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SERVICE INDUSTRY

The business of beauty

Sayeda Akter
With her face, arms and legs covered in a heavy layer of mud, Nablia lies back on a couch like an Egyptian mummy waiting to be entombed. Not far away women are steaming their faces and hair while others are having their heads covered with henna paste.
Buzzing between them, inside Persona's salon in Dhanmondi, hundreds of Mandi (indigenous people from the Garo community) girls in floral uniforms and aprons are shaping eyebrows, cutting hair, mixing and preparing pastes or busy running with bowls full of tepid water for manicures and pedicures.
It may be a weekday morning, but trade is brisk and customers were already filling up the waiting room of what claims to be the largest beauty salon in South Asia.
“On weekdays, we have to provide services to around five to seven hundred clients a day and at the weekend the number often reaches more than a thousand," said Seema, an executive at Persona Hair and Beauty Ltd, one of the country's top beauty companies with a chain of salons in Dhaka and Chittagong.
Persona's Dhanmondi salon is huge, able to serve 300 women at a time on a spotlessly clean open planned space and with separate sections for spa services and 'Adams', men in beauty salon talk, one floor up.
But Persona is just one of hundreds, if not thousands of beauty parlours that have sprung up all over the country, mostly in the last decade. Beauty is now a TklOO crore plus industry, providing employment for an estimated 100,000 women. Some work in top of the range parlours such as Persona, but many more work at smaller establishments set up not just in Dhaka's more exclusive areas, but in poorer areas, small towns and villages throughout Bangladesh.
It is quite a change from when the first beauty parlour, May Fair, was established in Dhaka in 1965, by a Bangladeshi born Chinese woman Carmel Hsieh. At that time only Chinese women were in the business and the clients were foreigners, a few film stars, singers and ladies from the elite society. In 1977, Zerina Asgar established Living Doll, the first Bengali beauty salon.
Kaniz Almas Khan, owner of Persona Hair and Beauty, said the reason for the sector's growth was the increased beauty consciousness
among women and a desire to take care of ones appearance, especially among the middle class.
“Consciousness spread through the soap operas on the satellite channels once they were introduced in the 1990s” she said.
“At the same time the number of working women started to increase and that gave women more liberty to spend their own money,” she added.
In the past decade there has also been an explosion in the number of women who have been prepared to
start up and run salons themselves.
Parveen Boby, owner and beautician of Fair Touch, a mid-end beauty salon at Mirpur, started her parlour in 2001 in her own sitting room with an investment of Tk 60,000 and now has a yearly turnover ofTk 5 lakh.
"When I started my family members and many of my friends said that the money is just going to be wasted, but I have proved them wrong,” Parveen said proudly.
“I marked that there was an interest in beauty service, but people were
not used to such things. By setting low prices I have been able to bring people into the salon,” she said.
The beauty market is well segmented, with prices set to appeal to a broad section of Bangladeshi women. For example, the cost of eyebrow shaping will vary from as little as a few takas in small salons outside Dhaka to Tk40 and Tk50 in the capital's more exclusive establishments.
At the top end of the market are salons such as Farzana Shakil. “If you can provide better services than oth-
ers, and you have a strong determination to survive in the business, you can succeed," she said.
The industry is growing not only in terms of salons, but also in the huge number of jobs it generates. Industry experts estimate that currently there arc around 100,000 people directly involved in the sector, of which 99 percent are women.
Mandis from Mymensingh, Tangail, Netrokona, Sherpur and Sylhet make up the majority of the workforce in most parlours. Legend has it that originally they were favoured because of their appearance, which was seen as more 'Chinese' in an industry that had been started in Bangladesh by a woman of Chinese descent. Now it is seen as a way of advancement in a community that in the past has had few job opportunities.
The government has fixed a minimum wage of Tk 3300 monthly for the women working in the beauty parlours, twice the minimum wage in the ready made garment (RMG) industry. However workers complain that in many salons it is not observed.
One beauty worker who did not want to be named said she had never even heard of the minimum wage. “I got only Tk 800 a month and a meal, when I started six years back and that was all," she said. However with six years experience she is now able to earn Tk 15,000 per month.
Farzana Shakil said one of the main problems the industry faces is a lack of professional training institutes. " People interested to come to the industry suffer from a lack of professional training and skills," she said.
"However, in Dhaka now there are one or two institutes that have opened recently but these are costly, she added.
Kaniz Almas Khan, owner of Persona, said the industry needed an. association to protect its interests and an initiative to set up one was now in hand.
And the industry is starting to get attention from the government. Last week, Rasheda K. Chowdhury, adviser to the caretaker government for Women and Children, was present at the opening of a new branch of the salon chain Women's World in Dhaka.
Frivolous? Not a bit of it, according to Rasheda. "This industry has grown a lot and it is growing day by day and generating a huge number of jobs. The government should recognize the industry."
sayeda@thedailystar.net