(This post is among a series of post chronicling my experiences during our recent trip to Pakistan last December.)
So, after all the wedding preparations and the pre-wedding parties, there was one thing I was desperate to do. I needed to go buy some makeup! Somehow in my crazy-packing-list-making frenzy of the weeks before our trip to Pakistan last December, my makeup bag didn't end up in our luggage. I noticed it the very first day but didn't think much of it because I don't wear any makeup usually.
But then came those pesky wedding functions and I suddenly remembered my missing makeup bag. Or, everyone around me noticed it. All the ladies of the family were agast that I would even consider going to these wedding functions without makeup on. It just isn't done. And they wouldn't allow it. A daughter-in-law is a reflection on her in-laws. If she's not wearing enough jewelry / nice clothes / good makeup, it means her family isn't good enough to provide these things for me. And my in-laws want to make sure I look nice at these functions, so they did my makeup FOR me. Well, a few of the younger girl cousins of M's did my makeup.
I'm not going to say they did a bad job. They didn't - I actually got a lot of compliments. But the compliments were that I looked like "one of the great Asian beauties!" Which sounds nice until you realize that I'm not Asian - I'm mostly Irish. Those are two very different things, and to make one look like the other might look or feel strange. My own mother, never one to mince words, said that neither she nor my father recognized me from the picture. (She may or may not have mentioned the word transvestite. As in, "I thought it was a picture of one of those transvestites you're always taking pictures of!")
So regardless of the compliments, after two evenings being made up by M's cousins, I wanted a crack at it myself. Also, as a non-makeup wearer, when I DO wear makeup, I tend to go for a more natural look, and after two nights of heavy makeup, my skin was begging me to go easy. While these lovely ladies were willing to lend me all their makeup, but no one had any shade of foundation that didn't make me look like I'd just been spray-tanned. So M took me shopping!
We went to a store called Naheed. We'd been there before the last time we went to Pakistan in December 2007. That's when I'd run out of baby food and someone told us we could find imported jars of baby food there. I was a bit disappointed with their baby food section at the time, and the prices were steeper than I'd expected - even more expensive that in America. But I'd never seen such a huge selection of "western" products, and the shopping experience is very much American-style. There's shopping carts and friendly (well, almost) people working there in uniform, and even several cash registers with conveyor belts. This is very different than the usual way of buying groceries - standing outside a stall, rattling off a list to a store owner who then goes and fills your order without you ever handling a box. I prefer the former.
When we got there, we walked around the first floor - where the food is sold - checking things out and picking up a few items. I briefly walked past the baby food section and saw that it was bigger than it had been last time, but since my baby is now over 3, I had no use for it. (But I, of course, took lots of pictures for you all, too!)
Then we headed upstairs, where all the health & beauty items are sold. There, the shopping experience got decidedly less American-feeling. I walked around the makeup displays browsing. They had mostly Maybelline and L'Oreal, (which are drugstore or cheaper brands here. Also, in America, you can manhandle the items all you want and sometimes they even have a tester available to see if the shade matches your skin. Here they had a tester too, but they also had a GUARD there. Each little makeup booth had a woman - a Naheed employee - standing guard over the cosmetics. I had to ask her to let me try the foundation (the very lightest shade they make. I am truly a gori gori.) Then, after we'd determined that it matched, she wouldn't even hand me the makeup. She took it over to the cash register where I could retrieve it after I'd paid for it. Then, when bought, the foundation was put in its own bag and sealed with a cable-tie so that nothing else could be put inside that bag and shoplifted. Very tight security for drugstore makeup, I thought! But the joke was on me, I guess, because I'd expected to pay like $5-7 for this "drugstore" brand of makeup but it ended up costing three times that amount!
I did my own makeup that night for the actual wedding ceremony - the Nikah. I felt a lot better about my face too. Well, until everyone started voicing their discontent that I "wasn't wearing ANY makeup!" and that I should have let M's cousins do it again. Well, I liked it at least.
AND no one compared me to a transvestite, which is really the most important thing, isn't it?
The street that the store is on, Naheed Market is the large 5-storied building on the left. I think they have other locations around Karachi too, but this is the one we went to in a part of town called Bahadurabad.
The store, after parking across the street.
Inside, you can see it looks very much like an American grocery store.
Here is the lineup of cash registers - about 4 or 5 of them, I think. And customers making orderly lines, which felt like a small miracle in Pakistan. I'd assumed it was a completely line-less country before witnessing this.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that they'd expanded their baby selections. This section used to be half its size, although I didn't go any closer to see if there was increased variety or not.
On the way upstairs, we saw they were even selling flat-screen plasma & LCD TVs.
Upstairs, in the beauty section, they had a wide variety of shampoos and conditioners that my hair is used to.
The 2nd floor, where all the beauty and health products are sold. I even bought some Flintstones vitamins for the baby at the back counter. They were like, $17 for a bottle or something...
I think this was where I bought the foundation from.
Right across the street from Naheed, we saw these women. They're wearing very "common" clothes and one's carrying a 20 lb. bag of rice on her head. Maybe they've never been in the "high-end" store they just crossed. M said that there are families who survive on less per month than the cost of my one bottle of makeup. Pakistan can be a place of very obvious disparity sometimes.
