Bollywood Beauty and Friday Beatbox

Ever wake up and think "This is just the kind of day to rub soot in my eyes!" Once again, I have a feeling these whacky new-age ideas only occur to me.

In a quest to add some extra special goodies to my ebay venture, I have started putting together Bollywood Beauty Bags, each of which contains a bindi, a vial of arabic oudh perfume, and box of incense and maybe kajal, the super dark traditional kind that I use. But I thought I could give myself an edge my making the kajal myself, the old-fashioned way!

So here's what I did. I made an oil lamp from a clay pot with a cotton wick poking over one side and filled it with olive oil. Next, I balanced a metal plate over the flame with the help of two empty jars, and let the flame and the oil do the rest. I left out a whole bunch of steps, like soaking the cotton in a special blend of herbs and juices and drying it, soaking it, drying it over the course of a day. But so what! Details, details.

An hour or so later and I got bored of waiting. A nice bunch of black stuff had collected on the steel plate. Once it cooled, I added a few drop of olive oil and mixed it up into a paste. It was promisingly black, and I did what any normal person would do. I applied this to the inside of my lower lids.

Well you can imagine the results. My eyeballs didn't rot and fall out, but they were pretty pissed with me, and considering I have a day job to concentrate on, partial blindness because of oil and soot in your eyes was not going to go down as an excuse.

This leads me to believe:

1. All these people posting home-made kajal recipes online have never actually tried them


2. Not everything our grannies did was a good idea


3. Some things are best left to a professional

To celebrate my stupidity and the fact that it's Friday, here's a collection of songs that mention kajal:


Referred to here as kajra (and has a really filthy sounding screen-grab which I apologise for):




And here. I painted my eyes with the kajal of your love, this kajal drove my insane (ie. your love)
I sacrifice myself to you
The world is after me,
But I'm after you
Make me yours
I sacrifice myself to you



In my eyes there is kajal, in that kajal is my heart (hopefully not itching profusely from home-made kajal)



The kajal of my doom is in your eyes, the redness of my ruin is on your lips. Yeah. Guys say that to me all the time.



Paint your eyes with kajal darling. Featuring my favourite actress, also called Kajal. And containing about 2000 reasons to be glad the 90s are over in Bollywood world.

These eyes, this kajal, this hair, this scarf, you are a beautiful sonnet. Sorry, but you'll have to try harder than that when you're a troll seducing a sari-clad babe.


You'll notice most of the songs pining after a woman's smokey eyes are from back in the day. Presumably this means men of today have discovered other more entertaining aspects in a woman than her eyes. Which is a shame. It must have been nice to floor a man with one look of your smoky eyes.


Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjANS-n8Nl6kyYA6XLLNxAVGgsIn0HczwQ_dmFHePnPdv0Pm6T6V2TuYiOuCpMqkoQae4gBwdAlRvEGbibzXxXNQ9DjF0e2KmVCl9CutK7vbpe8I3fITyrIKEv0vxJI0dcTHTqjTA/s400/Rani+Mukerji-2.jpg