Playing dress-up

I went to the Mayotte M'Gombani Fashion Salon today, as you can probably see from the photos. Different creators were holding stands with their various wares: trousers and tops, colourful dresses, earrings, necklaces, oven mitts (rather the odd one out), one stand of local food and one of beauty products.

Beauty products here are henna and m'dzindzano. Henna is used to decorate girls' hands and to dye hair, and m'dzindzano is the local beauty mask. It's made of sandalwood ground up on a coral stone, mixed with a little water and applied in circles to girls' faces. It's used to firm the skin and to protect it from the sun, it's white or yellow (depending on the dose of sandalwood) and gives a rather fixed expression.

Near the end, a lady seller suddenly jumped out at me and started selling like mad. Before I knew it, she'd told me to put my stuff down, lift my arms up and pulled a salouva over my head. Which she then proceeded to knot, and gave me a mirror. Then she got the kishali out (headscarf). She showed me how to drape it artistically over my shoulders, then knotted it around my hair, pulling down rather hard actually. This was the result. I can knot the salouva on my own, but I have to work out the turban-knotting, so I kept it like that and drove home dressed as a Bouéni (Mayotte woman). Got some rather interested stares on the way, as well.