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Enjoying her routine blow-dry service relaxingly at the cozy workshop of Aslam, a beauty parlor in downtown Islamabad, on Friday, a 21-year-old Pakistani stewardess Hena told this reporter, "Beautification? it is a part of my lifestyle."

Ten or more years back, it might be a shock seeing a lady allowing others to do the grooming work on her head or body at a public site. Nowadays, however, being a beauty salon goer is a trend in almost all the major cities of the country, with 96 percent of its population Muslims.

Scores of beauty salons have been set up in the past four or five years in Islamabad, the capital with a comparatively small population of 800,000 people, said Nawaz Malik, a beautician with Aslam, adding that in international port city of Karachi, the figure might be accounted for hundreds.

Gone are the days when women would hire someone to take care of their attires and make-up at home when getting dressed for a formal function. Being more concerned over the image-building is the result of more show-up in public.

The booming of the beautification industry might be partly attributed to the increasing female labor rate. Even though the figure is merely 13.6 percent according to the most recent official statistics, it is a boom, compared with the dominating rate of less than 10 percent in and before 1990s.

In the wake of the "9.11" terrorist attacks, western funds flooded into the nation which took the side with the United States in the Anti-terror war, making the economy more market-friendly. As more western enterprises stepped down their feet on the soil, Pakistani women, particularly those well-educated, found it easier to get a job and at the same time felt more pressure to care about their daily image-building.

"I have to look gorgeous every day to match the decent company I am with," said Rabia, a 23-year-old accountant. "My boss will be pissed off if I have not been at a beauty salon for a couple of days," she joked, adding that she spent almost half of her monthly income on beautification.

One should also not overlook the large number of young housewives who go to beauty parlors every other day, regardless of whether they have a social appointment for the day or not.

In a society where more and more urban Yuppy husbands are dying to copy the luxurious lifestyle from the pirated western DVDs they see daily, women are seemingly demanded to look as if they are ready to go to a wedding every day.

The parlor of Aslam claims that it opens early every morning for a particular client, who gets her make-up done before her husband wakes up, boasting that she has to look her best for him like a Nichle Kidman (a Hollywood hot star) at all times.

What one finds even more surprising is the new trend for teenager girls, aged 12 to 16, getting beauty treatments prior to social engagements.

Nawaz Malik, the beautician, feels that peer pressure is largely responsible for the new trend, noting, "if one girl gets her hair streaked, it becomes a must for the others in the group to get it done also."

"It might not be safe to judgmentally say that the increasing groomed power is a signal of the increasing social status of the country's around 60 million women, " said Nabi Khan, a social scientist.

It is in fact, however, that women's social status is improving in the country, he noted.

The female literacy rate is 29 percent, according to a most recent official figure. Compared with the even lower general literacy rate, it is definitely a great improvement.

And the government keeps making effort to promote gender equality through gender sensitive socio-economic policy reforms and by improving women's representation in political and administrative spheres.

Women are now holding 20 percent and 18 percent of the seats respectively in parliaments at provincial and federal levels.

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