Male Grooming in Brazil: Changing Attitudes and New Opportunities

BRAZIL, DOING BUSINESS IN

---

And more than 70 percent of the population have no running water at all. By contrast, most business people in Brazil either already belong to the controlling 10 percent of the Brazilian economic elite or are actively aspiring to join its ranks. Consequently, most Brazilian business people if not necessarily the society as a whole seem quite comfortable with what they perceive as natural order of economic inequality.

This often causes friction when Brazilian business people deal with their North American counterparts. Generally speaking, most business people in the United States or Canada are uncomfortable with class distinctions. Brazil, however, more than any other major business culture, professes to be at ease with these social inequalities. Most Brazilians view the world as a whole and the workplace in particular as innately unequal, and are more comfortable with these distinctions. Brazil's ruling elite are among the best educated people in the world. They are often educated abroad as well as in Brazil's many well-respected universities.

Still, the Brazilian elite notwithstanding, education itself is not widespread in Brazil as a whole.

Cross Category Trends

One half of Latin America's illiterate population lives in Brazil, and fully 20 percent of Brazil is completely unable to read. The figure for functional illiteracy is at least double that amount. Less than 18 percent of all Brazilians over the age of ten have gone beyond four years of school; indeed, more than half of all Brazilian children have never gone to school at all. Brazil can be divided into five major regions, each with distinctive business behavior, accents, and political orientation.

Because Brazilians themselves often stereotype the behavior that characterizes each region, it may be useful briefly to outline these stereotypes here. It is important, however, to point out that these characterizations are not necessarily accurate depictions of the people in each regions. The greatest concentration of business has centered on Brazil's southeastern states. While Sao Paulo is the largest industrial center in the country, the entire southeastern region is characterized by major emphasis on large business and large-scale foreign investment. Many Brazilians view the southeast as having a faster pace of life than the rest of the nation and greater emphasis on business.

People who live in Sao Paulo state are known as paulistas, with the widely accepted stereotype of being hardworking and business-minded. The Northeast is comprised of the coastal regions from Salvador northward. Those who live in the Northeast are called nordestinos, and are usually held up as a contrast to the southeast. Despite many notable exceptions, the Northeast is generally less economically developed than the southeast.

The Northeast is often viewed as having a slower pace of life than the rest of the country. The residents of Rio de Janeiro are called cariocas. Even though Rio is geographically located within the Southeast it is actually south of the state of Minas Gerais , most Brazilians view the city as having a distinctly separate identity.

Famous for its anual Carnival, Rio is also the nation's cultural center and for years served as its political capital. Brazilians often characterize the cariocas as fun-loving and spirited. On the other hand, Rio is also viewed as culturally and economically balancing the characteristics of the North and South. The Interior represents Brazil's vast non-coastal territory.

Much of the Interior is unexplored and little of it is developed. At one time, Brazil emphasized the need to develop the Interior as key to its future. Currently, these efforts to exploit the inland regions of the Amazon have come under reconsideration, at least since the Rio Earth Summit. Finally, the Federal District of Bras-lia represents Brazil's last region. For many years after its founding, Bras-lia was seen as an artificial city carved out of an undeveloped area and centered only on politics.

A major city in its own right today, some Brazilians may still hold this older view. It is important to keep in mind that these represent national stereotypes, and are not reliable characteristics of the people and the regions. These generalizations are most useful for understanding some of the friction between regions rather than for any clear indicator of actual behavior in the regions. Moreover, the regions are not populated only by people born to them; since the s, large numbers of Brazilians have moved to the nation's industrial centers looking for employment opportunities.

While all major Brazilian cities have seen some influx from the countryside, the highest concentrations have come to the southeastern cities, such as Sao Paulo, Belo Horizante, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba. Regional identities are not the only associative divisions in Brazil.

As Leni Silverstein has written, "there is a nationally held belief that the identity of the Brazilian people is characterized both racially and culturally as one-third Portuguese, one-third African, and one-third Amerindian, a result of the intermarriage of the three most populous occupants of the land. The Portuguese heritage remains a gray area. Clearly, Brazil owes its language and its Catholicism to Portugal. Indeed, it was Brazil's Portuguese heritage and the difference of Portuguese as a mother tongue that enabled Brazil to remain a single nation in the post-colonial period.

This contrasts markedly with the divisions that followed the independence of Spain's former lands in the Americas. Spanish America splintered into a wide variety of independent nations, while Portuguese America became the largest single nation in Latin America. Yet for all its historical ties to Portugal, Brazil's relationship with its former mother country remains ambivalent at best. Even while still a colony, Brazil had grown in many respects to greater or at least equal power to its mother country.

When Spain took over Portugal from to , Brazil remained Portuguese-speaking and essentially independent of direct Spanish rule. When the Dutch attempted to take over Bahia and Pernambuco during this period, it was Brazilian forces rather than Spanish or Portuguese troops that forced them out, a point not lost on the Brazilian conception of nationalism when Brazil reverted to Portuguese rule in Even more significantly, when Napoleon conquered Portugal in the early 19th century, the Portuguese royal family established its capital at Rio de Janeiro.

Make informed decisions with the FT.

This made Brazil the only country in the Americas to have ever served as a European seat of government. With this move came marked development in industry, finance, and the arts. Brazilian independence took place in when Joao VI returned to Lisbon, and Portugal tried to make Brazil a colony once more. By this point, Brazil was already significantly more powerful than Portugal in virtually all respects from economics to military to population.

What Men Want – Examining the Male Consumer in Beauty and Personal Care

Today, Brazil views Portugal as a relatively minor and very small nation. The common language perpetuates many ties with Portugal, but Brazil is seen as a much greater influence on Portugal than Portugal is on Brazil. This is in direct contrast to existing ties between France or Britain and their own former colonies. Perhaps the greatest Portuguese influence on Brazil remains the large-scale Portuguese immigration to the country. From the mids to , 1. Brazil is most different from Portugal, however, in the mix of cultures that blended with the Portuguese.

Brazil's former slavery heritage endowed the nation with a rich African heritage. Afro-Brazilians confront considerably less of the racism that characterized many other societies such as the United States historically involved with the slave trade. Most Brazilians pride themselves on the country's racial equality. Indeed, because of the high degree of interracial marriages throughout Brazilian history, racial lines are often not clearly differentiated. Nonetheless, considerable income disparity continues between blacks and whites in the many professions.

More significantly, while roughly 40 percent all Brazilians are Afro-Brazilian, the Afro-Brazilian percentage among Brazil's poor is notably higher, at an estimated 60 percent. Moreover, while Brazilian society may be somewhat lopsided in the number of blacks in higher level executive positions, color is not an overt barrier.

As a result, racism does not deny Afro-Brazilians the opportunity for upward mobility into government or business. Moreover, Brazil's strongly held ideals of what many Brazilians call a "racial democracy" have led to the strong contributions of Afro-Brazilians to the creation of modern Brazilian culture. African influence is present in virtually every aspect of Brazilian culture from its cuisine such as the national dish feijoada to Carnival, from business to the very nature of Brazilian Portuguese as a language, from the nature of Brazilian music and the arts to the unique nature of Brazilian religion.

Brazil's first residents, its Amerindian population, represent another important element of the culture as a whole, although with considerably less influence than the Portuguese or Afro-Brazilians. Indeed, in the reduction of their numbers from pre-Columbian days to the present, Brazil's Amerindians have matched the fate of early residents of the United States or the Argentina. Still, with the vast majority of the Brazilian interior left more or less undeveloped by the rest of Brazil until the midth century, Brazil's native population retained its culture and to some degree its land considerably later than the Amerindians of the United States or Argentina.

Still, by the s, Brazil was the subject of widespread international protest over the treatment of its Amerindian population and the destruction of the rain forest and traditional lands in which they lived. Probably the most dynamic influence for change has been Brazil's massive immigration.

Many Brazilians have strong ethnic ties to immigrant ancestry outside of Portugal or Africa. Sao Paulo, for instance, has the largest Japanese population of any city outside of Japan. Similarly, so many Italians emigrated to Sao Paulo that the city's regional dialect of Portuguese carries clearly Italian overtones. Many of Brazil's most successful business leaders and politicians have Japanese, Arabic, Italian, Jewish, Czech, German, and other ethnic ties. Brazil was also a major center of immigration for people from the Southern United States following the fall of the Confederacy in the U.

While many immigrants retain strong ethnic ties, it is characteristic of Brazil that most immigrants have assimilated and contributed to the general culture. Almost 90 percent of Brazilians are Catholic, at least in name. This gives Brazil the largest Catholic population of any nation in the world.

Catholic holidays, consequently, affect Brazilian work schedules and are widely celebrated. Despite the importance of the Church, however, many other religions influence Brazilian society. Brazil's Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. The country is home to a thriving Pentecostalist movement, and Brazil includes among its population people of all faiths. Several prominent business leaders are Lutheran or Jewish, for example. The most important religious influence in Brazil besides Catholicism, however, comes in the form of the uniquely Brazilian religions of Umbanda and Candomble.

Umbanda mixes Catholicism with elements of African religious worship of spirits called the Lorixas or exus. Candomble more directly derives its roots from African spiritism. Both Umbanda and Candomble maintain a strong influence not only among those who practice these religions exclusively, but also among many who are nominally Catholic.

Brazil is what is called a high context culture. This means that Brazilians place a strong emphasis on how a message is said rather than on the words used alone. As a result, for many Brazilians, the eloquence with which one presents one's position becomes a part of the message. For the rhetorical effect alone, some Brazilians may exaggerate a point but this is done in such a way that others know it to be an exaggeration. Business people from more literal low context cultures such as the United States, however, may misunderstand such rhetorical flourishes as dishonesty.

As in other high context cultures, messages are also understood in terms of the full context of the communicators' relationship with one another. This particularly affects the importance for social etiquette and formality in official situations including business meetings and creates an emphasis on face-saving and respect. Because of this high contexting in Brazilian communication, one needs to establish personal relationships when conducting business in Brazil.

It is only within the context of this personal relationship that most substantive communication can take place, enabling adequate levels of trust to undertake most business arrangements. To some extent, Brazilian business behavior is governed by individual interpretation and the need to gamer respect rather than on external rules and regulations. As a result, in Brazil, personal understandings may well prove more binding than contracts. Perhaps the quintessential example of high contexting in any society is found in the jeitinho. The term itself defies translation but suggests the Brazilian way of getting things accomplished through unofficial channels, connections, and rule-bending.

Livia Neves de H. Barbosa defines jeitinho "as a fast, efficient, and last-minute way of accomplishing a goal by breaking a universalistic rule and using instead one's informal social or personal resources. As with all nations, Brazil has distinctive nonverbal communication unique to itself. It contrasts markedly with the United States in the four areas described below. Brazilian concepts of personal distance are considerably closer than in North America. The average workplace distance while standing face-to-face between two people in North America is roughly arm's length.

Related to New Masculinity

While regional differences are notable in Brazil with interpersonal distance becoming greater as one moves south , the average distance is approximately three to four inches closer than in the United States or Canada. Brazilians also place a good deal of emphasis on touch.

The Results Are In: For Men, The 'Brazilian' Is Still The Favorite

This contrasts markedly to the United States or Canada, where most workplace touching is limited to the handshake. Common Brazilian workplace interactions would likely include handshakes of considerably longer duration than in North America and greeting kisses between men and women as well as among women themselves. Generally speaking, many Brazilians may be more expressive with their hands than most of their U. Also, Brazilians use many gestures not commonly known in North America.

One of these, the so-called fig placing the thumb between the first and second fingers is a sign of good luck in Brazil, while its use in the rest of South America is considered obscene. Brazilians tend to dress more conservatively in the Southeast than elsewhere in the country. Still, as a whole, business as well as social dress is usually more formal and considerably more fashion-conscious throughout Brazil than it is in the United States or Canada. Shoes in particular receive considerable attention in Brazil, arguably as a result of its major role in the shoe industry.

Indeed, accessories as a whole tend to carry more importance in Brazil than the United States or Canada. Finally, generally grooming—from hair to make-up—is given more attention in Brazilian business dress than in North American dress. Brazil and the United States are extremely different in the way each conceives of time. Brazil is what Edward T. Hall termed a polychronic culture; the United States, a monochronic one.

Brazil, like all polychronic cultures, ranks personal involvement and completion of existing transactions above the demands of preset schedules. The United States, like other monochronic cultures, adheres to preset schedules that take precedence over personal interaction or the completion of the business at hand. Considerable regional variance exists in Brazil regarding attitudes toward scheduling and time in general.

The Southeast is considerably more time-conscious than, for example, the customary pace of life in the Interior or the northeast. Thus, the generalization of Brazilian attitudes toward time that follows must be balanced against these regional influences. Nonetheless, even in the more monochronic southeast, Brazilians tend to be considerably lax in comparison to their North American counterparts.

Get the print edition

Because Brazilian business people customarily emphasize finishing tasks over maintaining preset schedules, executives and managers often find themselves pressed for time. To mitigate the consequent overloading, higher level Brazilians often count on subordinates to screen for them. If an individual manages to circumvent those screening, the person in authority will often immediately take up that individual's request regardless of its relative importance. This is directly opposite what one might expect in the North America, where the appointment book rather than a subordinate dictates the schedule and acts as the screen.

This difference has far-reaching effects in Brazilian business.

Because people rather than appointment books act as the screens in Brazil, personal relationships flourish within close circles. In the United States, most businesses discourage personal relationships, or at least view personal interactions as less important than maintaining the schedule. As a result, in the United States, the terms of the job determine the nature of personal relationships in a way that is often incomprehensible in Brazil.

Conversely, Brazilian jeitinho stresses personal relationships in the workplace in a way that is hard for most U. Brazilians make distinctions between insiders and those outside existing personal relationships. In the United States, one needs only to schedule a meeting with the appropriate people; little or no preference is given to those one knows over complete strangers. In the United States in direct contrast to Brazil , the outsider is treated in exactly the same fashion as the close associate. Barbosa, Livia Neves de H. Hess and Roberto A. DaMatta editors , The Brazilian Puzzle.

Columbia University Press, I only fainted, but I was nearly carted off to hospital and I have vowed never to try it again. Bikini waxing has been credited with a significant global reduction in cases of pubic lice. In Middle Eastern societies, removal of the female body hair has been considered proper hygiene, necessitated by local customs, for many centuries. According to ethnologist F. Fawcett, writing in , he had observed the removal of body hair, including pubic hair about the vulva , as a custom of women from the Hindu Nair caste. In Western societies, removal of female body hair except for head hair, eyelashes and eyebrows has traditionally been considered appropriate when it was visible.

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

Visible pubic hair of women continues to be widely culturally disapproved and considered embarrassing , and so is at times removed. In relation to pubic hair, with the reduction in the size of swimsuits, especially since the coming into fashion and popularity of the bikini since , and the elimination of the skirt on swimsuits, the styling of pubic hair has also come into vogue. A nude crotch is considered by some to be more youthful looking. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Fashion portal Medicine portal. Tips and Tricks for Beginners". Retrieved August 27, How Pubic Hair Became Political". Archived from the original on February 18, Retrieved May 9, A Study of the Female Body. Beauty Therapy 2nd ed. Erotic Review's Bedside Companion: Salons offer a choice of waxing styles for women, including the widely renowned Brazilian or Mohican for those concerned not to reveal a single stray pube in the inciest, winciest beachwear, while The Hollywood denotes the full monty.

Retrieved June 13, Archived from the original on March 12, Retrieved December 30, The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus. A New Edition for a New Era 35th anniversary ed. Archived from the original on October 23, Retrieved December 15, Retrieved 31 December The Girl's Guide to Absolutely Everything.

Guide to Getting It On. An Edgy Encyclopedia of Everything Sexual.

Archived from the original on July 13, Retrieved July 31, Retrieved October 26, Primary Care of Women: Retrieved June 23, Lanugo Androgenic Terminal Vellus. Black Blond Brown varieties: Disappearing blonde gene Fischer—Saller scale Fischer scale Melanocortin 1 receptor. Removal waxing threading plucking chemical electric laser IPL Shaving head leg cream brush soap Razor electric safety straight.

Alopecia areata totalis universalis Male-pattern hair loss Hypertrichosis Management Trichophilia Trichotillomania Pogonophobia. Retrieved from " https:

• The Place-names of Scotland: A First Introduction (Lectures in Scottish History Book 3)
• The Adventure of You
• Best Ways To Build Self-Confidence: Easily discover how to boost your inner strength, overcome fear and develop self-confidence
• Overcoming Lifes Trauma
• Invisible Wings