Dawn Images

KARACHI: Every year during Eid shopping emerges a new trend in wrist jewellery.

Only last year, no one really seemed interested in buying matching glass bangles with their pretty new clothes. Young women went for bracelets instead and their mothers said that they had too much work to do around the house on Eid day to wear the delicate bangles and see them broken. This year they have a solution for that at least — metal bangles. They don’t break.

And another great thing about the metal bangles in silver and gold is that they go with everything. Your chinking, clinking and jangling silver bangles will compliment your dark blue shalwar kameez as your golden bangles would look great with your maroon kurti. Quite frankly, if you want to wear golden bangles with the blue clothes and silver ones with your maroon dress, that is fine, too. And you don’t have to match bangles with your clothes anymore. Just get two dozen or so golden and silver bangles and you are done.

“Since metal bangles don’t break at all, I am also getting them for my six-year-old little daughter instead of getting her plastic bangles this Eid,” said a mother as she checked the small sizes available at one bangles shop at Gulf Shopping Centre, near Teen Talwar in Clifton.

Outside Jama Cloth Market on M.A. Jinnah Road, too, many bangle stalls had displayed the metal varieties in front. There were plain ones and those with a generous coat of glitter, too. “Is the glitter going to come off?” one girl asked a salesman while reaching for a glittering golden set.

“Of course not,” Ali Shah, the shopkeeper, replied, and the girl jokingly questioned then where did all that glitter on his forehead and hands come from. “It is not from the variety you have selected, Sister! It is from the glass bangles,” he tried to explain to which the girl started laughing, not believing him at all.

Hameed Khan, in the same shop, was selling bangle sets on 30 bangles or two-and-a-half dozen for Rs250 each and the aunty-type facing him wasn’t at all happy with the price though not one to back down easily the salesman kept explaining to her that the price was right as the bangles would last for years. “You may lose or misplace them, you won’t ever break them,” he said. But the aunty, too, being an old hand at bargaining, argued that they could bend nevertheless. “Besides, what if they turned black?” she asked. Finally, her daughter intervened and paid for the set without bargaining.

For those who still believe in the traditional glass bangles, they only cost Rs20 a dozen and are pretty as ever. Most bangle shops also keep packets of cone henna. “It’s keeping in line with tradition to wear bangles and decorate the hands with henna, hence the availability of it at bangle shops,” said Mairajuddin, another bangle shop owner.

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2016