Loading ...The Intimate World of Arab Muslim Beauty
Katherine Zoepf
Allure
Last week, CoverGirl named its first Muslim spokesperson, beauty blogger Nura Afia. Playboy’s September issue was the first to feature a Muslim woman, Noor Tagouri, in a hijab. But even as our culture is evolving to become more inclusive and welcoming (and yes, we believe it is), you only need to open the newspaper or go on Twitter to know that there’s still work to be done. We understand that there can appear to be a paradox that exists between some devout women and their makeup, fashion, and style. But we respectfully believe that the conversation is more nuanced than that. Recently, we asked Katherine Zoepf, a journalist who lived in the Middle East for years and the author of Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World (Penguin Press), to dive deep into the private, complicated, oft-misunderstood world of Muslim beauty.
As someone who is constantly resolving to spend less time thinking about clothes and cosmetics, I remember looking forward to my first reporting trip to Saudi Arabia, in 2007, in the way a compulsive Instagram user might anticipate a weekend stay in a place with spotty cellular coverage: as a period of enforced, but not unwelcome, abstinence. I was, at that point in my life—in my late 20s, and working as a reporter in Syria and Lebanon—increasingly pained by my interests in fashion and beauty, which seemed very much at odds with the serious journalism I aspired to.
Arab society is highly gendered, and though female Arab culture, which can sometimes take the cultivation of beauty and femininity to extremes, had not yet occurred to me as a subject in its own right, I felt its influence every time I set foot outside. Many women covered themselves, of course. But those who didn’t always looked, well, amazing. Arriving in Beirut after a few weeks away, I’d find myself suppressing the kind of acute anxiety about my appearance that I hadn’t experienced since middle school. I had to do something about my hair and nails, and right away, if possible. I was 26 when a concerned Lebanese friend advised a prophylactic Botox regimen; fair-skinned women like me aged so badly otherwise, she explained. I considered the idea with more seriousness than I’d like to admit. I had to get a grip.
If ever a secular, American, female reporter were disposed to embrace the abaya—the floor-length cloak that women in Saudi Arabia are obliged to wear in public at all times—it was this self-conscious beauty junkie. It was the fall, and I was heading to Riyadh for one of my first big magazine assignments. The thousands of pages I’d read about Saudi history and culture all seemed to confirm a picture of the kingdom as a sort of frivolity-free zone. And I couldn’t wait. I would buy a black abaya during my layover in Abu Dhabi, I decided, and that would be that.
At first, the abaya and the hijab did simplify matters. From the moment I stumbled out of baggage claim, trying to keep my new abaya’s trailing hem from getting caught in the wheels of my rolling suitcase, it was as if women had disappeared from the public space. They were there, of course, swathed in black. But I would go days without seeing another female face in public, and without other women to admire and emulate, concerns about grooming and adornment began to feel increasingly abstract.
The culture of regulating women’s modesty has a history in the West, too, with bikini bans in Europe as late as the 1950s. In the current political climate, the tide has turned dramatically. Certain towns, like Nice, recently banned the “burkini,” a swimsuit that covers a woman’s body like a hooded wet suit and allows Muslim women to enjoy the sea without compromising their beliefs. A French court overturned the ban, but the conflict highlighted the discomfort on both sides of the issue.
To say that reality in Saudi Arabia was more complicated than I’d imagined is a gross understatement. I should have been less surprised to find that in the gender-segregated kingdom, the female culture I’d observed elsewhere in the region reached its apotheosis.
When it comes to devotion to makeup, spa treatments, visits to the salon, and other higher-order forms of self-care, Saudi women are major players. Spending on cosmetics in Saudi Arabia has nearly doubled over the last ten years, from $280 million in 2005 to $535 million in 2015, according to data compiled and analyzed by Euromonitor, a London-based market-research firm. Even in an oil-rich country with sky-high disposable incomes, those are significant numbers. But they begin to make sense when you consider the Saudi population’s relative youth (roughly 70 percent are under 30) and the fact that Saudi women are increasingly working outside the home thanks to reforms enacted under the late King Abdullah, who died last year. Rising female employment rates had sparked hope among women’s rights advocates that financially empowered Saudi women, saving their own salaries in their personal bank accounts, would begin to command greater respect within their families and gain a greater degree of control over their lives.
But at the moment, it seems that supporters of those changes may have underestimated the seduction of the makeup counter; according to a report inArab News, the Jeddah-based English-language daily, the average employed woman in the kingdom spends between 70 and 80 percent of her earnings on beauty products.
And now, the great irony: Few, if any, of these products may be used or shown in public. Women pursue beauty for and among themselves, as a means of expression, in strictly private, women-only settings. In Saudi Arabia—more than in any other country, and to a degree that seemed inconceivable to me until I observed it up close—beauty is a private pleasure, an intimate, sometimes even secret, pursuit.
Muna AbuSulayman, a well-known Saudi philanthropist and media personality who is often referred to as the Oprah of the Arab world, told me that she believes that young Saudi women “care a great deal about femininity.”
The sheer tonnage of makeup imports to the kingdom may be the result of a long-standing “more is more” attitude. In general, AbuSulayman explained, Arab Gulf women like to wear heavier makeup than their European counterparts. “We say, ‘Wishik yohmoul‘—it literally means your face and coloring can take the more polished full-makeup look,” she said. “When you have light skin and delicate features, you don’t look as good when you use a lot of makeup. It looks wrong. But for a Saudi girl, we say, ‘Wishik yohmoul‘ because she can try all sorts of techniques and colors without looking unnatural or unstylish.”
I sometimes wondered whether, paradoxically, religious restrictions on the display of beauty only intensified women’s interest in it or heightened the senses somehow. The Saudi women I knew were alert to aspects of beauty and personal expression that I had trouble even perceiving. Like many Western visitors to Saudi Arabia, I found it almost impossible at first to differentiate between any two women who covered their faces. But Saudis, I soon learned, had no such difficulty. A black niqab covering the entire face is often a part of the school uniform for Saudi girls in elementary school, and if you happen to pass a girls’ elementary school at the end of a day’s classes, you’ll likely see fathers and drivers waving and smiling and effortlessly picking out their own daughters and charges from the sea of black-swathed children rushing out into the sunshine. During a 2013 visit to the kingdom, I once stepped into the corridor of a Riyadh shopping mall alongside a saleswoman I’d been speaking to and watched as she called out a greeting to an old friend she’d spotted 50 paces away, standing in a throng of uniformly black-clad women. Until the friend turned and gave the saleswoman a wave in return, I hadn’t been sure, at that distance, which way she was facing.
These garments are designed to efface beauty or protect against objectification (depending on your perspective), and there is endless debate over how a woman should wear her head scarf: tied in such a way that the outline of her neck and shoulders is still discernible, or worn “over her head” in a looser style that is considered more modest.
Among women who wear their face covering with a slit for the eyes, the precise width of the slit is a subject of passionate debate and mutual judgment. In Saudi Arabia, I often felt I was constantly recalibrating, refining my powers of observation, readjusting my sense of what was appropriate. Sometimes, especially if I’d spent a few days in the public space, leaving my own face uncovered felt a bit strange and vulgar. I began to feel awkward—there is no other way to put this—about showing so much skin, walking around with my whole face hanging out. I never did wear the niqab; as an American and a non-Muslim, doing so would have felt absurd. But after several weeks in Riyadh, going down to the lobby of my hotel without it felt like wearing a bikini top to the Met.
In July, Condé Nast International announced the launch of a new magazine,Vogue Arabia, and hired Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz as its editor in chief. I remember the trunk show Aljuhani Abdulaziz invited me to at her boutique D’NA and her obvious pride in the young Saudi designers she promoted and encouraged. There were pieces by Western designers for sale at D’NA, too, and, thinking that those displays looked oddly sparse, I asked Aljuhani Abdulaziz whether it was difficult to import clothing into the kingdom. She explained that no, fashion was so important to Saudi women that she often ordered only one of each piece.
Occasions for women to express themselves through fashion were especially precious to those who wore an abaya daily, and a customer buying an important piece liked to know that it was the only one of its kind in the whole kingdom. The thought of taking off your abaya at a women’s party and discovering that another woman was wearing the same dress was a special source of dread for Saudi women, Aljuhani Abdulaziz said. To avoid such disasters, Saudi women took great care to stay current and buy the latest collections, even when they had to stretch their budget in order to do so.
If there is a secret to understanding the tastes of women in the kingdom, it could be summed up quite succinctly. Said Aljuhani Abdulaziz, “I think the word that Saudi women like is ‘exclusive.'”