Beauty and butterflies

BEAUTY PRODUCTS dominate drugstores, reflecting the growing concern for looking and feeling good. Once almost exclusively for women (and gays), there is now a small subsection devoted to men who buy the same products under different packaging and formulation.

Watching my mother go through her evening ritual as a boy, I learned what it was to wash, tone, moisturize. It took decades before I took it on as a daily habit like brushing my teeth. Teenage pimples forced me to use toners instead of kalamansi. A harsh winter abroad forced me to use moisturizers which I associated with mothers and sissies.

How skin products moved from women to men is worth an academic study. Skin care for men is not necessarily for gays so marketers coined the term “metrosexual” for them, but even that has become passé since skin care today knows no gender or sexual preference.

I began to care for my skin after seeing my mother’s high school classmates. They all looked old even if some of them were younger than my mother. Mom once declared, “Wala nang pangit na babae ngayon, lahat kayang remedyuhan ng tyaga o ng operasyon.? Years of dedicated daily skin care paid off. Now approaching 50, I (forgive the pun) make up for lost time.

It is not enough to be born beautiful. One has to maintain  it, because beauty is one of the first gifts God gives at birth and it is also one of the first He takes away.

The change in Filipino attitudes to beauty and skin care can be seen in the medical profession. Long before Vicki Belo challenged the prohibition on doctors advertising their profession, long before she used effective marketing and celebrity (or notoriety), doctors had traditional areas of specialization, for example, EENT (Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat), but now some doctors just do eyes, or noses. Before dermatologists were consulted for vanity, their area of specialization used to be skin and venereal diseases. I realized this from an old clinic I passed in a seedy Madrid esquinita on the way to the Plaza Mayor, which advertised “piel y venerias.” In Manila classified ads these doctors catered to “Skin-VD.” Now Cubao street ads draw patients in for “VD-Raspa-Tule.”

Browse through a drugstore and you will see that skin and hair products are grouped together, separate from teeth and mouth care, vitamins, snacks and contraceptives.

Today’s column on beauty and skin care was inspired by letters Rizal received in late 1894 and early 1895 while he was in exile in Dapitan, from a certain Napoleon Kiehl in Prague (no relation to the upscale store Kiehl’s that sells hair and skin products). Kiehl was a collector and student of entomology and had a collection of butterflies, locusts and blowflies from around the world. In 1884 he published a treatise on the butterflies of Nias, near Sumatra and was keen to have specimens from Mindanao. They had a common friend in Ferdinand Blumentritt. At this time Rizal was sending all sorts of insects, animals and other specimens to Dresden, Germany, and his correspondent,  Dr. A.B. Meyer, sent Rizal’s butterflies to Kiehl who described the package as follows:

“They were 31 samples with pins that arrived in bad condition. Of course, the handling of butterflies requires a certain attention. The  principal thing is to catch other fresh samples whose wings are not in the least flayed. It is also necessary to have good nets. And once caught the butterflies are not held down with pins but placed in paper  bags. I take the liberty right now to send you in a little tin box:

“Two nets and some paper bags of various sizes, by way of sample,  filled with natural butterflies, though damaged ones. The paper bags  are for the purpose of showing how the butterflies are inserted in them? By way of a little experiment, you can return to me this little box filled with any kind of butterflies in paper bags, caught with one of the nets.”

While Rizal won the lotto and used the money to buy his seaside estate outside Dapitan, he explored other sources of income aside from medicine. For sending specimens to Dresden, he got books in exchange. So he sent butterflies to Kiehl and got this acknowledgement, dated July  2, 1895:

“Here I found the tin can filled with a few butterflies. There were 18 very interesting specimens among them, as they were from Dapitan, but alas, alas, alas, they were more or less flayed, and it was evident that the catcher who gathered them did not know yet the art of catching butterflies and it seems that he catches them with the fist? Of these 18 specimens, seven are not worth even the paper of the cone—they are so flayed that I return them with their names and classification in Latin? Neither are the remaining eleven good but passable.”

After this letter, Rizal stopped sending butterflies. It was too much trouble, especially Kiehl’s advice to use bottles laced with cyanide  and chloroform! He even sent this lethal recipe:

“A hole is made in the cork and then this is filled with cyanide or cotton soaked in chloroform. As it is only with chloroform that butterflies are narcotized and stunned, it is necessary to kill them afterwards by piercing their breasts with a pin moistened with  nicotine, tobacco juice.”

Butterflies mounted and displayed under glass in a museum can be very  beautiful indeed, but as in personal life it takes great care to look  and feel beautiful.

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