DUBAI -- Every time my mother comes to see me in Dubai, we have a big argument about how I look! She wants me to have lighter hair, dye my eyebrows and generally look more like a fashionable Iranian girl. But the garish makeup and dyed blond hair of Iranian girls look so false! My mother feels annoyed, whenever we bump into some fellow Iranians in Dubai. She wants me to use bolder lipstick and have more highlights in my hair. In my old photos of 10 years ago, taken when I was still living in Iran, I look more like my people. I had lighter hair and eyebrows. I remember clearly when I was in solitary confinement in Iran back in 1999 (due to a controversial article I was working on about the prostitution in the holy city of Qom for my [at the time] leading reformist newspaper Zan). As I whiled away the time in my cell, I couldn't stand the hair on my upper lip. I soon came up with the solution. I ripped a cotton thread from my prison pajamas and used it to remove the offending hair, while employing the base of my small metal food bowl as a mirror. When the female guards saw me, they gasped in disbelief and wondered how I'd done it. They also wondered why I was so concerned about how I looked when my life was under serious threat. After three months behind bars, I was released and went home. After a hot shower, my mother drove me immediately to a beauty salon for a complete makeover. She didn't want our friends and relatives to know how dreadful I'd looked after emerging from prison. Thanks mama! Iranian women today are having a love affair with makeup and cosmetic surgery. Iran is called the ‘capital of nose surgery'. Some girls have two to three times nose jobs, not to mention cosmetic surgeries to their cheeks and breasts, as well as liposuction. Eyebrow, lip and eyeliner tattoos are also proving very popular. Everyone from the cleaning lady up to the woman TV presenter tattoos their eyebrows and has a nose job, depending on their budget. Buttocks are also a target for cosmetic surgery. Sometimes the operation goes wrong and the courts are full of cases filed against bogus dermatologists and plastic surgeons. I now consider myself to be a New Yorker. As such, people always want me to look better than my fellow Iranians, if we are invited to an Iranian reception in Dubai or the US. As for my American girlfriends, busy working women in New York City, they haven't got time for a makeover, so you see them on the train on the way to the office every morning, mascara in one hand and mirror in the other, fixing their looks. No-one really has the time to spend an hour making up properly, so how do the Iranian women do it?! Whenever I see my sweet 12-year-old niece, she always tries to persuade me to dye my brunette hair blond. Blond Iranian girls are all over the place …quot; in the shopping centres of Dubai, downtown Tehran, Yazd, Esfahan, everywhere. I must admit that the Iranian girls I see in the shopping centres in Dubai have done a very good job and do look very pretty. My best childhood friend, who has a BA in law, is training to become a professional beauty consultant, because the demand is so much higher than for female lawyers in Iran! Beauty clinics, hair salons and cosmetic shops are all doing very well in Tehran. Some girls spend at least 40 minutes every morning making themselves up, before stepping out of the house. After 10 years away from Iran, I can understand why my people want to look so beautiful. Queen Farah Diba, one of the most elegant and best-dressed women in the world, inspired Iranian revolutionary to look beyond their shapeless black chadors. Thirty years after the Revolution, for women no longer forced to wear black veils (except in particular places), beauty has become a new weapon against the ruling system. Admittedly, they can only expose their faces, so they make them as beautiful as is possible. Tattoos on eyelids and eyebrows and lip liners might seem very strange to many readers, but it gives an Iranian woman great delight when the religious police, all carrying guns, approach her in the street and order to remove her makeup, but she refuses. She can't remove permanent tattoos and the police can't peel them off; nor can you be arrested (yet) for tattoos in Iran, where the battle for beauty rages between women and the regime. I told my niece that next time I go to the US, I'll pick up a bright blond wig for myself. She was delighted and asked for one too. Entekhabifard is an Iranian journalist based in Dubai. She is a regular contributor to The print and online editions of The Egyptian Gazette.
