Some people in America pays for expensive surgeries to get a more beautifull physical appearance but well... Some of our fellow African sisters goes throught some hudge physical pain (appart from the braiding) to achieve that goal.
This video is about Marième, who were obsessed with getting her gums tattooed because she wanted and more beautifull smile. It hurts a lot and then she cries so much that instead of getting seven layers tattoed, she stops at four. It's just crazy the number of things a woman can do in the name of beauty. The link to the video of the tattoing is just under the picture.
Some standards are just way beyond the physical abilities. For example in some parts of Ethiopia, women excised the two lower front teeth to insert a disc into their pierced lip, a disc that would considerably stretch the lip. Sometimes it's all the four front teeth that are excised.
Still in Ethiopia, in the Omo's valley, the Dassanech men wears a lot of scarifications like this, which indicates that he have killed a lot of men during battles. Those distictive scars are the result of ash rubbed into their wounds.
The Padaung women who live between the mountains of Burma and Thailand, wear ring on their neck. I've seen in a documentary that what we think to be so many rings is actually only one, tied all around the neck, and with the years, they're changed and replaced with longer one. The ring is applied for the first time at the age of 5, and then gradually changed to longer one by the time the girl is growing up and getting old. That thing presses the clavicle and the rib cage, and elongate the neck. One thing for sure is that they should and would never take it off because they definitely won't survive with the state of their neck.
I don't know which country this scared faced is precisely from, but I've seen Uganda and Sudan so far. Probably the both of them. This woman is called a Nuer woman, and carries traditionnal scars. This is the kind if scars that will follow you for the rest of your life. Of course it's traditionnal but sometimes for someone who decides to let the village and go overseas to study or to pursue a dream, no one around would see you as a normal being because of all these scars of your face. It has a story... Probably a sad one because the person have no control over his body, because it's owned by the tradition. You can eather be proud of it, or extremely uncomfortable with it and wish to have known your face without all of this. It probably have been extremely painfull to do that...
West African men also have some scars on their face, but more on the cheeks. I'm sure back in Africa you have seen a lot of men with these scars all over their face or on their cheeks. I personnally did in my childhood and I actually never really paid attention. For me they were born with it because they were from a different tribe than me.
It's hard to find nowadays people who'll accept to carry on their bodies their tradionnal legacy because of the effects it will have on their lives and their future. But still.. I think this is what makes the beauty of the different cultures and the differences between who decide to go through the pain in the name of beauty standards and who live it without having a word to say about it.
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