Bouéni Jolie

You often see girls and women here with m’zindzano on their faces. It’s a beauty mask made from sandalwood ground on a pure coral table, mixed with a little water. The table is made of one piece of coral, and often weighs 3 or 4 kilograms. It is the fine grain of the coral which makes the sandalwood powder fine and fluid, but they also use dried leaves and flowers, especially myongo, a stick which comes out of the central stalk of a palm leaf. It is applied either directly with the fingers, or with a corn ear whose kernels have been taken away, which is used as a sponge. It’s designed to protect their faces from the sun and the mosquitoes as well as to smooth and firm the skin by taking the impurities away from the skin’s surface. It is also supposed to smell nice.

My guide book tells me that only married women can wear the m’zindzano. Lots of different decorations can be made with this paste: suns, moons, stars, flowers, geometrical shapes… on the forehead and cheeks. There are several types of mask: the daily mask, the skincare mask and the ceremonial mask. In each case, the natural products used to make them are either gathered fresh or bought in powder form.

The daily masks

M’zindzano is a white mask, made of light sandalwood. This wood grows fairly freely in Mayotte, but the bouénis (women) guard the growing places very carefully and pass the secret down from mother to daughter. Which is why many women buy sandalwood chunks imported from Madagascar.

M’zindzano wa dzindzano is a yellow mask, obtained by adding curcuma or grated “country-saffron” (dzindzano), and m’zindzano m’koundru is a red mask, made from red sandalwood. It’s more of a cosmetic mask for women, but it can provoke allergies.

The skincare masks

Matra ya puinzi is made with sesame oil and is used against ageing and wrinkles. M’djanfar is a sandalwood-like wood, whose heart is recommended against migraines. Muté gets rid of little brown marks on the skin, avocado stones are used to lighten the skin and malandi is a kaolin-like white clay substance which is also supposed to lighten the skin.

The ceremonial masks

M’zindzano wa zukuba is made from mixed dried plants, squashed with a pestle and mortar, which gives a greyish-brown thick creamy mask, obviously supposed to smell very nice as “its fragrance seems destined to seduce”. Indeed. It is a mask for important days, not used for daily pottering. Zuzuka is another mixture of dried plants such as jasmine, basilic, roses and ylang-ylang among others. It can also be massaged onto the body to clean and lighten the skin. In traditional weddings, the husband and wife are both massaged with a zuzuka preparation every other day before the wedding day.

These masks are made for important moments such as weddings or dances, and are associated with jewellery, generally gold here (which suits the girls very well) and drawings made of henna on their hands. Many of my students come in with henna drawings, then complain that they can’t write with it on their hands and that it won’t wash off. I threatened to wash it off myself last time, and the girl suddenly found out that she could actually write with it on after all.

Postcard photos by local photographer Bruno de Villeneuve