Consuming Africa: safari aesthetics in the Johannesburg beauty industry

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.

KEYWORDS:

• South Africa
• luxury
• beauty
• spas
• aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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 2020; “Pamper palaces” 2019).

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?

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Governing Intimacies project.

Notes on contributors

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).