Beauty, glamour, Zambian lady

Analysis: DEXTER NJUKA
IT’S like boom, and there is glamour all over our ladies. How long this has been, I may never know.Beautiful faces; brushed cheeks, trimmed eyebrows and wetted lips with some coloured gloss and long hair extensions that reach up to the loin. Cleavage subtly exposed to fuel some transcended eroticism. Suspension of disbelief.
The manicured nails and fabulous body shape do tell something that our ladies are still going another mile of prettification upgrade. Truth be told, lately our ladies are spending more energies and time on their looks than they have ever done.
With this ‘selfie’ phenomenon that has to some extent dictated some cell phones being tailored to capture and enhance this beauty before it gets uploaded on Instagram, YouTube and all for the underlining purpose of getting a bounty of likes. Arguably, there is more than photo filters about this glamour. Our women are just more glamorous nowadays.
Improved living standards and exposure to media influence are somewhat attributed to this. Some of them want to look exactly like those media personalities they admire. What was only for the stage or screen has now found its way into the streets. Social media has influentially redefined beauty and glamour to the extent that some male folks have joined the trend of doing make-up.
There are lots of beauty parlours that have mushroomed in the recent past. Cosmetics of various sorts are at their disposal. Make-up is no longer a strange term that is only found in the backrooms of the entertainment industry, but it’s a term now contained in the ladies handbag.
Unfortunately, we live in an age that merchandises faked stuff – faked life, faked imported goods. I even watched a video of fake rice – rice made from plastic. Faked bottled water. And now faked hips and bums. Just faked beauty.
There is need for our ladies to not only have beautiful faces but also beautiful hearts. There is need to possess beautiful intellect, and such virtues as compassion, love and kindness. What can one say about the cold-heartedness of those two ladies driving to the funeral of the late Caristol Chitamfya Jr and with their utterance about the dead man?
They even had the audacity to post the said video of their blunting morality. Full of make-up as if they were going for a beauty contest and before one could even appreciate their beauty, my; their mouths were full of ridiculousness. For Pete’s sake, they couldn’t even pity themselves for their lack of command of the language they were using. Their beauty lay in contrast to what their hearts held.
Meanwhile, there are some extremists in this phenomenon. Their beauty and glamour reminds me of King Solomon’s warning about this woman in Proverbs 7: “She is unruly and defiant, her feet never stay home; now in the street, now in the squares, at every corner she lurks… Many are the victims she has brought down; her slain are a mighty throng.”
The passage states that this woman uses perfumes, exceptional clothing, smooth talk and her bed to steal away a man’s fortune. ‘Slay queen’, is what social media community calls such.
Let me say it here that let our ladies out there who are up to impress with looks also find time to beautify their intellect, as beauty shouldn’t come at the expense of economic production. No wonder, some women will get a good half an hour before knock off time to do their make-up. Man, that’s roughly 10 hours a month.
Needless to mention how others have gone to extremes by stealing company time chatting and posting ‘selfies’ on social media. One keeps wondering what time they get to do their job.
To some glamour has become an obsession. It’s like an overkill. And among these are religious people. Doesn’t the Holy Bible say extremism is more like idolatry? Anything that removes God or denies Him of His rightful places in our lives is idolatry.
The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, in its manual on ‘Standards of Christian living’, urges its members to “remember that it is not outward adornment that expresses true Christian character, but ‘the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quite spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God’ (1Peter 3:3,4).”
The author is a media enthusiast and pastors Garneton Mission of the Seventh-Adventists.