On nearly every street in the country, Lebanese women are provided an avenue for grooming and beautification. Hair, nail and make-up salons abound. In the diminutive Achrafieh Sodeco Center, there were four hair salons at the beginning of the summer until a fifth beauty parlor opened its doors in July.

The candy-colored Spa-Tacular Salon and Spa offers manicures, pedicures, make-up, facial treatments and hair dressing, but targeted to a slightly different market; Lebanese children.

 “The kid is the main client here, but the mom can also do her nails or get a brushing [blow dry],” explained Maya Kabbani Hilal, the 34-year-old spa owner and creator. “Kids come in to take care of themselves, to look good and to pamper themselves.”

Having taken notice of mothers taking their children to their own high-end salons, Hilal decided there was a market opening for a beauty parlor that catered to the country’s youngsters.  Indeed, Spa-tacular already has 100 clients and has hosted three birthday parties, where groups of young girls celebrate with beauty treatments.

 “Four or five year-olds come; it’s fun for them with the stickers [offered] and the colors [that the salon is painted]. Sometimes I get a group of four or five girls who reserve the spa room for two hours and they just pamper themselves with make-up, manicures, facials,” said Hilal.

Spa-tacuar isn’t alone in the child spa industry in Lebanon; two others, both in Verdun, opened in rapid succession this summer.

Last month, event planning company Special Events opened Bella’s, a colorful and kitschy spa for pre-teens on the bottom level of Verdun Plaza 2. Across the street in the Dunes Plaza, children’s activity center Frizzy opened a few months ago.  The center offers a variety of activities tailored to children of different age groups, including the Chez Lulu Salon and Spa aimed mainly at girls aged three to five, but according to an employee, the pink-themed salon is most frequented by eight year-olds.

Chez Lulu’s “floral bath” is particularly popular, said owner Lamice Joujou. The treatment involves bathing the young girls’ feet in hot water infused with special oils and flowers, followed by a foot scrub and massage before finishing with a pedicure.

According to Hilal, such outlets are primarily avenues for Lebanon’s young girls to learn the importance of hygiene and cleanliness, a rationale echoed by the owners of the country’s other two children’s spas.
 
“They become more and more aware, they grow up knowing that they have to have clean hands and clean feet,” said Hilal.

However, as many feminists and sociologists contest, the young clients also conceivably grow up with engrained ideas of womanhood that are detrimental in the long run, both to their individual self-esteem as well as to their larger role in society.

“It’s going to help form a certain idea of femininity in their minds from a very young age, [one in which] women are supposed to be manicured and waxed… and this really is a social construct more than anything else,” said Lynn Darwich, a member of Feminist Collective, which primarily advocates gender equality in Lebanon. “It’s a negative social construct because women end up feeling ugly if they’re not manicured… You get little girls who really focus on matters that shouldn’t be this important at the end of the day.”

Yet such matters are becoming more important at an increasingly young age.  Soraya Blell, the head of the English Department at City International School, has taught in Lebanon for a decade.  In her experience, over the past six years girls have become consumed with beautification starting around age ten, which Blell attributes in part to a simultaneous increase in exposure to foreign television programs.

Frizzy’s Chez Lulu Spa and Salon certainly provides solid substantiation for this suggestion; the most popular of the makeovers for children is Hannah Montana, the protagonist of the widely successful Disney TV show. Also popular are treatments themed around High School Musical, a movie series that has found immense popularity with teens and “tweens” – eight to 12 year-olds.

And because these teens and tweens live in a society in which women’s roles are greatly entwined with appearance, it is likely that the young girls frequenting such salons and receiving such makeovers will come to reflect the country’s social norms concerning females, says Darwich.

“Women are expected to live a certain gender role, and this has a lot to do with appearance as well. There’s a specific role they’re supposed to be playing…They have to look a certain way and act a certain way. They are encouraged to use their bodies,” she said. “When you have bank loans for plastic surgery, it tells you a lot…it says what kind of society this is.”

But while feminists may see the children’s salons that have cropped up as a both a symptom and reinforcement of a much larger societal problem, others do not make so strong of a link. To Hilal, salons for youngsters are not problematic in and of themselves; “It depends on their lifestyle, on their family upbringing. I’m not a school, it’s a salon.”

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