The Emirati women love to get their hands and feet painted with henna, a dark ink/ paint. Good henna fades slowly and lasts about 4 weeks. There are modern (flowers) and traditional ( lines) designs. Salama my secondary teacher has just had her hands painted again in this modern design of flowers. At Ramadan when families visit each other or stay in one house usually all the sisters get someone in to paint on the henna or paint each other. As its getting hot the Emirati people tend to stay inside as we would do in the winter, therefore they do inside type activities.... Salama had a Sudanese woman come to her house and paint on her designs, that weave almost up to her elbows. The designs are almost symetrical mirroring one hand onto the other. Definitely an art form
It's funny really. Salama is fascinated with my fascination of these customs. Today as I admired her hands, her comment was, "do you want to take another photo"? I'd admired her designs and photographed her hands just after Ramadan.
2 comments:
I wonder if doing the dishes or weeding the garden or cleaning the windows or cooking the dinner would withstand this kind of art? Still Western women do paint their fingernails, colour up their lips, and paint their faces. Ah fashion.
Amazingly intricate. How long would it take for her hands to have been painted?
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