The economics of beauty

Wolf Angel remarked in my recent post complaining about shallow, sexist dating advice columns that the question of paying for dates is more complicated than just who pays for dinner, since women often spend so much money on the clothes and grooming that are seen as a requirement for dating by many.  I was actually going to make a comment on that subject, but blew it off because I thought it needlessly complicated my basic point which was that quibbling over dinner bills is stupid when women make on 76% of what men make.  Wolf Angel linked to this article, though, and I was so floored I couldn't drop this subject.  And if blogs aren't the place to examine endless complications, where is the place? 
The other reason that I shied away from the whole issue of who actually pays more for dates is that I am sort of clueless in that department.  I am dimly aware that most women spend alot of money on make-up and hair and bath products and clothes, but as a perennial cheapskate, I don't.  I remain unconvinced that a) expensive cosmetics are much better than Clariol and b) that men even notice or care.  (I realize that it's standard to petulantly exclaim that you spend hours getting buffed and waxed a week for self-esteem, but give me a break.  If all men disappeared tomorrow, I give the buffing and waxing crowd a week max before they quit and take up watching French films in their spare time instead.)  I don't wear make-up most of the time, only for the occassional party, because I think it's counter-productive, time-consuming and it gives me zits.  I buy all my party clothes from the thrift stores (great way to avoid the embarrassment of wearing something similar to someone else!) and I don't have fancy hair products of any sort.  I firmly believe that most people wear too much perfume anyway, that cheap razors are just as sharp as any others, and that Suave's bath products are just as good as anyone else's.  Basically, I never spent oodles of time and cash on getting ready for dates, and that probably just upped the embarrassment I felt when a date insisted on dumping a bunch of money to take me out.
Nonetheless, I still get the basic point--I still probably spent more time and money than my dates on my appearance, even if it wasn't much more.  Many of my girl friends spend even more, sometimes even way more, than I did.  But I didn't expect the numbers that are kicked around in this article.

And me? I spend (to my horror) about $1,150 a month -- $13,800 a year, including manicures, underarm waxing, half-leg waxing and eyebrow waxing twice a month, pedicures, bikini waxing and facials once a month, personal trainer and Pilate's trainer three times a week, a haircut every other month and many girlie products I just can't resist. Over the past few years, I could have put a down payment on a house. But I have nothing to show for it but smooth skin.
 
I found the whole thing horrifying and definitely not reflective of what most women spend on their appearance.  To me, there is a line between normal, understandable desire to fiddle with your appearance to make yourself more attractive and fiddling with your appearance so much that the implication is that your normal, human body is so desperately inadequate and disgusting that it takes constant work to wipe it out and replace it with a more appropriate, non-human version of the female body. 

"I feel dirty if I'm not waxed," she explains. "It does feel like a part-time job. It's very rare that I feel that I'm in perfect primed condition. Either my nails are disgusting or my roots are showing. It's really time consuming to spend an hour or two every weekend trying to look good."
 
You couldn't come up with a better quote if you tried.  It's heartbreaking, really--she keeps trying to hang onto the perfect, inhuman beauty but ugly, nasty nature keeps intruding.  Hair and nails keep growing, keep asserting themselves, despite being either completely removed or chemically processed to disguise their natural origins.  It reminds me of one of the basic themes that we studied in writing classes--man vs. nature, except in this case it's woman vs. nature.
(Funny aside--while writing this, the song "Typical Girls" by The Slits came on the radio.  Had a good laugh.)
That women live like this amazes me.  And that it amazes me makes me feel guilty.  I live in a city and run in circles where that sort of intense attention to beauty is looked on with suspicion--if a woman with lacquered hair, perfume and tons of make-up walks into a room it's only a matter of seconds before some guy wonders what she's trying to hide. 
The writer laments that she could have saved enough for the down payment on a house with the money she spends on beauty treatments.  Indeed, it does seem like she's flushing money down the toilet that could be better spent on saving for her future.  But is there an underlying economic reason that women might be inclined to spend so much on their looks.  In other words, is it an investment of sorts?
There is absolutely no doubt that women have traditionally paid unnerving amounts of attention to their looks because the only route they had to improving their fortunes was marrying well.  Beauty was a woman's life work, and just as in any other field, some excelled.  Great beauty wielded correctly could mean lifelong comfort being married to a rich man.  Now more avenues have opened up to women, and as the author points out inadvertantly, the effort and money put towards achieving high standards of beauty can freely be invested elsewhere for financial independence.  You know, like buying your own house.
But we want to still maintain the fiction that in order for a house to be bought, a man must be involved, regardless of a woman's income.  The boyfriend lets that mindset show.

And does he agree that men should pay for the courtship because women have allocated their resources to looking good?
"It is, I guess, a reason to think that way. But not a very good one. There's still the expectation that the male will buy that house anyway, no matter how much, or how little, you spend on personal upkeep."
So if men will "buy that house," by which I think he means "have a relationship with that woman" whether or not she spends $1,500 every second month, does it make sense to do so?
 
Men take on women as financial burdens, even women who make enough to pay this much towards beauty treatments every two months.  It does make me wonder if this push for ever more expensive beauty treatments is well-received because it undermines the real implications of women's financial independence.  By spending money that could be saved to buy a house on beauty treatments, a woman is signaling to the world that she still needs a man in her life to proceed to things like home-buying while also committing to the myth that male approval is so important that getting it is all-consuming of time, effort and income.