This afternoon, I took a beauty-making trip to the salon to get my hair dyed with henna. For some inexplicable reason, I have had the urge to dye my hair in a bright-hot shade of red for months now. It started with an innocent trip to Superdrug in Edinburgh, on a whim meant to make my boyfriend cringe in disapproval. As we walked down the aisle of chemical-packed colours with names like “Egyptian Bronze” and “Honeysuckle Tan,” I gravitated to the electric-shock, neon-orange varieties of a colour called “ginger” in British-English (we Americans would just say “red”). But in the end, as usual, my pragmatic, holistic-thinking mind decided to save my scalp from ingredients like 4-ParaPhenyleneDiamine and C6H8N2. Generally, I try not to put things into my body whose names look like airline ticket confirmation codes.

So when I arrived in Bangladesh, it occurred to me that henna must be the answer! I had seen its affects on our wise old grandfather-like driver, Aziz: shots of bright color streaked through his dark brown hair. Surely, I reasoned, henna must be the magic bullet for overzealously coloured hair!

So I walked into the salon today, comforted by the unusual dominance of ladies: three surrounded the cash register, while their mothers and older sisters casually painted fingernails, trimmed toes, and plucked eyebrows with concentration and precision while idle copies of Cosmopolitan and Vogue lay discarded on the tables. I picked one up. The atmosphere of a women’s beauty salon, always familiar the world over, gave me a certain comfort in the rough world a Bangla-land. Not to mention, supporting a business in which women did all of the taking and making of money felt summarily pleasant. (more…)