Stains Of A Colourful Holi May Need A Docs Help To Wash Off

FACE SMEARED with acids, alkalis and a dash of mica and silica. Reads shocking. Don't be surprised, for this is what you put on your friends' faces and allow them to do the same. Holi is no longer the festival of colours.

The popular devilish black paste or the glittery golden are not as harmless as they seem to be. They contain hazardous and toxic chemicals that can affect your skin.

Even the milder blues and greens are not harmless. The green colour contains copper sulphate that can cause eye allergy, puffiness and temporary blindness.

The blue can cause dermatitis and the red ,which has a base of mercury sulphite, is highly toxic. It can cause skin cancer.

 

When it comes to dry colours the situation is no better. Gulal has two components, a colourant, which is toxic, and a base that can either be asbestos or silica. Both of these can cause health hazards. While silica may dry as well as chap the skin, asbestos, which is a known human carcinogen, gets built up in body tissue.

The major constituents of the colourant in gulal are mostly heavy metals known as systemic toxins. These not only get deposited in the kidneys, liver and bones but are capable of disrupting metabolic functions. While lead is the most dangerous of all heavy metals found in Holi colours, others such as cadmium, chromium and nickel too are found.

A test conducted at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, by Toxic Link, an environmental organisation working on the affects of hazardous chemicals, found red gulal to be containing mercury. A highly toxic metal, mercury can even enter the body through the skin or by inhalation. It has the potential to pass through the brain barrier and the placental barrier and is known to affect sensitive organs such as kidney, liver and the central nervous system.

Water colours too are not safe. The most commonly used violet concentrate can cause skin discoloration, dermatitis, skin allergy or irritation of the mucous membrane. In concentrated forms, it can even cause conjunctivitis and dark purple staining of the cornea.

But all this does not mean that one necessarily has to restrain from playing Holi. When the festival of colours began as a celebration of the arrival of spring and the harvest season, there were no chemicals. Natural colour extracts from seasonal herbs were used.

So all one has to do it revert to the old, traditional and safe way of celebrating the festival. Tesu flowers give the rich yellow colour. Petals of marigold and peels of pomegranate, beetroot and henna leaves can all be used to provide vibrant and safe colours.