mehandi

I just recently found my old tubes of pre-mixed henna that I had bought in India a few years ago. My family hails from Kolkata so I always remember my mother tinting her hair with it when I was younger & letting me use the rest to give myself "tattoos". She used to have to mix it from boxes of the dry powder and tell us how when she was younger, they actually could just find the leaves & crush them themselves. Now, we've got it in tubes & all you have to do is snip the bottom off to pipe it on :)


my mehandi book & the tubes of pre-mixed henna


multilingual instructions!
good points include: adding lemon to keep the henna moist, NOT washing off the crusties with water & if it's convenient, covering it with some plastic wrap helps too!


the book is filled with dozens of ridiculously intricate designs


I loosely followed the flower design here


applied & left it on for about 2 or 3 hours & flaked it off (without washing it in water, with hopes that it'll darken later)


the result right after picking off the dry henna. i love the organic look of it-- i don't have any tattoos (yet) but i always juggle with the idea of getting ones in all one colour since i'm not much of a colourful person.

Anyways, I just received some awesome nail stamping stuff in the mail & hope to blog about that soon! (Thanks to Mai for exposing me to it, it's soooo cool.)

xox