Three years ago, on a dark and stormy night, I was curled up in bed, face lit by my phone, scrolling TikTok’s endless void. Usually, the scroll feels like falling into a bottomless pit, where only the occasional shock makes you stop. That night, I stopped.
The video showed a girl in a cherry crop top, red lipstick, eyeliner sharp enough to slice. She displayed a Lana Del Rey coke necklace—dystopian merch in itself. None of that fazed me. What did was the silver chain connecting her nose ring to her earring. A naath. It shook as she lip-synced.
And suddenly, I felt offended in a way I’d never been before. Over jewellery.
A naath is traditional South Asian adornment. My mother wore one at her wedding—though she still complains it gave her a headache. She never liked nose jewellery. In her wedding video, she sits solemn, migraine and menstrual cramps layered on top of the burden of tradition. Her grandmother had told her not to smile or laugh too much; a bride mustn’t. So she looks both young and aged, exhausted. Each time I watch it, I feel the weight: generations of women, femininity bound in discomfort.
For me, the naath was never neutral. It carried culture, family, and a complicated inheritance.
As a child, though, I resisted my Pakistani roots. I’d dodge questions about my ethnicity, ask my mum to make food that didn’t smell too strongly of spices, and dread the day after Eid when classmates would ask about my mehndi. I never corrected teachers who mispronounced my name, no matter how many times it happened. I only wanted not to stand out.
Even now, at 23, I’ve never shown friends our Eid photos—those stiffly posed family portraits, eyes glazed as my dad worked his camera like a drill sergeant. Yet despite my mum’s distaste, I always thought naaths looked amazing. They felt like this proud, beautiful novelty unique to my culture. Still, I never wore one.
So when I saw that girl on TikTok—pale skin, perfect eyeliner, wearing something I hadn’t dared to—it stung. I checked the comments, hoping for some acknowledgment. There was little, aside from her bland apology: she’d “research next time.” For her, it was just an accessory.
Oddly, I wasn’t angry at her. Frustrated, yes—but in the way you’d feel about a snorer in your bed. The irritation wasn’t personal. The unsettled feelings were mine: she wore something I hadn’t had the guts to.
To make it worse, commenters raved about the “nose ring thingy,” calling it a “statement piece.” But to me, the naath wasn’t a statement at all. Or if it was, why had I never managed to wear it? What made it “different” on her but heavy and fraught on me?
I spiraled into imagining a future where the naath became just another indie-girl staple. Aesthetic, detached from meaning, filtered through white validation. And that was the heart of my possessive, almost childish reaction: No, it’s mine. I hadn’t claimed it until I saw her costume it. Only through her could I detach my own shame.
But while she wore it because it was “pretty” and “alternative,” I could only approach it through layers of politics, history, and pain. My cultural artifact was her costume.
The harder truth is that I’ve always needed majority culture to validate my femininity. I pulled from Lana Del Rey’s dreamscapes or Sylvia Plath’s tortured womanhood, not from my own cultural icons. South Asian femininity, as I saw it, was met with disdain: oily hair, wax appointments, public stares, cultural clothing deemed “exotic” or “hideous.” Meanwhile, Plath—who once wrote she looked like a “sick Indian”—was idolized. So I idolized her too.
That’s the recurring frustration: I diminished my own women while upholding others. And now, when the majority culture pulls from me—when it co-opts my heritage—I’m trapped again.
The obvious solution seems like reclamation: wear the naath, own it. But even that feels compromised. Because now, I can’t wear it simply because it’s beautiful, or because it links me to my mother and grandmother. I can only wear it as defiance. As a lesson. As resistance.
And so the trap tightens: my culture becomes something I can only engage with defensively, reactively. I can’t just celebrate it. I can’t just say this is mine. Even reclamation feels like loss.
I think back to my mother in her wedding video, frowning through pain and tradition. To the Eid photos I’ve hidden from friends. And now, to that girl on TikTok, chain catching the light, praised for her “statement piece.”
The naath was never meant to be a statement. It was supposed to be mine.
But cultural appropriation has stolen even that.