Smokes and Mirrors...

I woke up today wondering what to talk about. I chatted with a friend for a few minutes and inspiration beckoned. Kim Kardashian. Now, I love Kim. I have always been a fan of the girl and yes, I do keep up with the Kardashians. But, I wonder now, what ladies looked like and did before Mrs West came on the scene. If she didn’t invent anything, she sure made Spanx very popular. She made me know what Ben Nye Banana powder is used for. She had girls running to youtube to learn the art of contouring and highlighting. So now, eyebrows, foreheads, chin and virtually the entire body can be highlighted and contoured, all thanks to Kim. Let us talk about the big backside. If you aren’t brave enough to get a silicone butt, you can go buy the padded panty. You also want the nipped in, tucked in tum like Ms K, go and buy yourself a waist trainer. Do not be a learner. I repeat, do not be a learner.
Do you want to change how you look like? I mean change the appearance of your skin colour? I don’t mean getting rid of some pesky pimples/acne/cellulite or even stretch marks. I mean going from chocolate, such as myself and switching lanes to caramel or very fair such as Lae. It is so easy. You could buy Whitenicious, could pop Glutathione pills. I heard you can even take injections. So if you are still using Hot Movate Gel, sadly, you are a learner. You could have sparkling half caste skin in days. It doesn’t matter if your old pictures look nothing like you. It doesn’t matter if your old friends from high school don’t recognize you. Remember, you have to look the part.

I went to a restaurant to have dinner with a friend recently. I was trying to tuck into my sea food meal in peace but snatches of conversation kept on drifting around my ears, with accents I tried to place. A girl beside me was having dinner with a man and you would think she was American, until she received a call on her cell phone and she had to talk normally. I almost fell out of my chair. The change was so instant. When she was done, she flipped her hair and continued to talk to her dinner date, back to the americo accent. You meet Italians, South Africans, Ghanaians, the French…and you hear their own unmistakable accents. So why do Nigerians see the need to change theirs? Why are we so insecure?  
It doesn’t just end there. Go on to Instagram. People post pictures of things that don’t even look like their real lives. People pretend to be happy on social media. People show off with things they can never truly afford. They will sell, steal, borrow or kill to use to latest gadgets and toys to be part of the cool kids because, ‘if you aint, you cannot sit with us’. The see the blings, the champagne lifestyle, the PJ’s. (if you don’t know what a PJ is (not pyjamas) then you aren’t really cool) and they want all that. They believe if they cannot flaunt it, no one would really believe they have it. A guy spends all his salary looking like a million bucks, trying to impress the girl who spends all her earnings trying to look like a million bucks trying get a guy who look a million bucks…the circle never ends.
An alternate universe would be looking for happiness in real things, embracing the skin we were born with. If I remove all my false nails, my fake butt, my boob implants, my false name of Kleopatra and answer my God given name of Ifeoma instead…just if…I am not sure the earth would stop rotating. I listened to Chimamanda Adichie speak and I was so impressed. She is well on her way to receiving bigger awards in literature soon, she rubs shoulders with the bigwigs of the elitist literary society yet she speaks like the Nigerian woman that she is. My friend who has been living abroad for some years now, said that people back home ask her if she has started speaking like the Briticos. As if that means anything. Let us remove the masks and the labels and for once, ignore the girl in the magazine. You will never look like the girl in the magazine because, "The girl in the magazine does not even look like the girl in the magazine"

XO,
Rene.