Kohl: Beauty, Medicine, & Protection

The surma-daani is always smaller than you remember. It sits near the mirror like an afterthought: metallic, scuffed, practical; the lid slipping off with a soft flick. It barely closes fully anymore. Black dust with a twinge of blue milled so finely, packed so firmly. A thin salai is rubbed once, tapped twice, and then the instruction comes. Not dramatic. Not ceremonial. Just familiar. 

Don’t blink. 

Kajal has gone on in moments like these: before Eid prayers, before a wedding photo, before you step out into a day that will contain too many people and too many looks. The eye waters a little. Someone steadies your cheek with their thumb. The line lands, and suddenly your face is finished. Ready to take on the occasion ahead, adorned with the final touch. 

What makes kajal rather peculiar, and lasting, is that it has never been only makeup. It is beauty, yes. But it is also protection, and in the way elders speak about it, it is often care. Sometimes even “medicine.” 

The line that makes a face. The line is small, but it changes the face. It sharpens the eye into something deliberate: awake, composed, ready. Ready to fight the world. On ordinary days it’s a private choice; on big days it becomes part of the household timetable, as expected as slipping your shoes on. 

The salai was handed to you with care, someone came close enough to steady your cheek, close enough to tell you not to blink: kajal carries intimacy inside it. It’s beauty that arrives through care. 

The dot that hides what is precious. Then there is the kajal that isn’t meant to flatter. A baby is born. Blessing, someone says, too bright to be left unguarded. Everyone nods, echoing the same sentiment. A finger returns to the bottle or their waterline for a dot behind the ear, near the temple, on the sole of the foot: a small darkness placed where it can interrupt the gaze. Nazar is often explained as weight, heft, burden. Attention that presses too hard against joy. The dot is not proof of fear so much as evidence of love: an instinct to cover what feels vulnerable. Care, where beauty and remedy blur 

In many homes, kajal is spoken about as more than cosmetics: it “cools” tired eyes, it helps them bear sun and dust, it belongs to the grammar of looking after oneself. Whether every claim survives modern scrutiny, the category it creates is real. An overlap where ornament and care live together. That overlap is part of why kajal lasts.

A practice older than the room. If kajal feels like a household habit, it is because it has had centuries to become one. In ancient Egypt, eye cosmetics were the norm, the expectation translating into the afterlife that jars and applicator sticks were buried with the dead.

Ancient Egyptian sources refer to eye paint as msdmt/mesdemet, and later Greek writers used terms such as stimmi for similar preparations; the Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) even records eye remedies in the same world where kohl was everyday practice.

The black paste and powders we now group under “kohl/kajal” were made from specific minerals, most famously galena (a lead sulphide that gives a dense charcoal-black) and green pigments such as malachite for varying looks and finishes. Ancient sources treated these preparations as both adornment and protection: against glare, dust, and the eye infections that moved easily through the Nile valley. In other words, the cosmetic already carried the double life kajal still carries. 

What is striking is how technical some of this was. Modern analysis of ancient kohl has identified not only naturally occurring minerals but also lead-based compounds that appear to have been intentionally produced, suggesting the makers were chemists in practice even if not in name. The eye, in these worlds, was a site of beauty, yes, but also a site of vulnerability. 

As the practice travelled across West Asia and North Africa, it travelled with new languages. The word kohl is tied to Arabic kuḥl, originally associated with finely ground antimony: the stone known in many Islamic traditions as ithmid. In South Asia, the vocabulary multiplied. 

Surma is commonly traced through Persian usage; kajal/kaajal sits closer to the Indian vernacular, often associated with lampblack and collyrium traditions with darkness gathered from smoke, turned into paste, made usable. Empires, trade routes, pilgrimage, court fashion, and household recipes all did their work. What began as an ancient cosmetic and collyrium moved into Mughal and Persianate aesthetics, then into the intimate movement of our homes: a hand steadying a child, a dot placed behind an ear, a line drawn before stepping into public. 

Even with all its layers, beauty, protection, care, anxiety, kajal endures because it does something deeper than decoration. It gives shape to feeling. It gives a ritual to affection. It gives a visible mark to the invisible things we worry about: envy, vulnerability, the fragility of joy, and maybe that is why it always begins with that pause. Because for a second, you are not simply lining your eyes. You are participating in a history of being seen and of trying, in the gentlest way, to protect what the gaze can touch.