ABSTRACT
This article considers the way in which high-end beauty services in Johannesburg use a particular notion of “Africa” to brand themselves. Globally, the beauty industry is designed around an idea of indulgence, with pampering posited as a means of self-care, survival and joy. Marketing for beauty destinations often draws on an Orientalist idea of the “mysterious east,” invoking the stereotyped serenity of locations like Bali to offer bite-sized consumable contentment to clients. While it retains this focus on self-care as a practice of happiness, the burgeoning luxury industry in South Africa has seen the development of a new local aesthetic that treats the continent as an exotic landscape filled with healing plants and local wisdom. The article analyses the websites and physical salons of three high-end Johannesburg spas order to discuss their visual and textual representations of a mythic Africa as a site for luxury, indulgence and post-feminist self-care.
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Notes
1 For example, the spa of the Mandarin Oriental chain specialises in “Chinese medicine”; the spa of the Langham Hotel in London is decorated with a bonsai motif and features Chinese “balancing” techniques; the Shibiu Spa in New York’s Greenwich Hotel contains a 250 year old Japanese farmhouse (Marchant Citation2020; “Pamper palaces” Citation2019).
2 These include, for example, important debates about “black hair,” female body shape and skin lightening.
3 The kinds of spas I am interested in do attract male clientele, but the majority of patrons and workers remain female. It is thus appropriate to consider them as largely, if not exclusively, feminised spaces.
4 https://theresidenceportfolio.co.za/the-residence-boutique-hotel.html. Accessed on 18 September 2019. The portion of the website that includes available treatments has since been removed but these can now be accessed via the PDF spa menu, which I received after an email request.
5 https://africologyspa.com. Accessed 15 November 2020. Some of the images on this website have been altered since the original date of access.
6 https://www.fourseasons.com/johannesburg/. Accessed 29 September 2020.
7 Best known for its famed artefacts, many of them made from gold, Mapungubwe was a wealthy kingdom that thrived in southern Africa between 1200 and 1290 AD.
8 The notion of safari aesthetics could be fruitfully employed in a number of ways. Researchers could consider, for example, whether/how it manifests elsewhere in Africa and in other locations or media forms. Do luxury spas in Lagos, Nairobi or Dar-es-Salaam exhibit the same semiotic tendencies? How does this aesthetic appear in designer fashion, reality TV, YouTube make up tutorials, celebrity magazines?
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Nicky Falkof
Nicky Falkof is a media and cultural studies scholar based in Johannesburg. She is the author of The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa (2016) and co-editor of Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (2020).