What’s the latest in beauty? You’ll never guess. Unless you’re right wing and flaunting it, of course.
Being a publication that dabbles in luxurious experiences, we occasionally sit around and chat over kombucha or cold-brewed coffee (when we really want to live on the edge), about Korean agelessness, probiotics in our night creams and black-sugar masks. Walking the talk, as most people in marketing will know, is all about talking the talking.
So when the intern piped in from a corner, saying that she’d just used some cow colostrum on her face, we looked down our microdermabrasion-ed noses, while being secretly intrigued. She went on to talk about eye gel with cow urine forming the key ingredient, and someone faintly asked from another corner, “Is it organic?”
We looked up the products and scrutinised the packaging. ‘Harbal’ said one online description; “toffy” said a package label of another (cow-milk sweets, perhaps?). A company that had evidently employed a graphic designer, because their labels seemed to be designed by someone other than a farmer, had an ubtan that contained cow dung and rose petals. Talk about mixed messaging. At another shopping portal, you could even stop by a gaushala and buy everything from ‘womencare’ products (such as Go Femme tablets and something that is “helpful in gynecological disorders”) to Vedic plaster and cow dung plant pots.
I liked the cow dung pots, but that’s because I’m a bit of a stick in the mud, believing that cow dung belonged where all shit should go (irrespective of the animal): into the ground. But I’ve been thinking about it: this resistance to putting cow dung on my face. When Western brands throw at us vampire facials, along with a lot of jargon we don’t fully comprehend (PRP, for instance), we buy into them. We like to use terms like “science-backed” and “extensively researched” in ‘health’ stories. Remember, most fashion and luxury magazines put health under their beauty sections. Is it to give beauty credibility? As if it isn’t skin-deep any more and makeup is a bad thing that must be discussed under a headline that subliminally says, ‘This is a serious subject’.
Don’t get me wrong — I am all for Paloma lips and nail art (well, maybe not the latter – I refuse to sport black hearts on pink stripes). I buy into boutique brands packaged in recycled glass with sparse monochrome labels meant to communicate the luxury of minimalism. If they tell me lanolin is the go-to ingredient, I am happy to dip my fingers in, to experience the product. Just so you know, lanolin is extracted from the oil glands of woolly sheep. It’s purified sebum.
Why then do I have a problem with nasal ghee drops? Or face wash with cow urine? And the bovine business space itself? A prejudice because the packaging is ‘off’? Or because the sellers don’t say Paris every few sentences?
There is a nation out there that exists in small cities, under-exposed to the wonders of boxed, tinned and bottled beauty products. Brands that sit in the space where beauty, cow and e-commerce overlap are simply tapping into this. And they’re using the luxury model of promoting their wares as a lifestyle, where ubtans mingle with massage oils and air purifiers. In fact, “natural”, “herbal” and “Ayurveda” were found to be key drivers in 2016, says a study on Beauty and Personal Care in India by Euromonitor International.
Desi brands are also using the current mood to their advantage — much like what khadi did with nationalism. Except with a modern twist – where our grandparents spun khadi themselves, we can simply order nationalism online, with beauty thrown in for free. Or is it the other way round? Either way, it makes perfect commercial sense: they’re tapping into what the India Brand Equity Foundation says will be a 20 billion-dollar segment by 2025, up from the 6.5 billion it was last year.
As for me, I’m sure I won’t be trying the gaumutra distillate that promises weight-loss. But perhaps I will order the floor cleaner with cow urine and see if it can beat the chemical-laden anti-bac version I use. As for the talcum powder with cow dung ash, there is a debate on whether talcs are cancer-causing, so I will (conveniently) skip that one.
