CN Tower, we can do that. We've had people bring in items to display from home, favorite chairs, pictures, live jazz bands, pets . . ."
"The younger generation is starting to get imaginative," interjected Karie, Crystal's colleague. "The baby boomers expect a lot of choices because of their attitude as consumers."
This put me in mind of a custom-ordered casket company called White Light Inc. that operates out of Dallas. From them, you can order a coffin painted as a brown paper parcel with RETURN TO SENDER stamped on it in red letters. Har, har. Or if you were into the Indy 500, you could get a coffin with race cars zooming all over it. Hunters can choose a deer and rabbit motif; gardeners pick flowers. People used to be memorialized according to their virtues: the brave warrior, the wise ruler, the great poet. Now they head into eternity with Knit-Wit.
"But even if people want more ritual," I said, "why can't they jot it down in a will, or leave it to the family? Why do it themselves?" The short answer, according to Crystal, is that it's easier to shop when you're not grieving. "A lot of times, families come in [after the death] and they're totally overwhelmed. With preplanning, there's no rush, you can spend all afternoon, you're having a cup of tea and laughing. It's more relaxed."
Padding silently across the plush carpet, Crystal and Karie led me to inspect my options as a future dead person. I could, for example, choose from a few vaults, which are an increasingly popular accessory, although the only thing they accomplish is to ease cemetery maintenance by warding off grave cave-ins. If people are worried about their caskets decaying in my opinion they might consider burial in the tundra. I myself would like to be buried in a bed of soft lake sediment so that I can turn up in 215 million years as an interesting fossil. But that isn't the point of vaults from a funeral home's point of view.
Near the vault models was a crucifix display, as well as some stationery, and a variety of guest books to choose from. Hmmm. The few times in my life that I've imagined my funeral, it has been a revenge fantasy, wherein an ex-boyfriend or nasty colleague stumbles into the church with teary eyes, regretting everything they said. I hadn't thought about stationery, or a guest book. I sometimes imagine what music I'd like people to be listening to as they mourn me, but I change my mind too often to "lock it in." (N.B. to self: Make sure family knows that I am not, under any circumstances, to be memorialized to the careering drone of Anglican hymns.)
We floated downstairs to the coffin display room. They all looked the same to me— bloody terrifying. What was the selection criteria? Was I supposed to lie down in each one to see which best flattered my corpse? I contemplated the Sheraton, a plum-colored casket with pink satin lining. Then I mused over the Ladies Octagon Oak, with its embroidered roses. "You know what? Why don't you just bury me in a paper bag," I suggested.
Karie and Crystal immediately protested in hushed alarm. "But it's not for you— it's for your family! For the service, where they need support! They're going through the roughest days they'll ever face."
Oh geez, we come full circle then, don't we? If it's not for me, then someone else can plan it. And in the meantime, I can drive and cook dinner and dance as I fantasize about my all-time favorite send-off songs.
To Be Mrs. or Not to Be Mrs.
It seems to be growing fashionable again among educated women of my acquaintance to take their husband's surname after marching down the aisle. The Washington conservative writer Danielle Crittenden, who is married to George Bush's former speech writer David Frum, has observed that wives who insist on keeping their own names are simply engaging in a "display of insecurity."
That's an interesting thought. Call my preference for staying Pearson a sign of insecurity if you like, but my husband's last name is Pottie, and going through my life as Patty Pottie has about as much appeal to me as wearing a dunce cap to a ball.
Besides, I already have a name, as I see it, and my merger with my husband is symbolized in other ways, such as that I— and no other woman— get to wear his boxer shorts when all of my underwear is in the laundry. Also, of course, we have wedding rings, and a joint checking account, and children with our blended DNA and their very own talent for tantrums, which my husband and I suffer through in tandem. So I tend to think of myself as fully and demonstrably merged.
Like everything else, the question of what a woman ought to do with her name upon donning her wedding gown has more than one answer in our culture. Some answers are highly inventive— such as a couple whose surnames were both colors, which they changed to the hue that those two colors created when mixed, which was, we hope, not puce. Other answers involve hyphens or an ungainly split between husband
and pen name, or indeed the use of an alias.
If you're getting married and can't decide whether to be Mrs. His Wife, as the Washington pundit referred to herself, or instead Mrs. Beige, or The Jackal, perhaps you might consider the customs of other countries.
The Burmese, for example, have no last names, which makes these sorts of feminist quandaries irrelevant. Madonna could marry Fabio and not a single Burmese eyebrow would rise.
The Indian state of Kerala is a matrilineal culture, with property being passed down from mother to daughter. Thus, the men who marry in Kerala adopt their wives' names. They may or may not resent it— I couldn't find any reference to the debate in a scan of the Times of India.
Elsewhere in India, women keep their fathers' last names when they get married, whereas their husbands have reversed names. My husband and I, if married in Rajasthan, would become Patricia Pearson and Pottie Ambrose, which I would call a much better deal for me.
In other parts of India, on the other hand, it's more common for women to take their husband's names, although not always.
In Ethiopia a woman takes her father's first name as a lifelong moniker. If I were Ethiopian, my name would be Patricia Geoffrey, and my daughter would be Clara Ambrose instead of Clara Pottie, and marriage wouldn't alter that one way or the other.
Every Ethiopian name has a concrete meaning, like potato or lion, so tracing one's lineage backward means stringing words together to form an actual sentence. Instead of having a family coat of arms or other visual symbol for lineage, you get a phrase like "God's potato, eater of lions."The system is probably getting a bit mucked up by new generations of Ethiopians, mind you, who emigrate to Israel or England and marry men with names like Arnie.
But the basic objective is to convey blood lineage in one's name rather than husband-love, which is also true for women in Singapore and Taiwan, who keep their paternal surnames.
Area Woman Blows Gasket Page 4
