A press release arrives on my desk. It announces Dr Martha Tilaar, the founder of the Martha Tilaar cosmetic company in Indonesia, will be in Hong Kong during the Cidesco (Comite International d'Esthetique et de Cosmetologie) exhibition. It describes how Dr Tilaar has 6,000 employees, and how her current beauty philosophy is based on the human life cycle. It also outlines her 'Seven M' strategy - Man, Management, Materials, Machines, Method, Money and Marketing - and how her success secured her a personal invitation from Kofi Annan to attend a global conference in New York.
What is good enough for the Secretary General of the United Nations is surely good enough for this magazine, so I met Dr Tilaar - or, as I was advised to call her, Ibu Martha (ibu means 'Mrs' in Indonesian and is also the polite way to address a woman) - at her booth at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. Such was the crowd milling around, trying to catch her attention (and also, I suspect, attracted by the statuesque woman being body-painted in the corner), we decided to extract ourselves from the throng and retire to her hotel. As we left, several groups of women bobbed and smiled at Tilaar: alumni, as it turned out, of her beauty school in Jakarta.
Tilaar is a gracious lady of 63, firm of opinion - while I was showing her the beauties of Victoria Harbour she looked at the window and announced, 'This is not clean - if it's clean it's better' - but strangely sheltered of outlook. She doesn't blush discussing female problems in fine detail, but her grasp of the social aspirations of 21st-century women is somewhat narrow: if you crossed Jane Austen with Estee Lauder and threw in a gynaecologist, you might well end up with Tilaar.
This was brought home to me in a discussion we had about Tilaar's latest cosmetic range, the Jamu Garden (alas, not yet available in Hong Kong - and as she winningly told me,'You have to help me make it popular').
'There are six beauty treatments for the six stages of life,' said Tilaar. 'Baby, teenager, pre-married, married, post-natal and menopausal.' I considered this, and then asked where she slotted in a single woman, who hadn't found Mr Right but wasn't a teenager. 'Good question,' she replied after a minute's thought. 'Pre-married.'
Her Hong Kong PR, who was also in the room, asked gamely where she would place a nun in this aesthetic hierarchy and Tilaar replied swiftly, 'Menopausal. Usually if a woman is not married but lives with her boyfriend, it's the married treatment. Most Americans and Europeans live together like this.' And a lesbian? Whereupon Tilaar was struck so speechless her marketing director, sitting nearby, was compelled to jump in and say, 'It's also to do with the condition of the skin and the body.'