Beauty treatment

Stealing Beauty, a collection of portraits, focuses on the tradition of facial tattooing among Chin and Apatani women in Myanmar's Chin State and India's Ziro valley. It is the story of two tribes sharing, without contact, a custom that is on the brink of disappearing.

Historically, Chin and Apatani women were adored for their beauty, drawing kings and men from surrounding areas to their villages to steal them away. To stop their women from being so desired, village elders began tattooing teenage girls to make them "ugly". The tradition stuck but over generations lost its association with ugliness and instead came to represent courage, beauty and strength. In both communities, however, as more people left their villages, the struggle between tradition and modernity placed these tribal cultures under increasing threat. Language, dress and customs - including the practice of facial tattooing - have been abandoned. Now there remains only a handful of women adorned with these often intricate embellishments.

"I was told by my grandmother that [neighbouring tribe] the Nishi would sometimes steal the Apatani girls," says Tailyang Yaming, at her wooden home in Bulla village, in Arunachal Pradesh, in India's northeast. "So we began tattooing young girls to make them ugly. It was a way to keep our identity as Apatani. Of course, now we don't see the tattoos - or nose plugs - as ugliness; in fact, it's beauty."

When Apatani girls hit puberty, they would be "defaced" with tattoos ( tiipe) on their chin, nose and forehead, and bamboo or rattan plugs ( dat) through their nostrils. A painful and bloody process, the tattoos were etched using thorns to implant ink made from soot and starch from cooked rice under the skin. They took almost a full day to complete and a week to heal. The nose plugs were fitted into holes cut into the upper nostrils. First, openings would be made on the nose and a small plug inserted; the next day it would be replaced by a larger plug to stretch the nostril. This process could be repeated up to seven times until the desired plug fitted.

"When I was 12 and got my tattoo I cried so loud. A woman was sitting on my legs and another sat on my chest," says Ngilyang Bunii. "I felt very proud once it was complete. Girls would want to have the darkest tattoo or the largest nose plugs to be the most beautiful. Now the younger generation don't have tattoos, they're mixing with other tribes and I feel like the Apatani identity is under threat of disappearing forever."