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When Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas in 2018, you’ll have noticed she was wearing vermillion red dye in a skinny line along her centre parting. Since then, Chopra has been seen sporting the style on various different occasions, something which she has been each ridiculed and praised for on social media.

To grasp this polarised response, it is advisable look back into the history of the practice. Referred to as sindoor, this red dye has been utilized by Indian women for hundreds of years and holds historic, spiritual, and medicinal significance. First placed on a girl by her husband on their wedding day as an emblem of her devotion to him, the style is traditionally utilized by Indian women to indicate married status. Nonetheless, more recently, the practice has been shunned by some feminists who imagine it to be an emblem of patriarchal control.

While it’s unknown when precisely the tradition originated, female figurines dating way back to 5000 years have been present in northern India with red painted partings. Sindoor also gets a nod within the Hindu epics. In Ramayana, for instance, which theologians date back to the seventh century BCE, Sita is alleged to use sindoor to please her husband, Lord Rama. Just like the bindi, the importance of sindoor stems from its location near to the Third Eye chakra (AKA the Ajna chakra) on the centre of the top. The Ajna chakra’s proximity to the brain associates it with concentration, desire, and emotional regulation. For individuals who imagine in the facility of chakras, placing sindoor on this location means harnessing a girl’s mental energy to concentrate on her husband.

Sindoor has also traditionally been used for medicinal reasons. In Ayurvedic herbology, a system of drugs with historical roots in Hinduism, red sindoor powder is assumed to have medicinal properties that profit women, including stimulating blood flow to trigger their sex drive – the explanation why single women and widows usually are not allowed to wear it. Actually, in 2017, the Indian government deemed sindoor so essential to a girl’s health that they granted tax exemptions to the powder. Menstrual products, however, are taxed between 12 to 14 per cent.

Whether a girl’s selection to don the dye is for historical, spiritual or medicinal reasons, a unifying thread is that, traditionally speaking, the top goal is to please men – be it a husband or the broader patriarchy. Nonetheless, views on the practice began to vary in the beginning of the twentieth century as India was going through an enormous cultural shake-up brought on by British decolonisation and the spread of international feminist movements. During this era, sindoor was caught within the crossfire between a recently decolonised population attempting to re-establish age old traditions and newly emancipated women fighting against practices certain up in patriarchal obligation.

One in all the earliest acknowledgments of sindoor’s controversial status is Kishore Sahu’s 1947 film of the identical name, which tackles the theme of widow remarriage. Controversially, women were often deemed a burden after their husbands’ deaths so, because the logic goes, why would she wish to reapply sindoor for a recent husband if she was truly dedicated to her last one? Sindoor ends with the widow’s want to remarry being accepted by the opposite characters within the film. As she reapplies her vermillion, symbolising her renewed marital status, she undermines the archaic value system related to sindoor application. Almost 30 years after the film’s release, The Illustrated Weekly of India referred to this ending as something which solidified Sahu’s status as a “socially conscious filmmaker.”

More recently, the polemic surrounding the red dye has entered twenty first century cyberculture as sindoor’s relevance in Bollywood film became meme-ified. In a scene from the 2007 classic Om Shanti Om, heroine Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone’s breakout role) extols the virtues of the red dye in her song “Ek Chutki Sindoor” (That One Pinch of Sindoor): “A married woman’s crowning glory, every little thing a girl has all the time dreamt of.” Desi Twitter has since poked fun on the conservative lyrics, transforming the scene into an iconic meme format which broadly correlates to Sean Bean’s ‘one doesn’t simply…’ meme within the Euromerican cyberworld. 

Nowadays, women who go for the style risk being labelled as overly conservative – the criticism often levelled at Chopra for wearing it – while at the identical time married women who shun the trend have been sexually harassed and socially ostracised. Amrita Anand told Feminism in India that she’ll wear Sindoor to family functions “simply to stop people making a difficulty out of it,” despite never otherwise wearing it. But some individuals are fighting back against this unimaginable position.

Despite online ridicule, beauty gurus have continued demonstrating the trend in YouTube tutorials, although more often as ‘throwbacks’ than progressive styles for viewers to try as wearable looks. Sonam Kapoor’s Vogue GRWM featured the vermillion as an homage to 90s Bollywood stars, however the Raanjhanaa actress clarified she was only applying it, “To make the look super Indian”. YouTuber Shalini Mandal meanwhile begins her copycat tutorial applying the Sindoor, as per Kapoor’s instructions, and exclaiming in dismay “I appear to be my mom!”

Throughout the past decade, many influential beauty figures within the South Asian diaspora have played with the conventions of the trend to overturn its potentially old skool connotations and challenge cis-heteropatriarchal ideas about who’s allowed to wear sindoor. The Times of India’s #NoConditionsApply campaign which began in 2017, fought for Sindoor Khela (a yearly tradition where married women smear vermillion dye on one another) to be inclusive of more women, including widows, single women and trans women, with a view to rework the event right into a celebration of “sisterhood” and “solidarity” fairly than women’s appendage to men. Designer Rohit Verma’s March 2020 fashion show, meanwhile, took this a step further, with cis men, trans women, acid attack survivors, widows, and divorcees wearing Sindoor on the runway, with a view to “empower women to challenge norms that result in unfair traditions imposed on them for the last 400 years.”

For some creatives, facing the cultural baggage of sindoor head on meant shifting the trend more radically. Back in 2018 designer Masaba Gupta, who is thought for her quirky and disruptive takes on classic Indian attire, debuted a collection with models using white and neon pink sindoor to adorn their partings, with the dye bleeding deeper into the hair lengths than what had previously been seen. “It’s embracing the undeniable fact that Sindoor isn’t a dated concept or old skool,” Gupta explained on the time. “Today, the usage of Sindoor has change into more of a selection.”

The trend of colourfully dyed roots has also been making headlines outside of the Indian subcontinent. Last summer, American pop star Billie Eilish debuted her now famous slime green roots, while a month later, Halsey rocked rainbow roots on the MTV VMAs. Most recently, Dries Van Noten’s SS20 show saw models walk the runway with vibrant colored roots, this time the results of feathers and little question plenty of hairspray. For Eilish and other artists rocking the trend, it’s come to indicate an upheaval of beauty norms which generally understand roots as a grown-out problem to be fixed. Consequently, inverted dye has change into a middle finger to oppressive beauty rules that favour norms over individual selection.

Similarly, recent uses of sindoor akin to Gupta’s and Verma’s signify a feminist reclaiming of a drained rhetoric, enabling wearers to prioritise individual selection over oppressive dogmas around announcing one’s marital status. In each corners of the world, the trend of colourfully dyed roots is undeniably having a giant moment, revealing more cross-cultural similarities than you may think at first. It’s clear that ladies in all places are reclaiming control of their creative expression in a way that is bound to take root for a long time to come back.