“Our beauty is our qualities”

When Kaniz Almas reached for the microphone in front of her and began speaking, a hushed silence fell all over the room. Speaking on Dove's Choose Beautiful campaign, Kaniz Almas, a beautician of note, could speak with an authority in the subject that only a very few could ever get. Here was the woman who had spent the better part of last two decades making women feel beautiful. Thus, her two cents were worth listening to. The first point she raised, in terms of beauty, was that of confidence. “Most people nowadays do not want to say that they are beautiful. Maybe we were raised to not be outspoken and this could have made us less confident over time,” she said. The link between feeling beautiful and thus actually looking beautiful could easily be established, according to Kaniz Almas, and hence beauty was more a psychological concept, as the old adage went, changing according to the beholder. 

“Fair skin, round eyes and such are our own constructs of beauty which are not entirely accurate,” Kaniz Almas said. “Those don't really show our beauty. Our qualities are actually what matter. Once we understand our good qualities and nurture them, we feel and become more beautiful.” “Cooking can be a beauty and so can intelligence. Our beauty is actually the summation of our qualities,” she concluded. 

Kaniz Almas, who passed Secondary and Higher Secondary Examinations from Siddheswari Girls School and College and then went on to graduate from Eden College,  trained in Beautification under the tutelage of famous beautician of Bangladesh, Zerin Ashgar Khan. In the 1990s she went on to open her first beauty parlour, “Glamour”, which changed its name to “Persona” as it grew bigger and more reputable. Over the years, Kaniz Almas has herself made numerous individuals look beautiful or more pleasing to the eye, but she maintains that beauty is inherently present in everyone and her job has only been to lend prominence to the beauty already present. “One of the misconceptions that prevails in society is that fairness is beauty. I have seen this to be proven absolutely false over the years,” she said. “The new generation seem aware of this and less people consider looking fair to be important. Whitening of skin can only take you so far; your other qualities can beautify you even more,” she continued. 

Throughout the years, Kaniz Almas has travelled to China, Thailand, India and England to name a few and she has seen how unnecessary the reinforcement of ideas such as needing to be fair really are. Thus, she truly appreciated Dove's campaign to bring more attention to this issue and really once and for all try to prove that beauty standards set by men were fickle and needed revision every few years or so and thus beauty by itself could never be set in stone as something definitive. “I really admired Dove's campaigns. For instance, the one where the women had to choose the door to select whether they think they were average or beautiful really shows how Dove understood the people's sentiments,” she said. “Through this campaign, I have gathered a lot more respect for Dove and Unilever as a whole,” she ended. 

Photo: Sazzad Ibne Sayed