What role did salons play in urban life and what types of customers usually frequented these destinations?

I stanbul, like other major cities worldwide, has seen a boom in commercialized beauty services closely tied to the development of an increasingly global, neoliberalized consumer economy since the 1980s and to the feminization of the workforce in an expanding urban service sector. Amid a rich landscape of beauty that includes private beauty schools, municipally run classes on bodily grooming and beauty, online discussion forums on the topic, beauty fairs, and makeover reality television series, in 2014 over seven thousand hair and beauty salons were listed in the Istanbul Chamber for Women Hairdressers and Manicurists. 1 While these 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 appearance of the body have been expanding globally, with a large array of (new) professionals providing haircuts and massages, dietary advice, manicures and pedicures, makeup, aesthetic surgery, and various noninvasive aesthetic procedures for purposes of "rejuvenation" or to lose weight. In their influential volume Intimate Labors, Eileen likewise emphasize the "heightened commodification of intimacy that pervades social life" in contemporary global capitalism. For them, intimate labor "entails touch, whether of children or customers; bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, such as sexual intercourse and bathing another; or close observation of another and knowledge of personal information, such as watching elderly people or advising trainees" (ibid., 2). As the following will show, aspects such as touch, trust, familiarity with and attentiveness to particular bodies, and people all play a central role in the intimate bodywork in Istanbul's beauty salons. However, as I argue, the meaning of intimacy and indeed its permissibility may vary considerably for those involved and across the city. Whereas beauty salons may cultivate vastly different styles of intimacy, the interpretation and handling of intimate labor requires negotiation between beauty salon workers and their customers. I will therefore challenge the implicit assumption in the literature that, in the process of commercialization and "professionalization," the relationships of intimate bodily care have become the same around the globe.

Intimacy can be translated into Turkish using the concepts of samimiyet and mahremiyet,with each term touching on different semantic fields. While samimiyet describes the quality of a relationship and implies a sense of integrity, mahremiyet refers more to the context of the encounter (see . Accordingly, interlocutors spoke about intimacy mostly in terms of samimiyet, emphasizing a physical and emotional closeness that comes out of everyday practice rather than kinship relations. The intimacy created in all-female salons that prohibit entry for men or that may be seen as lacking in salons that cater to both men and women suggests the concept of intimacy implied in the term mahremiyet, that is, a social and topographical space protected in a social and moral sense as well as one that is confined and possibly confining. As the description of online religious forum discussions will show, some forms of beauty work and some parts of the body may be interpreted as too intimate (haram) to be delegated or presented to others. In contrast to Debra L. concept of bodywork as women's participation in shaping their own bodies in a form of self-work, I understand bodywork or beauty work as a social relationship between a person who performs this kind of work, whether paid or unpaid, and the recipient of this work. The relationship between them is permeated by affects and informed by cultural, moral, and social notions of gender, beauty, bodily care, and well-being.

Analyzing US public discourses after the conservative "Reagan revolution," Lauren an intimate public sphere in which matters of sexuality, morality, and family values have all become key publicly debated issues. For Turkey, Esra has described a similar process of the privatization of politics in the early 2000s, where "the controversy between Islamism and secularism ma[d]e privacy and intimacy vital to politics and citizenship in a particular way." More than ten years after studied Turkish secularists' creation and display of "novel privacies and intimacies in order to represent freely internalized, and hence voluntary and legitimate, political positions," intimate matters have become vital to debates on national identity and the definition of how citizens, especially women, should look and act. After the third electoral success of the conservative, pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) in 2011, the government's repeated interference with women's intimate lives, such as the draft proposal for a ban on abortion in 2012 and the incentives provided to families with three children or more, intensified feminist struggles and sparked street protests and online activism that have been interpreted by some as a prelude to the far-reaching Gezi Park protests of spring and summer 2013 .

From the perspectives of the feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements, the Gezi Park protests can be seen as a (temporary) reclaiming of a public space by women and transgender people that, before the eruption of the protests, had become infamous for rampant sexual harassment and (police) violence . Research for this article took place in the wake of these protests and hence in an atmosphere of political polarization and ongoing public conflict about intimate issues, such as the debate on coed university housing in November 2013 and the declaration of Turkey's deputy prime minister, Bülent Arınc, in July 2014 that women should not laugh out loud and should remain chaste in public at all times (see . In this climate beauty salons assumed a central role as places where publicly debated ideals of femininity and sexuality are visibly manufactured and hence become real.

Against this background of intimate politics that turn "women's bodies and practices" into a "battleground" for secular and Islamic ideologies and "taste wars" among the Turkish urban middle classes , the article describes a changing urban geography of beauty that has multiple repercussions on women's highly spatialized notions of femininity, intimate bodily grooming, and aesthetics. In what follows I provide a short outline of the discussion on gender, bodily grooming, and space in Istanbul, then I present my methodology and ethnographic data. Finally, I discuss intimate encounters and concerns comparatively in two urban salons and neighborhoods. eroded the urban mahalle (neighborhood) that for centuries had characterized everyday life in the city (see . This had tremendous effects on the intimate lives of the city's residents, including practices of beautification, bodily grooming, and sociality. Defined by neighboring practices that create "networks of support" between neighbors and resident-owned shops and businesses, writes Amy , "the mahalle is the space of intimate daily life in the Turkish urban context, and narratives of and ways of life in the mahalle articulate competing notions of what it means to be a woman in Turkey."

In the neighborhood collective rituals of washing, grooming, and bathing formed a major foundation of sociability for women in public, gender-segregated baths or hamams and later in private homes. Indeed, because of the lack of bathrooms in private homes and female seclusion, for many urban women in Ottoman times and beyond a regular visit to the bath was one of the few legitimate social occasions outside private homes in the immediate neighborhood (see . Public baths may be considered antecedents of today's beauty salons, spaces for bodily grooming, intimacy, and sociality for women. Similar to spaces of sociality that catered to adult males in Ottoman times, such as the boza (fermented malt drink) house, the tavern, the mosque, and, since early modern times, the coffeehouse, public baths were attended by all social classes and, at least to some extent, encouraged social leveling . The immense role of public (neighborhood) baths before the installation of running water and washrooms in private homes has to be seen not only in terms of their practical, aesthetic, and social uses but also their ritual use (ibid.; Akşit 2011).

Once the urban social structures that included the rituals of collective bathing had been dissolved, in the middle-class imagination public baths became spaces of pollution rather than purity, infested with all kinds of fungal diseases and reserved for the lower social classes, whose private homes did not allow for a decent bath . 2 In her analysis of continuity and change in Istanbul's public bathing culture, Nina ) describes a process beginning in mid-nineteenth-century Istanbul in which public spaces like theaters, parks, and cinemas came to be frequented by the urban elite, meaning that "the bathhouses were not the most chic places any more." In this process the Beyoğlu district (historically known as Pera), with its long boulevard, La Grande Rue de Pera, later renamed İstiklal Street, and its modern Taksim Square, assumed a central role as a "European" and cosmopolitan secular space of entertainment and commerce. There non-Muslim Istanbulites opened the first women's hair and beauty salons in the early republican era. Until at least the 1970s all but a few salons in the city that catered to women were located in Beyoğlu and the nearby residential neighborhoods of the secular elite, such as Nişantaşı, Şişli, Levent, and Etiler. In these neighborhoods hair and beauty salons for women became part of a "secular space," that is, "urban public sites that are associated with secular ways of life, nonreligious activities and symbols" . This changed dramatically when, during the global boom in the beauty industry in the 1990s , places directed at bodily grooming, hygiene, and beautification, such as fitness centers, hair and beauty salons, spas, and nail bars, mushroomed all over the city and increasingly across not only the social but also the secular-religious divisions that characterized the urban space.

Numerous studies have pointed out that women's bodies are the center of attention in processes of nation building and modernization, as has certainly been the case in Turkey . As elsewhere, in Turkey imaginations of bodily aesthetics are historically produced and tie a specific bodily appearance to imaginations of modernity, morality, and citizenship. In her analysis of beauty contests in early republican Turkey, for example, A. Holly shows the pivotal role of the public presentation of feminine, bodily beauty in republicans' attempts to project images of a modern and "civilized" nation while also redefining patriarchal concepts of honor and shame to "secularize Islam and to normalize the female body." Amid the politicization of the head scarf in the 1990s, a number of studies focused on the continued role of women's bodies as a battleground between modernity and tradition, secularism and Islamism, and the role of Islamic dress and sartorial styles in creating new Islamic (elite) lifestyles . In focusing on the manufacturing of beautiful, feminine, and more generally proper bodies in diverse urban neighborhoods, I seek to contribute to this large body of literature. Similar to what Banu has argued in regard to an emerging veiling fashion industry, in analyzing the intimate and commercialized encounters between women in beauty salons across the city, I argue that the dissolution of the boundaries between Islamic and secular neighborhoods is more than topographic, it is embodied and gendered. The focus on intimate bodywork in beauty salons and clinics, however, draws attention to the fact that the fashioning of female identities clearly goes beneath the dress and even beneath the skin, being produced in a social encounter and as such being affectively laden, often painful and sensual at the same time.

This article is part of an ongoing research project on femininity, beauty work, and aesthetic body modification in Istanbul that draws on fifteen months of field research, including five short field trips since 2011 and an uninterrupted period of fieldwork in 2013 and 2014. I conducted some one hundred ethnographic guideline interviews, most scheduled and recorded, with customers and patients of hair and beauty salons and clinics; beauty salon owners and workers; aesthetic surgeons and other experts, among them tattoo artists; activists in various feminist organizations; a fashion photographer; and an Islamic scholar who rules on the permissibility of beauty treatments. Moreover, the project employs media analysis, including the systematic analysis of newspaper archives, online forums (Kadinlar Kulübü and Fetva Meclisi), and so-called makeover shows on private television. In 2013 and 2014 I attended the annual Istanbul Beauty and Care Fair 3 and distributed questionnaires among its visitors. I also distributed questionnaires among participants in two municipal training courses on makeup and facial care.

I used multisited ethnography to follow beauty practices in different hair and beauty salons and clinics in the city, with a focus on residential and commercial sites in socially and politically diverse urban neighborhoods, namely, Başakşehir, Fatih, Nişantaşı, Beyoğlu, Moda/Kadıöy, and Etiler. I selected one or two hair and beauty salons or clinics in each of these neighborhoods in which to observe participants during regular ongoing visits. I strategically chose the neighborhoods as highly contested urban areas for various reasons. In the popular imagination, Fatih and Nişantaşı, the two neighborhoods described in greater detail below, are at different ends of the Islamist-secularist axis, with Nişantaşı being a well-off secular neighborhood and Fatih being a rather conservative working-class neighborhood. By choosing these neighborhoods, I wish to illustrate the similarities and differences in intimate encounters and concerns in the city and point out that processes like the commercialization and professionalization of beauty work affect both neighborhoods even though aesthetic norms and the spatial performance of beauty vary considerably. Hence the sites and persons selected for presentation are neither representative of nor at the extreme ends of a continuum, but they do draw attention to the urban diversity involved and to some common themes and issues with regard to bodily grooming and intimate encounters.

Following the feminist and anthropological focus on everyday spaces, on quotidian and seemingly mundane practices, I argue that beauty practices and beauty salons are excellent research themes and sites in which to study the relationships between gender, bodily intimacy, space, and consumption. Female beauty salons have been described as intimate social spaces in a number of academic studies (see . Indeed, whereas male-dominated spaces such as the coffeehouse or the (black) barbershop have often been theorized as crucial for forging a public sphere ) and political subjectivities (Harris-Lacewell 2004), female beauty salons have typically been associated with female care and sharing. For example, Frida Kerner Furman's (1997) ethnographic study of a specific beauty salon catering to elderly Jewish women in New York emphasizes the comfort, caring, even friendship that women find in this space, while Paula similarly describes the beauty salon as a highly feminized and therapeutic space where notions of beauty are not as important as heteronormative notions of femininity and well-being and an increasing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 aestheticization of women's workplaces. Moreover, the emergence of professional beauty salons may also be interpreted as an alienating process in which bodily grooming, according to bell hooks , turns from a ritual of bonding between women into an expensive, isolating, and commercialized experience.

In her "linked comparison" between beauty salons in Paris, Cairo, and Casablanca, Susan makes the distinction between three kinds of hair and beauty salons, which helps us differentiate among salons where particular kinds of femininities and intimacies come into play. These are (a) the neighborhood or proximate salon, a kind of "cocoon" that "nurture[s] bodies in formation" and is a space of female solidarity set off for feminine concerns (ibid., 101); (b) the "fast-cut" salon, which is more impersonal and often centrally located, with a clear hierarchy from owner to hairdresser to assistant; and (c) the "special salon," which, located in central or upmarket shopping districts, centers around "famous products, hairdressers, and clients" (ibid., 121). Drawing from the insights of this literature and contextualizing different beauty salons in their respective settings in a specific street, neighborhood, and urban space, I intend to go beyond their analysis as intimate spaces per se or as spaces lacking intimacy due to commercialization to examine the transforming intimate encounters in their particular urban, social, and political complexities.

The Nur Hair and Beauty Salon in Fatih Fatih, a well-known working-class neighborhood within the old city walls, has been described as "the paradigmatic Muslim mahalle" in terms of its historical spatial organization and demographics. 4 Its main street, Fevzi Paşa Boulevard, with its small cafés and restaurants, clothing stores selling modest fashions, Islamic financial institutions, and tourist agencies specializing on the hajj (Islamic pilgrimage), points to the conservative character of the neighborhood. Diverse styles of Islamic dress dominate the streets of Fatih, and prominent pictures of beautifully arranged and decorated head scarves in the windows of its numerous hair and beauty salons advertise the styling of head scarves (türban tasarım in Turkish) alongside the usual services. The Nur hair and beauty salon is on a little side street just off Fevzi Paşa Boulevard. Sibel, a trained hairdresser-beautician and former midwife, opened Nur in 2000, and it is one of the oldest salons in the neighborhood that caters to women exclusively.

Thus, following the principle of Muslim gender segregation like an increasing number of salons in Fatih and other conservative neighborhoods, the Nur salon prohibits entry to men and is protected from the public view by a white foil covering its windows on the inside. Amid notices of special deals and posters of beautiful women, all covered, a large sign at the entrance announces that men are not permitted entry unless by prior appointment. A veil behind the entrance protects inside from the gazes of passersby even when the front door stands open, which commonly happens on hot summer or busy weekend days.

Sibel is an energetic, tall, self-confident, and somewhat extravagant woman in her forties who takes great care of her appearance and loves flashy fashion jewels and glittery shirts and boots. The daughter of migrants from the Black Sea, Sibel grew up in Fatih and lives with her teenage son and her second husband in the adjacent neighborhood of Çarşamba, known as one of the most conservative parts of the city. Like many Çarşamba residents, Sibel became çarşaflı a couple of years ago; that is, in public she hides her hair and body shape under a long black coat. In the salon she works alongside her two "girls," Azra and Feride, who are in their midtwenties and midthirties, respectively, and who do not cover their hair or dress modestly. Sibel's twenty-one-year-old daughter helps in the salon, applying makeup, performing depilation, and, until her recent marriage, offering private classes in oryantal, the Turkish belly dance. Several times a week two middle-aged beauticians offer skin treatments, permanent makeup, eyelash extensions, perms, various treatments for losing weight and rejuvenation, and intense pulsed light (IPL) laser treatments for permanent body hair removal. Both beauticians describe themselves as secular and live outside Fatih. More recently, amid a growing number of refugees in the neighborhood, Sibel added two young Syrian women as apprentices. Except for the apprentices, all the women working in the salon have known each other for many years and describe each other as "like family," preparing meals together and, when business is slack, often drinking tea together or sharing food.

The Nur salon is on three floors, with the main hair salon on the ground floor; rooms for the beauticians and depilation on the upper floor; and a kitchen, a toilet and shower, Sibel's office, a prayer room, and a little gym in the basement. On entry, the customer finds herself in the main hair salon, decorated in white and purple, with three hairdressing chairs and large round mirrors on one side and a waiting area with a black leather sofa and armchairs on the other. As in most hair salons, the wall behind the counter beside the entrance displays the owner's and her employees' framed diplomas in such diverse qualifications as "hairdressing," "eyelash extension," "IPL laser depilation," and "Japanese manicure." A white ornamental folding screen separates the front of the room, reserved for makeup and hairstyling, from the back, where manicures and pedicures are provided in a special chair. The TVabove the entrance is usually set to the popular music channel KralPop and plays Turkish pop music at full volume. When the salon is busy, the sound of the music mixes with that of the hairdryers and the lively chatter between the customers and the hairdressers. Those waiting can choose between various promotional flyers, the conservative women's magazine Ala, and catalogs of hairstyles, including bridal hair, on the coffee table next to the sofa. Most important, the basement extends into the "garden," a large tent in the building's backyard. With an airy atmosphere, a large dining table, comfortable armchairs, and a stereo, this is a prominent place of sociality for workers and customers alike and is one of the salon's greatest assets. Thus in the mornings before the salon gets busy, Sibel, her daughter, and the hairdressers have breakfast in the garden, sometimes joined by an early customer. At night the space may be rented for a celebration after someone has given birth or for a henna night, the women-only celebration shortly before a wedding. On some nights during Ramadan, the women break their fasts there, inviting friends and customers to join them. In summer 2014, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, a corner of the garden was devoted to the commemoration of Palestinian children killed during Israeli bombardments of the Gaza Strip. Some of the customers come to the garden to smoke a cigarette or have a chat before or after their treatments, and sometimes Sibel or her daughter serves tea and homemade pastries. While their hair is still wrapped in aluminum foil or their nail polish is drying, women's conversations and gossip revolve around children, common acquaintances, food, cooking, or beauty. Sibel, a clever businesswoman and a great mentor, frequently comments that a customer's skin or hair is desperately in need of a special treatment, one that-what a coincidence-is on offer only this week. Sibel contributes her knowledge of childbirth, alternative healing, or infertility and its cures, and when she still practiced midwifery she delivered the children of a few of the regulars. Other customers come not only for beauty but also for business, promoting their own services and products, including during my visits a saleswoman for a Japanese firm selling magnet therapy products, a woman from Chechnya on a visit from Cairo who performs hacamat (cupping) treatments, and a travel agent who with her husband organizes travel to the Arab Middle East, including pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem. Many of the more regular customers are housewives who live nearby, some of whom arrive with children who play in the garden while their mothers are treated. Younger women, often in pairs or in groups, arrive for a quick eyebrow shape or a blow-dry in the middle of a day of shopping on Fevzi Paşa Boulevard.

In the Nur salon the intimacy (samimiyet) that Sibel strives to create and that her employees and customers cherish is linked to the sociality of the garden and the sharing of tea, food, and cigarettes. The association between intimacy and the sharing of food or tea is not peculiar to this salon or even related to its location in a conservative working-class neighborhood. Thus the owner of another beauty salon in the secular, (upper-) middle-class neighborhood of Suadiye on the Asian side of the city, telling us about the intimate nature of her relations with her employees and customers, laughingly and proudly recounted how some of her customers enter the salon asking, "What's the soup of the day?" Nevertheless, there are intimate concerns that are more clearly linked to the location of the beauty salon and to the piety of its owner and clientele. Sibel recounted in an interview that she entered the beauty sector rather reluctantly out of economic necessity as a recently divorced mother of two forced to leave her profession when the state, adjusting to European Union regulations, withdrew the license for her independent birthing center. Before opening her beauty salon, Sibel solicited fetvas (legal rulings) from three well-known Islamic scholars on the permissibility of the salon and its treatments to meet her own and prospective customers' scruples. While the rulings were concerned with the gender-segregated nature of the salon and prohibited eyebrow shaping, 6 the scholars did not oppose the idea of a salon in principle. The beauty salon nevertheless met fierce resistance from some of Sibel's neighbors, and shortly after its opening a group of women attacked her home, smashing windows and defacing a wall. For months she was abused verbally by a group of çarşaflı women who followed her between her home and the beauty salon. For even longer anonymous people called Sibel or sent her text messages attacking her for opening a beauty salon, which they regarded as sinful, a place of vanity and creation of sexual allure that was misplaced in a respectable neighborhood. Sibel remained steadfast, and after she sought the mediating support of an influential Islamic scholar (and, one might add, after she married again), the hostility subsided. Today she counts many of her pious neighbors among her customers.

One aspect of beauty work, however, continued to trouble Sibel in spite of the fetvas, namely, pubic hair removal. Rationalized as a matter of cleanliness (temizlik) rather than beauty (güzellik), the removal of body hair, including pubic hair, is widespread (cf. . As a trained midwife, Sibel of course was accustomed to working with the bodies of female strangers, including touching their genital areas. However, the presentation, not to mention touching, of another woman's "private part" (avret bölgesi in Turkish) 7 for other than medical reasons was considered sinful and was prohibited by religious scholars. Initially, she refused to perform this service in spite of her customers' requests. In an interview she explained: out, Sibel and her customers managed to negotiate a procedure that eventually came to satisfy both sides. It is noteworthy that, in their desire to meet standards of beauty and cleanliness, even Sibel's most pious customers were ready to interpret their faith self-consciously and make Sibel overcome her reluctance to perform intimate bodywork that she had initially perceived as haram. This applied to other procedures as well, and while Sibel's beauticians observed that in the beginning it was hard to find customers for procedures that may have been problematic from an Islamic point of view, such as eyebrow shaping, nail polishing, or permanent makeup, 9 in recent years requests for these services have increased even among Nur's conservative clientele. Likewise, while Sibel initially delegated many of these tasks to her "open," that is, uncovered, beauticians and criticized the hypocrisy of her customers who publicly supported radical Islamic ideas but secretly engaged in many of these "problematic" practices, by the time we met in 2011 she had worked out a rather pragmatic approach. Thus more than a decade after the salon's opening in Fatih, the services demanded and provided resembled those of all-female salons elsewhere, including in Nişantaşı, considered one of the urban centers of beauty. These findings resonate with those of other studies on the veiling fashion industry in Turkey, namely, that there is an increasing concern with aesthetics among the new Islamic middle class and that,while piety and (the creation of ) bodily beauty have an ambivalent relationship, women adapt Islamic norms creatively (cf. . In this process hitherto unthinkable intimate relationships emerge, and intimate concerns once considered morally problematic become routinized.

Built in the mid-nineteenth century for a new European bourgeoisie and still inhabited mostly by affluent and secular residents, Nişantaşı is considered one of the city's most exclusive neighborhoods. In contrast to Fatih's domestic products, in Nişantaşı international brands are dominant in advertisements; in clothing stores; and indeed in the clothes, shoes, and handbags seen in the neighborhood streets and cafés. The American nail bar is in the basement of a commercial building on Valikonağı Avenue, a busy shopping area that hosts art galleries, designer workshops, and upmarket cafés and restaurants along with numerous international products. Stacey, a US college graduate in economics and a US native married to a Turk, opened the American-style nail bar in 2006. She explained in an interview 10 that American style means that if a group of four or five women walks in without appointments, the women can be sure of being served right away. Accordingly, out of a total of eight manicurists, at least five are present at any given time during the day, seven days a week, from at least ten in the morning to eight at night. Stacey herself does not perform treatments but comes in several times a week, mostly sticking to her small office in the back of the salon. Treatments include a long list of manicures and pedicures, facials, body hair removal, and aromatherapies and massages. On entry, the visitor is greeted by a receptionist, a stylish young woman in a skirt and high heels, who works behind a counter and in front of a wall of framed diplomas and pictures of the founder of the Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk. She makes or checks appointments, assigning a manicurist to each customer. The manicurists, all rather young and stylishly dressed, wait on a bench next to the entrance. They lead their customers into the main room and ask them to relax in one of the six large manicure and pedicure chairs with beige leather covers. Another female employee, the çaycı, who is also responsible for generally assisting the manicurists, serves tea or Turkish coffee. As the salon's website states, a visit is intended to be much more than a manicure or a pedicure: "Sink yourself into a reclining chair surrounded by a forest of organza drapery, sip a green tea while soothing New Age music washes over you, close your eyes and inhale the soothing scent of 100% pure and organic essential oils, now surrender yourself to the simultaneous pampering of your hands and feet, including Thai-inspired massage and [a] seemingly endless choice of nail polishes!" 11 In its evocation of a "forest," where one may forget about the noise, stress, and traffic outside on Valikonağı Avenue and find peace and quiet while being served and "pampered," the nail bar becomes an experience of sensual care and well-being. Signal words, such as organic and green tea, announce a specific type of middle-class cosmopolitanism that, in the urban geography of Istanbul, is rather well placed in this particular neighborhood.

In taxonomy of beauty salons, the American nail bar comes closest to a special salon. It is in a central, upmarket shopping district, assembles a number of exchangeable manicurists, and revolves around its famous products and clients. It is a place where the latest nail polish brands are applied to the mostly immaculate hands of the customers, the famous who know of each other as customers and the less famous who know that the others are customers and hope to be recognized likewise as regulars of this exclusive place.

Eschewing the food and chatting that characterize the Nur hair and beauty salon and other neighborhood salons, even in Nişantaşı, the intimacy at the American nail bar is altogether different. Indeed, signs on the wall ask customers to refrain from using their mobile phones and to keep their voices low. The workers are attentive and polite but refrain from being "chatty" with their customers. Saliha, one of the most senior manicurists, explained this policy in terms of professionalism. To her, talking in an intimate a way with her customers-Saliha employed the term senli-benli, literally, to be on familiar terms with someone -signified unprofessional behavior typical of those beauticians who had trained as apprentices rather than in proper beauty schools. Observing Saliha and her colleagues at work, I noted that they made an effort to engage in some small talk with a customer during the first few minutes of the nail treatment, if possible relating to an earlier conversation with 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 him or her ("How was your holiday?" "Has your mother recovered from her flu?"), but then fell silent, to all appearances concentrating on their work. The initial conversation sometimes took the form of customers questioning or mentoring manicurists, then customers shifted attention away from the manicurists, who nevertheless continued to hold customers' hands or feet in their own, clipping nails, pushing back or cutting excess skin, massaging, and finally applying lotions and nail polish. Some customers engaged silently with their smart phones or leafed through the available fashion magazines (Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan), while others disregarded the notes on the wall and the more tacit rules of the nail bar, making phone calls to family members, friends, and clients or ordering a quick lunch.

Saliha regarded herself not only as professional but as successful, as indicated by the fact that she had many regular customers. These often came for a weekly manicure and an occasional pedicure, eyebrow shaping, massage, or depilation. They were all clearly (upper-) middle-class, not least due to the nail bar's rather steep prices. In 2014 the cheapest manicure cost TL50 (US$23), more than three times the price in the Nur salon and more than double what Saliha and her colleagues earn per hour. Some of the customers were celebrities or sosyete (high-society) people who lived in the neighborhood, among them a famous dietitian who regularly appeared on TV talk shows, a former Miss Turkey, a well-known plastic surgeon, and a blogger whose posts on style and fashion were extremely popular among young Istanbul fashionistas. In the manicurists' imaginations the proximity to power in this topographical center of beauty and the urban elite arguably carries with it a promise of social climbing that makes employment in the nail bar attractive in spite of the long hours working for hardly more than the minimum wage. 12 The intense self-stylization of some manicurists, including in some cases heavy makeup, eyelash and hair extensions, cosmetic surgery, and branded clothes, may be interpreted as the desire for such a rise. In the American nail bar, where customers often encouraged beauty salon workers to "make more of themselves," one could clearly observe a culture of mimicking, with some workers investing so much effort in selfstylization that their colleagues gossiped.

For Saliha too, employment in the nail bar signified a career she had long worked for. Like most of the other manicurists, she started her career early, as an apprentice when she was fifteen years old. She did so out of economic necessity after her mother divorced and took Saliha and her younger sister from Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey to live with relatives in Istanbul. At first Saliha worked in a conservative neighborhood on the outskirts of the city in a small salon that rarely offered manicures. In 2015 she and her husband lived in that neighborhood next to her mother. Applying her ambition and skills, Saliha eventually made it to a more upmarket neighborhood salon in Kadıköy, then to a private beauty school, and finally to the American nail bar Power structures in the nail bar, as elsewhere, are temporarily inverted, not least due to the troubling aspects of intimate beauty work itself, that is, the vulnerability and shame related to bodies exposed and the pain of some of the treatments. Saliha was fully aware of the unease customers felt about depilation or even about exposing nails that had been bitten or torn. Calling body hair depilation an example of a service in which intimacy could easily become uncomfortable, Saliha explained that "you see all of her body, all her flaws. I mean she can't trust you not to talk about her with the next customer, because it is common among many people. . . . I realized that people make conversational material out of this among themselves. Disgusting subjects like: 'her was like this and the other's was like that.'" 13 It is hardly surprising, then, that some customers seek privacy in the nail bar, coming by appointment during quiet times of the day to avoid encounters with others. Indeed, while weekends, lunch breaks, and early evenings in the nail bar are typically busy with professional women who work in the area, at other times a single manicurist might be alone with a customer while the others wait on their bench. It is on the bench that some of the sociality and chatter often described as typical of beauty salons unfolds. Although manicurists are prohibited from bringing food into the salon, sweets do make the round, as does gossip about customers, photos on smart phones, or babies of friends or former employees. In the manicurists' waiting area, the much-feared abuse of trust that materializes in gossip is accompanied by online searches about prominent customers as a kind of revenge.

In spite of the intimacy between manicurists, Saliha, for example, was reluctant to describe the American nail bar as an intimate social space (samimi). This was certainly because the social hierarchies between the owner and the workers and between the customers and the workers were clear-cut but also, I assume, because it was a space accessible to men and women alike. While this did not bother Saliha to the extent that she refused to work there, she described handling male bodies as difficult and affectively uncomfortable, especially when it came to massages. In contrast to her assessment of the salon as a nonintimate space, Saliha removed her head scarf on entry and changed from a more modest attire into pants and shirts. She explained in an interview that she made this strategic decision after consulting a manicurist friend who worked in a nearby salon with her head scarf on. The friend complained that she was continuously forced to explain herself to her secular and ideologically "open" customers, who misunderstood her way of dressing as a sign of oppression. As in neighboring Tesvikiye, where Berna Turam (2013) describes the conflictual encounters between secularists and women in pious dress in highend clothing stores, coffeehouses, and a hairdresser's, these customers perceive a manicurist with her head covered as an intrusion into "their own" secular space. Moreover, although the fashion-conscious pious women whom Turam describes as visiting and shopping in the neighborhood are still around, none of them is ever seen entering the nail bar Sporting carefully manicured nails polished in bright colors is tied to a specific secular middle-class status in Istanbul that, in the atmosphere of political polarization and growing anxieties over the Islamization of Turkish society apparent during my research, turned into a secularist statement. In conversations and interviews with American nail bar regulars and other secular long-term residents of the neighborhood, it became clear that these women saw their stylization and bodywork as part of a personal and increasingly politicized distinction from what they commonly termed the varoş, that is, working-or lower-middle-class pious residents from the urban margins . In an interview a friend of one customer "explained" the lack of cultural capital that was commonly attributed to the varoş: "these people" are unable "to even match their handbags and shoes." Following Marcia notion of "spectacular femininities," in this context the female customers of the American nail bar engage in a performance that is "staged, presented before an audience, and subject to interpretation."

Stepping out of the American nail bar into Nişantaşı with freshly manicured, colorful nails is a performance of both a specific middle-class position that enables them to afford this kind of beautification and an affective secularist attitude or "internal state" (ibid., 222) of someone seemingly aware of her public moves asserting control over "her own" territorial space while also enjoying the playful and at times spectacular beautification that materialized in her nails. Accordingly, customers often talked about the "joy" they derived from their newly polished nails, a joy that made their days.

To return to Saliha, it can be argued that it was because the salon was so remote from her own intimate daily life and moral world that she did not mind taking off her head scarf to become "professional" in the eyes of her customers. In spite of the sometimes long-standing relations she has with individual customers, the closeness between them, according to Saliha, ends on the doorstep of the nail bar. Creating affective well-being, the "joy" that customers referred to, in spite of the troubling aspects of bodywork, the shame and the pain, the relationships between customers and beauty therapists remain socially distant. Intimate labor here comes across as a devalued, commercialized service that exacerbates existing hierarchies and ideologies rather than instigating reworkings of morals and subjectivities, as in the example of the Nur salon.

The Respectable, Beautiful, Spectacular: Grooming Istanbul and the Spatialization of Intimate Labor In spite of their many differences, in both salons intimate labor in the sense of bodily touching, trust between beauty salon workers and customers, and attentiveness to particular bodies takes place in a setting that is removed from the public space and yet functions as a kind of microcosmos of the surrounding neighborhoods. In Nişantaşı women's hair and beauty salons have been part of an elite "secular space" for more than half a century. Indeed, today most of Istanbul's special salons, in Ossman's definition mentioned above, are located in this and similar districts nearby, whereas in recent years the numbers of neighborhood salons in the same areas have dwindled. In contrast, in Fatih beauty salons are a more recent development. Neighborhood salons based on proximate sociability between women who live in the area exist next to an increasing number of what Ossman terms "fastcut" salons. A specific political economy of middle-class beauty in Istanbul ties the famous beauticians, hairdressers, and stylists to the elite secular spaces of neighborhoods like Nişantaşı, so according to common understanding, one would probably look in vain for a special salon in Fatih. However, with the emergence of a new Islamic middle class that is increasingly concerned with fashion and aesthetics, it is only a matter of time before beauty salons in Fatih and other conservative middle-class districts, like Başakşehir, assume the status of special salons, offering styling of head scarves alongside other aesthetic services with famous stylists, halal brands, and customers of their own. 14 While I chose Fatih and Nişantaşı, neighborhoods typically placed on different ends of both the social and the Islamistsecularist axes, to highlight the similarities and differences of intimate concerns and encounters in a polarized political climate, it is important to note that there are elitist salons concerned with Islamic modesty and working-class neighborhoods not so concerned with Islamic modesty.

In the salons described above, distinct types of intimacy and intimate concerns seem to be in place. As a neighborhood salon in a rather conservative district, the Nur hair and beauty salon in Fatih is a space of intimate sociality in the sense of both samimiyet, structured by female care and sharing that extends from bodywork to other fields of women's daily lives, and mahremiyet, an all-female space where treatments are questioned according to their permissibility in Islam. In the American nail bar, a place of exclusive well-being where treatments may assume the status of conspicuous consumption, intimate concerns focus on professionalism, privacy, and exclusivity rather than intimacy per se. Thus the American nail bar more readily brings to mind Viviana Zelizer's (2010, 268) concept of intimate labor as work that is potentially risky, at least for customers, since it exposes personal information that could leave one vulnerable because it is "not widely available to third parties."

In both settings similar services are highly personalized and handled in ways that make a clear distinction between them obsolete. Customers and beauticians are eager to create long-lasting relationships, and many customers are regulars who return repeatedly to the same beauty therapist. However, in interviews with customers in the American nail bar it became clear that for them the hygiene, concept, and aesthetics of the place are more important than the relationship with a particular manicurist. Similar to what has been analyzed in paid domestic work arrangements, beauty salon workers, at least in the nail bar, may be understood "marginal insiders and intimate outsiders" whom one may admit to one's intimate secrets or allow to touch one's body in intimate ways and places, albeit without any further social consequences. Intimacy here is a form of closeness in settings removed from public display, existing not in spite of social distance but because of it.

While both salons are structured by clear divisions of labor and social hierarchies, the extent and rhetoric of inequality between the beauty salon owners and workers and between them and the customers differ. In the Nur hair and beauty salon the owner, who works alongside her employees, and most of the women present share a personal history and aspects of everyday life beyond a remunerated personal service, as expressed in the common saying, "We are like family." Here the long-standing relationships between beauty salon workers and customers and the bodily intimacy of beauty work create a familiarity, despite social hierarchies, that turns the salon experience into a space of bonding for women, where food is shared and strangers are turned into kin.

In spite of their many differences, both the American nail bar and the Nur hair and beauty salon are commercial places that, displaying their branded products, technologies, and diplomas, strive to be recognized as modern, chic, and up-to-date. While Fatih and Nişantaşı are typically placed on different ends of the social and the Islamist-secularist axes, they are both rapidly changing urban neighborhoods where a strict division between a secular upper-middle class and a pious lower-middle class makes little sense. In the beauty salons of both Fatih and Nişantaşı, rather pious and more secular women meet just like those of different economic means, even if only, as in the case of the American nail bar, as customers and workers. The development of an Islamic culture industry and a pious middle class that manages to reconcile its desires for fashion and beauty with its belief, as my ethnographic material suggests, has especially strong repercussions in Fatih. Challenging the common assumptions of self-proclaimed cosmopolitans in neighborhoods such as Nişantaşı, beauty salon workers and customers in Fatih and other conservative neighborhoods not only prove well up on the latest styles and fashions but display a striking willingness to establish new intimate relationships and negotiate the boundaries of moral permissiveness and bodily well-being. This resonates with Jenny B. observation of an immense openness to difference among (young) pious women, who are clearly able "to make choices that affect their subjectivity, their sense of who they are in the world," combining "elements of globalism, secularism, Islamic piety, consumerism, work professional engagement, and political activism." In Fatih and other pious neighborhoods, no less than in Nişantaşı, many Turkish women strive to fulfill heatedly debated public ideas of femininity and the latest fashion amid commercialization, negotiating the complex, affective dimensions of intimacy and distance that arise when intimate bodywork turns into a commodity This article has examined the subtle ways this is done in a distinct urban space. In particular, I have sought to illuminate how different kinds of beauty cultures and stylizations are inflected by the practices and politics of local life in contemporary Istanbul. Due to the affective nature of beauty work, the process of its commercialization is full of contradictions, with those involved having to negotiate new styles of bodily appearance and forms of intimate relations. In their encounters beauty salon customers and workers not only create strategies to deal with the (bodily) intimacy between them, they also test moral, social, and religious boundaries with regard to what is attractive, respectable, pious, or permissible. Resonating with research on the emergence of tesettür as a fashionable choice (see , the story of the Nur hair and beauty salon and its owner shows that these boundaries have been pushed considerably in recent decades. In the context of heated debates on intimate topics and the right kind of femininity in contemporary Turkey, beauty work and salons are, perhaps more than ever, set in the midst of social and political reproduction. It is here that heteronormative ideals and images of women's bodies become real, incarnated not simply by patriarchy but in a complex array of negotiations and fantasies of who and what are respectable, beautiful, or even spectacular. To sum up, as discussed in the literature on intimate labor, the commercialization of intimate services in the late twentieth century marks an important shift in the relation between the public and the private spheres and in the way seemingly private matters become an arena of intimate politics and public debate. This article has shown that these processes are not the same globally but are highly contingent on space, enfolding in ways, as the examples illustrate, that cannot be routinely anticipated.

CLAUDIA LIEBELT is assistant professor of social anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. She directs a research project on aesthetic body modification, beauty work, and femininity in Istanbul that is supported by the German Research Foundation.

Contact: 1.

Oktay Erkal, president of the Istanbul Chamber for Women Hairdressers and Manicurists, interview with the author, April 9, 2014.

In recent years some of the historical baths have been renovated and are promoted as tourist attractions. In contrast to the baths, which formed part of a neighborhood structure and were affordable for almost everyone, the renovated baths often charge upmarket prices that restrict access to the affluent.

3. See Güzellik ve Bakım, www.guzellikvebakim.com (accessed June 18, 2015).

The names of research sites and participants without a public role or function have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout this article.

Esra, interview with the author, February 4, 2014; my translation from the Turkish.

6. According to a particular hadith, shaping eyebrows is prohibited, as are tattooing and more generally changing one's features as created by

The application of nail polish is considered problematic, because, according to prominent rulings in Turkey, it prevents water from entering the body during ablution (abdest in Turkish), the ritual washing in preparation for formal prayers, thus rendering it invalid. Insofar as it is considered a form of tattooing, permanent makeup is also prohibited.

Stacey, interview with the author, October 10, 2013.

Quoted from the nail bar's official website, whose address I do not disclose here for reasons of anonymity (accessed November 7, 2014).

In December 2014 the Turkish minimum monthly wage was about US$400.

Saliha, interview with the author, January 23, 2014; my translation from Turkish.

14. I am grateful to Banu Gökarıksel for pointing this out.

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