LA: Mm-hmm.
ZH: But as we see, even though this was thousands of years ago, kohl is still used in very similar ways across cultures.
LA: After the break, Zahra takes us from Egypt to Japan where she spent time with a geisha, a hostess at a tea house in Kyoto and whose use of eyeliner is essential to her work.
ZH: I went to Japan a few years ago and spent some time in Kyoto and actually, and I don’t know if this was just from complete naivety from my perspective, but I was actually, like, surprised to see that geishas were more than, to put it in li- I guess, like, very, um, basic terms, more than a tourist attraction in some senses.
LA: You spent some time with geishas and their beauty rituals and use of eyeliner. Tell me a little bit about that.
ZH: It’s quite a fascinating, I think, segment of cultural history in Japan. Especially because they’re highly, I think, misunderstood in the West, um, as they’ve been popularized in the West. And I was very curious about the meaning of the aesthetic and, um, their roles as geisha and what they’re like both in and out of their makeup and their costumes or their outfits. And I spent and, um, some time with a millennial geisha and it was actually a wonderful experience because she’s just like, she’s just like me, really. That she was just- she would just tell me, “This is my job.” You know, and-
LA: Right.
ZH: It’s a job like any other and of course, yes, the aesthetic is very important and it carries profound meaning for her that the process of beautification was multi faceted, um, and it helped her gain confidence. Um, it also he- she used it at times as a mask be- because she had, um, you know, bad skin when was she was growing up. But the one thing that she found that she could always rely on was her eyeliner because it was, it would draw attention to her eyes.
The role that eyeliner played, um, or at least the, sort of the- the decoration or the adornment of the eyes have played historically, is that there was a use of red pigment around the eyes to protect the body from evil spirits. To protect the eyes from evil spirits. The geisha aesthetic, even though there are fewer geisha today, the- it’s highly valued and respected and- and really adored, especially in Kyoto. So that was a really, that was a wonderful travel experience.
