The new fad in town is the cosmetologist’s way of making a paragon of beauty out of a hag.
That is a problem on its own because that act alone is both a deception and an act of corruption. We will come back to that fact later. For now, the larger picture I see is that second colonisation from the West (plus the East now) has come into the Black world through body fillers they now apply to ebony-black ladies’ faces to turn them white.
At weddings and birthdays especially, ladies’ facial outlays are changed through these body fillers that husband now mistakes his own wife for someone else, while most weaning tots hungry for breast sucking run away from their mothers when offered the human milk, because the artificial faces offering them some breasts to suck, do not fit into their mental pictures of the mums they know from birth.
In case you haven’t observed closely, as I had done, look at the lady you normally know by her mushroom-patterned nose, suddenly turned European with an artificial narrow, long nose she carries at society events – courtesy of colonial- commissioned agents, otherwise referred to as cosmetologists.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as fun but it goes beyond that: like or loathe it, this new fad is now at the core of current rifts between relations and friends.
Let me tell of an experience I had with an area aunty a few months back. We were at a social function recently invited separately by two different friends but I never realised my aunty was the lady seated two chairs away from me. I greeted her no doubt but not as chummily as I would have, if her facial contour had not be re-configured from the usual or natural.
When a few days later I saw her in the neighbourhood where we all grew together and I warmed up to her, she responded so coldly in a manner suggestive of a kid whose fairy tale world had collapsed.
“Why are you now greeting me when you were so casual in your salutation the other day at ‘so-so-and-so’ party”, she snapped, and I had to take recourse to swearing by the names of our forebears as witnesses, to convince her I didn’t know she was the fairy-world lady that sat two chairs away from me the other day.
Or, the case of a man who went to grab and peck a lady she thought was his best friend’s wife at a party, only to realise the lady didn’t know her from Adam. The result? After apologising to the lady for mistaken identity, his wife who was watching the drama within earshot, picked offence at her husband’s overzealousness and I’m told that there’s an unending rumble in the home of that couple now.
Or, take the case of another man who drove all the way from Yaba to Dolphin Estate in Ikoyi to visit a ‘smashing’ lady she had toasted at a party at Ikoyi a day earlier. I’m told the man almost fainted when his car pulled up in front of the lady’s house and was received by someone he could swear he had never met before. “I’m asking of so, so and so person”, said the man; to which the lady replied: “yes, I am” and an interesting scene began. “No, you are not”, the man countered, adding that he remembered the lady even spoke to him a while ago on the phone while asking for direction to her house, apparently to convince the lady he knew who he had come for.
The drama got a life of its own when the man insisted on phoning the lady of his dream again, to double-check, only for the phone to ring in the palm of the lady standing before him. The man’s guard fell because the lady standing before him had apparently washed off the beauty that fascinated the man the day before. The man was no longer amused, and in order to dismiss himself from the lady’s presence, sold her a lie: “let me see a friend nearby, I will be right back”, before zooming off from the lady’s presence. It was the shock of his life!
As things are now with these body fillers that reshape and redesign ugly women to suddenly become enhanced in beauty or a naturally endowed lady become wonderland’s paragon of beauty, it won’t be long before dirty slaps and exchange of fiery fisticuffs between respectable and otherwise restrained gentlemen and ladies become the order of the day at parties and other social functions – all in the name of get-more-beautiful fad in town!
This reminds me of a life incident that occurred in a city in far-away Asia not too long ago between a hitherto love-birds’ couple, which ultimately ended up in divorce.
The rich man, who was a comfortable executive in a car manufacturing company in Seoul, doted on his “pretty” lady so much that he had promised her an extraordinary gift whenever she delivered his baby. The wife had looked forward to this promise until the baby arrived, only for everything to go awry. ” I bet my child, begotten by my pretty wife, can’t be this ugly when I’m myself handsome”, the man thundered, on seeing the baby in her hospital cot.
An argument ensued as the wife and those tending her and her baby, swore the baby was from his wife’s womb and quickly ordered a DNA test which confirmed the paternity of the baby. The man slumped and the question that burst from him, when revived, was: “how can a beautiful lady and a handsome me, beget this ugly tiny tot ?”
The answer came in a manner as if the man had been hit by a thunderbolt: his baby is truly from his wife who had previously undergone plastic surgery to assume an artificial beautiful face – and that was before the couple met.
Blimey! you can bleach, you can put in all the body fillers in the world or even get under the surgeon’s scalpel to enhance your beauty but, you can’t change your genes !
When we were growing up, we used to know of “onidiris” whose plaiting prowess would take a beating on the world stage or the “lali” and other cosmetic implements queens, princesses and other girls or ladies of the time used to attract attention to themselves; but they never disfigured them as we witness these days.
Let me end by warning that if ladies don’t retrace their steps on this issue, before long the after-effect may be too devastating for comfort. Let them ask those who relished in bleaching down to their arses to attract men but who have ended up losing their self-confidence and esteem because they have unwittingly bleached off their human essence; the very reason Yoruba people derisively call bleached Christian ladies “adie otio”, and who now wrap up their charred, disgusting necks with scarfs, as cover up, in searing weather, as if they are now muslim hadjias whose religion permit that manner of dressing.