The beauty industry claims to be so high-tech. But let me ask you this: If it’s so high-tech, why can’t women cut their bathroom time down to less than an hour? Why do our beauty rituals take up to nine steps? If there were a gadget like Superman’s phone booth, into which a woman could step each morning and emerge five minutes later — made-up, blow-dried and coiffed — now, that would be high-tech.
Instead, beauty companies spend all their research money on what’s in the jar or tube. What’s in the containers may be high-tech, but the method of delivery is still rooted somewhere in the Dark Ages. That P5,000 miracle cream? Dip your paws right into it and slather it all over your face! We’re too busy with aerospace technology to provide a hygienic pump bottle!
But there’s still hope. There are some companies that do try to provide thoughtful, time-saving devices that shave whole minutes off the daily grooming routine. And most of them are small and portable; they’re not the room-size, million-peso machines that require a board-certified dermatologist to work. To be depressingly honest about it, though, we’re still a long way from Superman’s phone booth. As comedian Jerry Seinfeld would say, “These are the best ideas they’ve come up with so far.”
Makeup
In the realm of professional makeup, there is this myth called the five-minute face. That’s the least amount of time, makeup artists claim, you can spend applying cosmetics to your face and leave the house looking decent. Bollocks, I say. If you’re over 30 and don’t want to scare away small children, it’ll take a lot more than the dab of lip gloss and swipe of mascara five minutes will allow. For one thing, many Asian women have stick-straight lashes, and just curling them before applying mascara takes about that length of time.
Luckily, companies like ModelCo have expedited the whole lash-curling process with heated eyelash curlers. ModelCo’s Lash Wand is a nifty, battery-operated little gadget that heats up within 60 seconds to give mascara-ed lashes a more lasting curl. It even has a blue sensor coil that indicates when the wand has reached optimum temperature. The whole process should take no more than three minutes, according to the box. Of course, that’s not taking into account the minutes you will spend afterward cleaning the wand of mascara buildup.
In terms of skin and making it look flawless, nothing beats an airbrushed finish, previously achievable only through Adobe Photoshop or an actual airbrush. Though airbrushes are available online, they are pricey, as bulky as landline phones, and require special makeup and skills to work. Hence SK-II’s Air Touch Foundation, a rare objet in the world of beauty. Air Touch is a mini airbrush housed in a round, red-lacquered, battery-run device that releases the finest spray of foundation you “paint” your face with to make it look luminous, candlelit … airbrushed, in other words. And since SK-II is Japanese, the gadget design is beautiful, minimal and ever so high-tech.
It’s also about as impenetrable as an alien spacecraft. Packaged in three boxes with multiple leaflets and “some assembly required,” I spent about an hour puzzling over the Japanese instructions and matching origami-like illustrations. Numerous false starts and one “duh-uh!” moment later, I was as exhausted as if I’d gone 10 rounds in a Rubik’s cube tournament.
Lip products, I’m glad to say, are cosmetics not stuck in the Dark Ages. In fact, the new trend for lippies is to let there be light. A British brand called Liparazzi in Beauty Bar consists of light-up glosses and lipsticks with mirrors in the barrel and tiny lights concealed in the cap. (On the local front, Fanny Serrano has launched True Light Liquid Lipstick, a lipstick-gloss hybrid in mirrored and lighted tubes modeled on the same concept.) Meant to help you reapply a smudge-free pout in dark and smoky nightclubs, lighted lip products are also useful for checking if your front teeth are free from spinach, rummaging for keys in the wormhole known as your handbag, and spotting lost earrings on the mucky floors of your favorite hotspot. Liparazzi, in particular, has been tested and proven worthy by such ladies of the night as Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Kelly Osbourne.
Hair
The most gadget-heavy category in beauty is hair care. Women will go to any lengths in pursuit of the perfect salon blowout at home, thus the proliferation of supposedly high-tech gadgets ending in “ic,” like ceramic brushes and ionic blow dryers. Five years ago it was all about the irons — curling irons if tousled waves were in, or flatirons if it was a Gwyneth Paltrow stick-straight-hair moment.
I am extremely bad at blow-drying my own hair, so any tool that gets me through the ordeal is extremely appealing. That’s how I came to buy the Velform Rotair Ceramic Brush from SkyCable’s Shop TV channel, a blow dryer-cum-rotating brush with big and small brush heads. It wasn’t cheap, but the promise of an appliance that styled as it dried was too good to resist, plus the Caucasian women in the infomercial made it look so easy.
Well, the Rotair hasn’t made its way yet to the dusty part of the cabinet where I keep my Ginsu knives and Ab Roller, but I’m still waiting for my hair to look like the models’ in the ad. The ceramic brush is supposed to keep frizz at bay, but my non-Caucasian hair keeps frizzing out at the slightest opportunity. And while I like the large brush head for daily drying, on a whim I tried to create curls with the small brush and almost ripped my hair out when it tangled in the rotator.
So it was with wariness I tried the Rowenta for Elite Model Look, another hot-air brush with six attachments that doesn’t rotate, which makes it less scary for tech-challenged beauty addicts. Again, the promise of the Rowenta is that you, too, can achieve five different hairdos and look like an Elite model with the enclosed attachments. Unfortunately, while the brush itself is made in China, Rowenta is a proud European brand, which means you get an instructional manual in 10 different languages — none of them English. All you get is drawing of a hairstyle next to a drawing of each attachment, but how to get from this picture to that — say, how to get your hair to flip under nicely by using the root volume attachment — is a mystery comparable to the hieroglyphics in Egypt’s pyramids.
Shaving
Considering my luck with electrical and battery-operated beauty gadgets, it’s no wonder my favorite gizmo is neither electricity- nor battery-powered, but relies on good, old-fashioned elbow grease: the Schick Intuition shaver. There haven’t been many quantum leaps in the realm of shaving, possibly because you never want to rely on a machine when it’s wielding razor-sharp blades.
First, there was the ergonomic Gillette Venus razor, which thoughtfully conformed to a woman’s curves. Schick has taken it a step further with Intuition; not only does it have an ergonomic shape, its razor cartridge is ringed with a moisturizing soap bar that lathers when wet, doing away with shaving cream entirely. Now, that’s what I call thinking outside the box.
I was also going to talk about nail gadgets, but aside from nail dryers and foot spas, the industry hasn’t come up with any worthy substitutes for your favorite manicurista, who can dole out foot massages in addition to giving you a perfect pedicure. Unless there’s a future gadget you can stick your hoof into that will give you a beautifully buffed, filed and polished foot without you having to hunch over like Quasimodo, then there’s really nothing worth talking about.
This lack of truly high-tech, user-friendly beauty gadgets explains why women, if they do decide to look pulled-together, still take forever performing their ablutions in the bathroom, or why some women just plain give up and never even start in on the whole beauty thing, let the hair and hooves fall where they may.