Mehndi: The Timeless Art of Henna Painting [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I give this debunking in order to counteract what I consider to be the book's biggest weakness: Ms. Roome's tendency towards scented-candle prose. There are some really good designs here, and some downright practical tips; there are dozens of pictures of attractive people (or their hands and feet), modeling various designs and a cursory explanation of the meanings of some traditional motifs. However, the reader has to wade through pages and pages of New-Agey fluff to get to the real gist of the matter: how to make the paste (vague), how to apply the paste (excellent), and how to make traditional designs without prior experience in art or Islamic culture (very good). Somehow, I can't really take seriously an American how-to book, written for Americans, that decrees "meditation or prayer" as an essential step in mixing lump-free henna paste, or an author who goes into ecstatic flights of portentousness over everything from how Indian groceries in New York City excite her to her personal discovery that coins (one of her favorites, she breathlessly relates, is even marked by a cross!) make good guides for drawing small circles. Every small detail of the process is laden with exoticism, complexity, and mystification that's neither authentic nor necessary: while it's a proven fact that henna is more effective at coloring in the presence of gentle heat (like a hair drier) and a mild acid (lemon juice is most commonly used), she specifies tamarind as a mordant, and recommends the use of the smoke rising from incense (of a properly symbolic nature) as a heat source -- apparently, having exhausted the Hindu/Moslem angle, she felt like throwing in a little American Wicca in for good measure.

And why not? Most of the rest of the book is taken up with trying to recast what is clearly a symbol of female oppression as an expression of Goddess- worshipping feminism: she loves to stress that this is a religious art associated with women, who do this to each other, away from men, in communal gatherings, hinting that something more must be going on than a little pampering and gossip. That neither Hindus nor Moslems are noted for coed partying and the most traditional use of mehndi is as an adornment for 14-year-olds about to marry someone they've never met seems to be irrelevant: it's enough for her these are "authentic" women, observing a female-only rite of a religion that isn't Christianity, which quite naturally makes them more truly free and spiritual than we are. Considering that a mehndi job in progress means that you have about as much freedom as a full-body cast, this is like arguing that Billy Graham supports atheism. Why can't she just admit that it's cool to have red filigree rosettes on your palms, and even cooler that you don't have to deal with the cultural baggage to have them?

In sum, this book seems tailor-made for deluxe beauty salons (who might feature mehndi as a service) to put out in their waiting rooms: modishly serious-looking, pretty enough to invite casual browsing, flattering to the (presumably female) reader with its insistance that pampering is spiritually good for you, soothing and clear enough on the process to assuage fears, but vague and mystifying enough to frighten you...not to do it yourself.