khmer sources

I am the nouveau arrive at beauty school in Phnom Penh and I am frightened, for someone is to shave my eyebrows with a razor blade, my Brooke Shield’s 1980s-never-before-plucked-eyebrows. I hadn’t envisaged that a make-up course could be so incredibly dangerous.

I am swiftly led to the upper floor where the real students are performing magical make-up maneuvers. Today I shall be versed in penciling eyebrows, mine have just then been very skillfully shaped, and not removed as I had feared. I am to pencil first the top of the brow, then beneath, and finally within. I pencil the other brow for good measure. I have really outdone myself.

"The left side is bigger than the right side," says my make-up tutor Marady turning my head from side-to-side, "So omit with this cream and this cotton bud and re-do." Fine, this is quite understandable. Of course by the fourth time I am not so enthusiastic.

Marady says some students have taken nearly three weeks to master the art. Will I ever graduate to blusher? I am tiring of eyebrows. I want gold eyelids, fake lashes and pouting lips. "You have to learn about natural make-up first," I am told tersely. The next day I learn about the application of foundation. Before weddings, Cambodian women usually apply three or four layers of waterproof yellows, creams and whites and their faces are completely shaved with a razor blade to remove every single scrap of hair so the make-up goes on perfectly smooth. Cambodia’s renowned beauty queen,and the owner of the school Sapor Rendall says frankly, "If you’ve got a lot of pimples you need thick make-up." Mimicking an ogre’s grimace and clawed hands, she adds, "But some people use way too much."

The hair styling course is next door, and an odd looking decapitated mannequin with plastic hair is unsentimentally screwed onto the bench. I begin by plaiting, thumb getting in the way of thumb, so help arrives and I become further confused, six hands are now at work on one plait to create ‘Gills’, a fish-like hair-do. "You have to learn the basics first," says Cheng Chanda my teacher. I have very little aptitude for hair styling, even teasing, and what will I ever know of the technical masterpieces? How could I possibly create the 35-step ‘Isabella’, ‘Desdemona’ or ‘Cinderella’?.

I blow my cover and admit to be writing for a magazine. These students are too advanced. I talk to Sapor instead.
"Here at Sapor you can learn make-up, hairstyling, hair cutting and blow-drying, fruit carving, facials, massage, body scrubs, pedicures, manicures, cooking, dining etiquette and cat walk," Sapor says.
"Beauty is a very popular course. Once upon a time women didn’t care about their faces and they didn’t care about their look. They liked being fat. But things have changed in Cambodia."

Asides from being a mother (she’s married to an Australian), a business woman and a cat walk model (most recently at a New Year’s Eve bash at Sokha Hotel in Sihanoukville), Sapor has made countless television appearances, including contraception ads for OK Condoms, Mobitel and a public health advertisement about malaria.

"In it I ran to get help from my village for my ‘husband’ who was very ill from malaria … But no one recognized me!"Sapor, 33, was born in Kompong Thom and grew up there, but with the financial assistance of her adoptive Chinese parents left for Australia when she was "16 or 17". She studied beauty the Australian way. "When I studied eyebrows in Australia, we went for the natural way, but in Bangkok, where I also studied, they have to look straight and thin, like a ruler. Cambodians like that Thai style," she says. I will have to tell her later, my eyebrows will definitely be reverting back to the "natural way".

She is open about her success. "Everywhere I go I hear people murmuring, ‘There’s Sapor. That’s Sapor’. They know me and I feel proud of my achievements.
"You know, when I was in Battambang for a fashion show I realized I had left one of the dresses in Phnom Penh, and I was running around panicking looking sporty and very daggy. I got the women there to make me a simple and sexy dress for the show and they made it in three hours. If they didn’t know me it would have taken three days, so that’s a bonus."

This woman has had three children and retains the figure of a 20-year-old—that’s the bonus. Sapor has got a very infectious laugh and the rather endearing habit of saying Australian "yeahs". She’s a likeable character and she knows her stuff. There are 50 students at the school (which opened in 1996—the first of its kind), 50 models on the books and people still clamoring to get in to both.

I’m not cut out for the life of makeup and modeling or Cinderellas and cuticles, but Sapor is. She’s not a drop-out.