After a reader shared her story with us about her attempt to make her lips look pinker, which ended in a disaster, I’ve been curious about the whole process. So yesterday, while waiting at Computer Village for my phone to get fixed, I decided to go looking for “pink lips” underneath Opebi bridge, which is apparently a very popular place to find a solution to almost any type of beauty problem you might have.
Walking down, I had barely gotten to the bridge when I began to hear a couple of young boys calling out “brother you wan do pink lips?”Curiously the market seems to be directed majorly towards men and not women. None of the boys calling for customers directed their calls at me, so I walked up to one.
I explained that I was interested in getting pinker lips and he proceeded to tell me that he had just the thing for me and I was lucky to have walked up to him, because apparently everyone else was selling fake products. He explained that my case was very severe -even though I actually do not have dark lips-, and I needed some kind of supposedly special, long lasting, quick action product.
So he dug out a plain white small container from his bag that had absolutely no inscription on it and told me that the bottle was just 2,500 naira. I asked to look at the contents of the container before paying and the first thing that hit me as I opened it, was the distinct smell of hair relaxer. Somehow they had added some sort of colouring to the relaxer to make it pink, to give you the illusion that constant use of the product would make your lips the same colour.
I was most certainly not going to pay any amount of money for the small container of pink relaxer, and so I went “Oga take 500 last”. He snatched his container from me and proceeded to continue looking for the next unlucky person to swindle.