Beauty products (or are they cosmetics?) are supposed to enhance a woman’s beauty. However, sometimes things backfire at the dressing table, leaving the user looking like a scarecrow, cartoon or Christmas tree! Keen observers will tell you this seems to be the trend in Kenya, especially among young girls.
This state of affairs is quite confounding to most of us who were born and brought up in the village. Most girls today only retain their identity on their identification documents. But the holder of the document rarely resembles the bearer of the same. Modern girls are now masters of heavy make-up.
In days gone by, a small scoop of petroleum jelly is all you needed to keep your game on point on a Sunday afternoon in the village. Today, a girl going on a date resembles a pre-school children’s storybook. She is a walking billboard of a clash of colors.
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While I may not pass myself off as a seasoned fashionista without being ‘outed’, I certainly do not expect that wearing white-framed geek spectacles with purple lipstick is the way to go. Girls, if your grandmother cannot pick you out in matatu queue during rush hour due to the ornamental nature of your attire, then something is amiss.
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Girls, you cannot simply ape what you saw in a 50 Cent music video and turn up in school, church, or at a wedding thinking you look cool. No way. That ‘face painting’, heavy make-up, and skimpy dress code in music videos is just for that; music videos. Differently put, it’s the attire to get that job done, very much the same way butchers have white overalls and parking attendants have yellow ones.
The same applies to nail polish or whatever thing you paint on your fingers. How can you have 10 fingers and all of them are sporting different colors? Girl, what are your fingers for? A color palette at a paint shop? Let me give you free advice, dear sisters, please go easy on the make-up because the day you will want to fly out of the country, you will not get past an immigration desk. Do you think I’m joking? I kid you not. There is a reason they always say you must present a recent passport photograph of yourself.
They do not want to ponder over how much you have grown since they last saw you. They don’t know you and they don’t care. All they want is to have the most recent appearance, for this is how you would look when you present yourself at an embassy or at immigration.
If you go looking like a tie and dye shirt, you may have a problem. Look, if your skin tone is light or chocolate on your face, but upon convincing you to shed your clothes for a quick steamy session, I find that your back and stomach resemble the underbellies of gorillas in Rwanda, we will have problems sustaining the steam, I’m afraid.
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Ladies, when you paste layer after layer of powder on your face as if you intend to put up an apartment on your nose under the guise of ‘foundation’, you are mistaken. If the ‘foundation’ applied on your face is so much to the extent that it significantly alters your look in a manner that your grandfather would have to wear his lens like specs to single you out in a family portrait, girl, those are not cosmetics, that is a disguise!
