Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

What a Charming Face!

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What a Charming Face!

As her face was covered with thick makeup, she was batting her eyes as a bride. Her stylish dress, eye-catching tights, high-heeled shoes and decorative bag would make you give in to temptation and cast a look. She was born neither in London nor in Washington but here in the war-torn city of Kabul – where a burqa was must for girls and women about 13 years ago. Moreover, she was not going to a fashion show, but, perhaps, for shopping. Since I was grown in a village, wherein the girls were dressing traditionally and revealing their bare faces, the latest fashions and updates styles are jaw-dropping for me.

I don’t purse my lips, but recall my village’s simple girls and their miserable life. The images of hungry children crying for a morsel of bread, the female teenagers wearing red shawls and patched dresses, the pale and nervous mothers and the sweaty fathers with blistered hands flash my mind. Being occupied with such thoughts, I put the images of the stylish girl and my village’s girl side by side. I resist my tears. A lot of questions arise in my mind, but all of them seem unanswerable to me. Only few minutes later, I see a woman on the corner of street wearing a burqa and taking a female baby on her bosom. She is groaning and imploring the passersby for a coin. This scene adds insult to my injury. What if the stylish girl comes out without makeup and gives the money of her make-ups to the poor woman? In other words, generosity is an inner beauty but makeup is an outer one, what if the fashionable and rich girls change their outer beauty into inner one?

Perhaps, because they want to be seen by the people and inner beauty is not visible. Therefore, their fake beauty is far more significant for them than a hungry stomach. Although, it is written in our school books that members of a society are akin to organs in a body, when an organ aches, the whole body is restless. Ill-fatedly, this moral advice is no more practiced in our society.

Why most women and girls feel that they have to wear make-up to look beautiful? There are many reasons why women and girls feel this way. Women and girls are told that every day by advertisements that show beautiful women wearing make-up. Wherever women and girls go, they see these pictures and begin believing they too need to wear make-up to be beautiful. Women and girls need to start believing in themselves and that they are beautiful as they are.

Did you know that only four percent of women and girls think that they are beautiful? This makes it easy for people who sell make-up. People who sell make up use advertisements that tell women and girls that make up will make them look much younger and more beautiful. Women and girls are constantly told that using make up will change their looks and it will make them more beautiful. Many women and girls want to change their looks, since so many women and girls don’t feel good about themselves. They believe that advertisements and wearing make-up makes them feel better about themselves. Everywhere you go you will notice that there are advertisements of “beautiful” women wearing make-up. These women in the advertisement look very happy and are usually having fun. If the women and girls will be happier, they are told they have to look like the women that are in the advertisement. Sometimes, women and girls might have scars on their face and they might feel that they look ugly. They think that they might look better with make-up on. When a woman or a girl has a date, they will put on make-up because they think that their date will like them better. Lots and lots of women and girls will have pimples and they think it looks ugly and they might put on a lot of make-up. Advertisements make us believe that covering up our selves makes us look better.

But, how do girls feel about seeing all these advertisements and things in media? Again that there are only four percent of woman and girls think that they are beautiful. When women and girls see other women or girls who they think are very pretty, they want to look like them. There is a video which shows a woman model and lot of people putting a lot makeup on her. After she finished putting makeup, they took a picture and fixed her face with the computer. She looked like a normal person when she started, but when she left, she didn’t look like the same person anymore, and she didn’t even look real! So if magazines, for example, show the women and girls that are not real like the make-up on the models, it is not fair because women and girls see models that are not real. But since it’s fake, they can never look like that and it’s just wasting their money for the make-up.

Now, how can we change this idea of wearing make up? Companies should change these ideas. They should not display fake faces but the people that look like everyday people and not models with lots of make-up. They don’t have to use supermodels and the computer to fix real people and to make them look like models. The companies are supposed to make the girls feel more confident about their looks as they don’t need make-up to be beautiful.

Hujjatullah Zia is the newly emerging writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at outlookafghanistan@gmail.com

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