She is No Beauty School Drop Out

Our third roommate left last week to head back to her hometown.  She was a Uyghur girl who had come up to the big city to study Uyghur wedding hair and makeup with the hope of opening he own beauty shop.  She ended up finding a school close to our home that specialized in  hair and makeup.  Every day the students would stand outside the school and try to entice women to come in and let them practice on them.  Both my roommate and I grab a friend and went on separate occasions to have our makeup done.  Wow, just getting done up gave me a lot of insight on what a Uyghur bride goes through.    

Traditionally at a wedding the bride is suppose to keep her eyes down and look a little sad at the thought of leaving her family.  I always marveled at the demure look of the girls here,  their shy upwards glances, and their straight faces .  At home the bride is normally smiling from ear to ear, greeting all of their guests in the eye.  Now I know it is not just culture that keep a Uyghur girl form acting this way… it is the ton of makeup that weighs he eye lids down.  

When I went in I told them I was going to a theater performance that night, they all agreed that meant I didn’t need the full out wedding look.  Instead I only got one set of extra long fake eyelashes with several coatings of mascara on them.    I also had scotch tape on my eye lids to help achieve the double eye lid fold – which is crazy since I am westerner and I naturally look like that.  Maybe some of you don’t know the Asian obsession with having a double eye lid.  Many people have surgery done to create this effect of having a small crease above their eyes.  For those who don’t want to go to such drastic measures a small piece of tape can be placed on you upper lid which causes the skin to fold over on itself.  People with my culture background are born with this added skin above the eye.  But even though I have a double lid, my beauty consultant student felt it necessary to accentuate it by sticking two pieces of tape on. The tape had to be covered over with several layers of foundation, eye shadow and glitter.  By the time all the eye makeup had been applied I could bear look up if I wanted to.  My eyes felt so caked and heavy that I had trouble fully enjoying the theater show.  No wonder brides look down, their eyes hurt too much to do anything else. 

In one afternoon I was wearing more makeup that I have cumulatively in my whole life, and they had gone easy on me since I was just to a performance.   No wonder when my roommate look at pictures from my brother’s wedding she asked me if the brides in my country don’t wear makeup.  The idea of a simple, natural look that still even vaguely resembles your original state is unheard of.  

After her classes finished our house began to take on the feel of bridal Barbie’s’ glittering paradise.  She was out daily shopping for wedding dresses (she bought eight or nine of them to rent out), bridesmaid's dresses, tiaras, necklaces, veils, fake flower bouquets, wedding car decoration,  and anything else that sparkled.  The office in our apartment became over run with supper huge hoop skirts- the type that doesn’t even fit through the door way and hair products.   Finally all of it got stuffed into several large bags and dragged to the bus station.  While I miss having my roommate around, I have to admit it is nice not to be finding glitter in sticking to every fiber of the carpets, or bobby pins and fake eye lashes lying abandoned on the coffee table.  

Stuffing the Head Scarf

When I travel down south I tend to wear a head scarf, it is more appropriate and respectful of the culture.  When I use to wear them I always felt like my hair was just too flat to hold it up, I tended to spend the majority of my day readjusting the colorful accessory and in an attempt to keep it from slipping off.   All Uyghur girls put their hair in a big bun on the top of their head and you can see the bump of hair under the scarf.  Uyghur girls have such long, thick, dark black hair that I always just figured it contributed to the seeming large appendage on the back of their head.   My relatively short, thin, plain hair was only be twisted up into a droopy little bun that just couldn’t compare.  Their secret isn’t in their length of their hair, or its thickness … the truth is most Uyghur girls stuff their head scarves.  To get that really full-back of the head-bump under the scarf look,  all you need is the biggest scrunchy known to man,  a hair clip with so much volume and fluff of its own that it rivals the size of a soccer ball.  Now with the popper tools in hand I tool can have the trendy fashionable bulge on the back of my head. 

 

The Desired Look

  

Getting 'How to' Lessons

 

Pulling It Off

 

Bazaar Baldy

The following post was written by one of my travel companions.

“Try to look local", I said as we stumbled off the crowded bus. We had arrived at our destination. The weekly village bazaar. From our hotel we took a long-distance taxi, then walked through the little town to an unmarked stop, jumped on a flat-bed motor taxi to the outskirts of town where we switched to a bus and road several kilometers into the countryside. We knew we were getting close to our destination by the lines of horse carts filled with village farmers on their way to the weekly bazaar. This wasn’t a bazaar as you might think...crocheted doll toilet paper covers and hand painted ‘Welcome to the Lake” signs. This was Central-Asian-style village bazaar. Here we found pavilion after pavilion stocked with everything from hats to socks, horse tack to cooking utensils, grilled kabobs to boiled sheep lung and feet, sweet walnut toffee to fried bread. The small lanes were teeming, shoulder to shoulder with people, ladies in full hijab, farmers in knee high boots and white skull caps, people chatting over a kabob or fried bread. The smell of animals, grill smoke, popcorn, and body odor mingled together with the sounds of merchants hawking their wares, animal noises, the thud of meat being cut on wooden cutting boards and beeping horns of motorcycles. Needless to say, our best attempts to ‘blend in’ with the crowd were a miserable failure. My friends and I were the cause of numerous double takes and more than once I saw a small child start at my boots with his eyes and begin the long crane upward, ending in a wide-eyed, open-mouthed look of surprise at the gigantic foreigner standing before him.

We decided to split up in an attempt to lessen the stares. My classmate and I headed off to see what we could see. Coming around the corner, we found men selling vegetables and behind them, the weekly open-air barber shop. This barber shop consisted of two rows of men, probably farmers on every day except bazaar day, each standing in front of the chair or stool they’d brought with them. Their tools were the aforementioned chair, a piece of drape cloth, a carafe of water, a tin can with lather, a paint brush to apply the lather and a straight-edged razor. Only one style is offered, that being the classic bald look.

As we stood there watching these men skillfully shave their customers heads, beard, and neck I was surprised to hear my buddy say, “Let’s do it!” Wide-eyed I turned to him and agreed. This must be done! “You go first. I’ll take pictures”, I said. As you can imagine there was no small amount of interest taken at the two foreigners plopping down to get a shave. The process started with a vigorous head rub, followed by a lathering, and finished with a shave with the sharpest straight edge I’ve ever seen (or felt). My labors in local language were useless here as almost no one only spoke Uyghur. I was able to answer a few questions in Uyghur as to where we were from, etc., but mostly we commented with nods and smiles. Finally one man, curious as to why I was taking pictures so intently, asked me in broken version of our one common tongue , “Don’t you have barbers in your country?

Soon it was my turn and I took my spot. I have to admit, my barber had both skill and an extremely sharp knife. It was a relatively comfortable shave. In a matter of minutes, I was beautifully bald and with no cuts. Thanking our man, we handed over our money. Total cost? less than $1. Heading back toward the front of the bazaar, we decided the best way to head back into town was horse cart. So, for quarter per person we jumped on for our slow journey back into town.

Red Head

We get a little bored around here without internet to entertain us. I think for that reason more than any other, one of my friends finally talked me into using henna to dye my hair. I have dyed my finger nails several times in good Uyghur fashion, but I had never done my hair. Henna on black hairs gives it the faintest hint of red that reflexes beautifully in the sun light, but on white hair it is a shocking orangery red that looks more like it belongs on a cartoon character.
My normal hair colour is somewhere in the middle and I was always afraid, it could either look good or REALLY bad. One night my roommate and I decided to go for it and dyed our hair together. Our Uyghur teacher even came over to help. She mixed the dye henna powder with strong black tea, an egg, and a little honey and started to slather it on our heads. She then tied a plastic bag on top to keep it from dripping or drying out, and had us wear a head scarf on top of that to keep it warm. We had to sit like this for four hours or so before washing it out.
For the first few days it seemed like a little too intense of a red. But for the next few weeks every time I washed my hair I could see the water turned red and more and more colour came out. Now almost a month later Anne Shirley would be happy to know "it has settled into a real handsome auburn."

A New Look for a New Year

Happy 2009.

In honour of the new year ( actually I think it had more to do with celebrating class being over for the semester than anything else) I decided to go for a new hair do. I have gone to beauty shops around here before, but it is hard to explain what I want exactly, and I always seem to walk away with something a little more Asian funky than I was hoping for. So this time I let one of my classmates have a go at it. She came highly recommended after having cut someone else's hair once. It is a little shorter than I originally intended, but this way I had enough to mail my ponytail to Locks of Love. Oh well, it will grow back (now the only thing is that you will all be able to tell when I am lazy and just use old file photo's on my blog-which trust me I do often since things haven't changed much in the four years I've been here).

All of my Uyghur friends are mourning the loss of my hair, since they place a high value on a woman's long locks... but the rest of the ex-pat community seem to think it is really cute.

Enough about outward appearance, I do hope that 2009 is a year in which we will grow in the important areas of life and that we will continue to walk the walk.

The Baby with All the Hair

My mother has always told me that I was the ugliest baby she ever saw. In fact in her telling of the story even the nurses at the hospital where I was born couldn’t find a single complementary thing to say about me. They never said “Oh she is so cute” or “what a beautiful baby you have.” Instead the nicest thing they could think of was “Oh so you're the mother of the baby with all the hair.”

Me when I was a baby

I found myself using the exact same line the other day in reference to my friend’s baby. Not because she wasn’t an adorable child, but because I was trying to honour my friend, her baby, and their culture. For the Uyghur people, it is very rude to gush over a child and claim how beautiful the baby is. They have a great fear of demons and the evil eye. The belief is that if you compliment a person too much the evil spirits will notice and perhaps attack the person. I wanted to thank my friend for sending me pictures of their child (they had to send the photo over email because a Uyghur woman and her baby are not allowed out of the house for 40 days after the birth). But I didn’t want to scare them into thinking I was casting a curse on their baby… so I settled for the good old comment that had often been made about me "Oh, look at the baby with all the hair."

My friend's child

To us this sounds like a very strange belief… but it is very real in Uyghur culture. My roommate went to visit her friends in the countryside a few months ago. Most of the neighbours had never seen an American and everyone who met her commented on how beautiful she was. The neighbours made such a big fuss about her big blue eyes and her gold hair, that when she got sick the next day they were sure that all the attention had attracted the evil eye. The grandmother of the home then performed a bread ceremony over her to try to rid her of the demons. No one ever seemed to realize that drinking the water straight from their tap might have negative effects on her stomach.

In class the other day my teacher was saying they often lie and call a child ugly just to keep the evil far away. Maybe that is what my mom was doing all along. I wasn’t REALLY ugly; she just said it for my own sake. (haha)

Red Hands

I am getting the urge to dye something again. I remember when my roommates in college would get this same urge, normally it meant it was time for a new hair colour or just a few high lights around the face. However, when Uyghur girls get the urge to dye something it is normally their hands or their fingernails. I must admit I have dyed mine three times and actually kind of enjoy it.

When dying your hands there is only one colour RED. The girls buy henna powder on the street for just pennies a box and then mix it with hot water. The paste can be put on the palms of your hands, soles of your feet, nails and hair. You have likely seen the beautiful designs that they use henna to make in India, unfortunately here the effect isn't quite as decorative. I have asked a number of my friends what the henna symbolizeses. I have read that in strict Islam it is related to fertility. Most of my Uyghur friends have never heard that, they say that there is no meaning, that it is just like makeup to make you beautiful.

Don't you think it is beautiful?

Don't worry it does come off the skin in five to seven days, but will stay on your nails until they grow out. The deepness of the red depends on how long you leave it on. Most times I make up the mast, apply to my nails, wrap each nail in a little bag and than sleep like that for the night. When I get up in the morning my nails are a dark blood red. The first few days are a little scary because I often forget that my skin is dyed and when I look down it looks like I am bleeding. I have to keep reminding myself how beautiful I look to my local friends.





I will follow this local makeup tip, to try to fit in, but I think It will be a long time before I go out and buy the plant they use to get the unibrow look (which is also considered very beautiful by people who live in villages).