Abstract
This chapter explores the ways intimacy is encountered and navigated within the South Asian beauty industry in Los Angeles, a burgeoning market that has garnered mainstream appeal in recent years as it branches out from diasporic communities in the United States. While intimacy can produce affective bonds of loyalty between clients and estheticians and ultimately for the business, it argues that the achievement of intimacy within an ethnicized service sector rests precariously on the negotiation and fulfilment of classed, gendered, and racialized expectations of its workers. By exhibiting how intimacy constitutes the various relationships comprising this niche field, this chapter examines how a capitalist-driven industry in the era of multicultural consumption commodifies intimacy and authenticity within a global marketplace.
Keywords: beauty industry, intimacy, ethnicized service sector, multiculturalism, global marketplace
It makes perfect sense that many of us obsess over our bodies.
There is nothing more inescapable.
Roxane Gay
The silhouette of Arezoo's back made an elongated C-shape as she hunched over her client's face with her head slightly tilted to one side and one tenacious strand of cotton thread intertwined between her fingers stretching taut to her mouth. At times during the threading service Arezoo's face was a mere two inches from the face of her client as she scrutinized the patch of skin surrounding the eyebrows looking out for any stray hair. Once she found the delinquent strands she followed threading convention and asked her client to use her two hands to stretch the skin above and below the eyebrow so as to make the area as tight as possible, reducing pain levels and allowing the esthetician to pull out the strands with more ease and accuracy.
The client seated with Arezoo this particular evening was an older woman with arthritis and her ability to stretch her hands to her face, let alone stretch the skin, was minimal. Coincidentally, I was seated at the front desk watching Arezoo's rhythmic movements that was part-fieldwork and part-complete admiration for the meticulous nature of this underrated skill. I noticed the client unable to use her hands in the way others almost mechanically do while seated in the threading chair. Arezoo, a middle-aged woman from Iran with two years into this niche beauty scene, stood unsure of how to proceed with the client. Within a moment, she gestured for me to come over to her station.
