Central Asian women are great enthusiasts for personal grooming, and dedicate a lot of their time and money to looking good. Beauty salons offering manicures, pedicures, waxing and other treatments aren’t hard to find — there’s usually a Salon Krasota on most street corners. But you need to choose among the man the right one. I had several experiences in Kazakhstan and other countries that were painful, humiliating or just plain weird.
- The first time I ever went for a mani-pedi was when visiting my friend in the beautiful city of Uralsk in the northeast corner of Kazakhstan. Now I’d never had a pedicure and when I’m home I love walking around wth bare feet so not to put too fine a point on it my feet were hard and horny. Kazakh beauticians like to really go for it with a variety of metal implements to make sure that every single bit of unnecessary skin is removed. It’s not uncommon for me to bleed when going for a manicure. But back to the feet, she set to work stating with a file, but after a vexed noise she decided something more effective was required a brought out a large scalpel, and she cut, and she cut, and she cut… By the time my friend had finished her own mani-pedi there was a large pile of skin on the floor and the beautician was still hacking away. She’d been fairly quiet with me except for the odd displeased noise but when she saw my friend the floodgates opened and the diatribe started. Luckily for me, as I was already feeling pretty embarrassed and Kazakhs don’t have much of a filter between brain and mouth, she was speaking in Kazakh. But I could guess what she was saying. Oh yes, I could guess.
- I’d been in Karaganda for a conference and noticed that my manicure was getting a little scruffy. As I was on my way to Astana to meet some friends that night and had a couple of hours before the train was due to leave I ducked into a nearby beauty salon and requested a manicure. Midway through, and even though I told her I was just passing through the city, the beautician decided to upsell permanent eye makeup. I’ve never had this done, but knew how it works because some of my Kazakh friends regularly have black dye injected into their eyebrows and eyelids. Now as the beautician was jabbing painfully around my fingernails at the time, I wasn’t particularly inclined to let her loose on my eyelids with a needle full of dye. Her selling technique involved looking me straight in the eye for maximum contact; she jabbed and a big blob of blood splattered onto my (white) jeans. I could only be grateful when the salon manager intervened.
- Yerevan, Amenia. The beautician was wearing a blue denim jumpsuit. I say ‘wearing’, I should actually say ‘bursting out of’, especially in the bosom area. When it came to the pedicure, she sat in front of me and wedged my foot against her chest. Now my feet are a little ticklish, and every time she prodded them or pumiced a tender area my foot jerked and I kicked her right in the cleavage. She didn’t seem to mind though, so perhaps all her clients did it.
- Dushanbe, Tajikistan. “Oh Enrique, oh Enrique Iglesias, I LOOOOOVE YOOOOUUU!” So said Mairam, a skinny young woman in a floor length robe and headscarf, with two children and the same number of gold teeth, who divulged her burning passion for the singer while filing vigorously down one side of my nail. She was too carried away to do the other side or put a topcoat on, so I came out with a strangely lopsided look and varnish that peeled off almost immediately. So, Enrique, if you ever tire of Anna Kournikova, Mairam is waiting for you in Dushanbe.
So how do you chose among the many beauty salons in Central Asia and avoid this kind of experience? Personal recommendations are the best way to choose, especially if you’re visiting a friend in an unfamiliar city. My experience in Uralsk may have been embarrassing, but I can’t fault the beautician’s thoroughness and dedication to her job. But I also like to find somewhere local to me through trial and error. The traffic in Almaty and increasingly now in Astana is so bad I don’t want to have a two-hour round trip every time. So each time I’ve moved flats, I get something relatively small like a manicure at one or two local salons to see which does the best job and where I feel the most comfortable.
More posts about style, beauty and travel packing
How to guides:
How I went from terrible packer to travel capsule wardrobe expert
I cut my closet in half after an international move: here’s how I did it
How I rescued my boring travel capsule wardrobe for Tirana
Some examples of tiny travel capsule wardrobes:
My 12 item capsule wardrobe for Corfu and Saranda
My 14-item travel capsule wardrobe for Slovenia
Spring travel capsule for 10 days on the Adriatic riviera
Shopping:
My massive Bucharest thrift haul
Hanging out at the malls in Astana
Beauty tips:
Steppe in Style 
Leave a comment