TIMES OF LONDON ONLINE - Fashion & Style October 08, 2002 Style Beauty Unveiled by Sharon Krum Do Afghan women need mascara before midwives? Our correspondent looks at a novel aid project, set up by cosmetic giants, to open Kabul's first western beauty salons If the practice of beauty were a religion, New York City would be its Vatican. To be a beautiful woman in New York means adopting beauty as an unrivalled form of worship: one must cultivate serious, ongoing, intimate relationships with a hairdresser, make-up artist, facialist and personal trainer. And true adherents of this faith don’t rest on Sundays. So it comes as no surprise to hear that key players in the New York industry plan to export their superior rituals and beauty products overseas. The surprise is the city in which they have chosen to start — war-torn Kabul. Some time between now and January — the time-frame is inexact because of construction delays — a beauty school will open in a building inside a compound of the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Funded with American money and using cosmetics donated by the New York-based companies Matrix, MAC Cosmetics (Estée Lauder) and Revlon, Afghan women will be trained in the arts of haircutting, make-up application, manicures, pedicures and book-keeping — American-style. Since the Taleban fled and burkas were abandoned, Afghan women are reportedly hungry to resume styling their hair and painting their faces. But faced with antiquated hairdressing equipment and no cosmetics, their efforts are said to be crude at best. “Grooming has always been important to Afghan women,” says Sunita Mehta, the co-founder of the New York-based advocacy group Women for Afghan Women. “Before the Taleban they always took great pride in how they looked. Nothing has changed.” Of course not. Every woman knows that a love affair with cosmetics is lifelong. But given the state of affairs in Afghanistan, do women there need a beauty school? In a Third World country where supplies of food, medicine and basic necessities are so low, is a shampoo and blow-dry the answer? It depends who you ask. “It’s a nice gesture but the priorities are all wrong,” says Zieba Shorish-Shamley, of the Women’s Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan. “Right now women in Afghanistan need medical supplies, food and warm clothing. When you are hungry, what do you care about beauty? Listen, they need midwives, then mascara, OK? They need food before they need foundation.” But not according to Mary MacMakin, a septuagenarian American aid worker who has lived in Afghanistan for more than 25 years and is the brains behind Parsa, a group that helps Afghan women to market handicrafts and achieve economic independence. When the Taleban fell, MacMakin was contacted by a friend, the New York hairdresser Terri Grauel, offering to sell Parsa wares to her clients. MacMakin responded that handicraft sales were not enough; what Kabul really needed was a beauty school. Make-up and hairdressing, she believed, would be another route to restoring traumatised women’s self-esteem while allowing them to establish economic independence. “There is a huge problem now in Afghanistan, with women begging in the streets,” says Mehta.  “Women need to learn skills to support themselves.  If there is a real desire for more beauty salons — and in Afghanistan, don’t forget, they are places of sisterhood and camaraderie — why not?” Thomas Gouttierre, the director of the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, is a former adviser to the UN peacekeeping mission to Afghanistan. “A beauty school is a great idea,” he says. “You can’t prioritise commercial life and say that people need soap or diapers first. To bring life in Afghanistan back to some semblance of what it was, everything needs to happen at once.” After MacMakin’s call went out, Grauel swung into action. Together with a New York beauty consultant, Patricia O’Connor, they created the Kabul Body and Soul Wellness Programme, then approached the Editor-in-Chief of American Vogue, Anna Wintour, about the idea. Wintour kicked off the scheme with a start-up donation of $25,000 (£16,000) — which will cover the cost of building the school — and hosted a lunch for executives from big cosmetics companies to enlist their help. Estée Lauder then matched Vogue’s donation.  Soon the lipsticks and lipliners started to pour in as well.   “At this lunch we learnt that, under the previous regime, beauty salons and the use of cosmetics as a form of empowerment and self-expression had been obliterated,” says John Demsey, the global president of MAC Cosmetics, which donated more than $25,000 worth of foundations, lipliners, mascaras and eye shadows. In addition, MAC Cosmetics shot a training video and devised the core training curriculum for make-up. “One of the huge problems is illiteracy, so it was important to create visual materials for the women,” he says. But what about concerns that cosmetic companies arriving in Kabul under the auspices of charity are actually hoping for a marketing pay-off in the future?  Is the idea that the goodwill engendered by donations will have women reaching for, say, Revlon products when they hit the shelves one day in Kabul or Kandahar? “You can’t blame the companies for thinking that there might be a market for these cosmetics eventually,” says Mehta. “But I think this is a long way off. Right now they are providing women with a chance to become economically independent, and that is crucial.” Rochelle Udell, the executive vice-president at Revlon, says their only intent in sending boxes of nail polish to the school is charitable. “Beauty is a very important expressive part of women’s lives. We feel very good about our contribution and hope that it is a step in empowering these brave women of Kabul.” Demsey is emphatic that working with the beauty school is not a branding exercise: “The programme is generic and talks about make-up fundamentals. It isn’t about brands. We didn’t do this to penetrate the market. Our involvement was purely humanitarian.” But he adds: “If there is a marketing benefit at a later date, that would be nice.”