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We returned to Lebanon as a family in the 1990s, as my parents had decided the country was safe enough for us to live in after the end of the war, and partly also because they protectively did not want me to experience my teenage years in England. There, as a young adult whose insecurities had only metamorphosed, I attempted to assert control over my looks, often to my conservative father's dismay. I had the kinks and waves straightened out of my temperamental hair once a week by Fatima, a boisterous Palestinian salon owner who chain-smoked as she fried my strands with tongs. (My eyebrows were thinned out so brutally by this same woman that they've never fully recovered.) I avoided feminine clothing and high heels, for they would mean I'd take up more space in a world that already felt hostile toward me. And I dressed like my four brothers year-round, very much wanting to be a boy, knowing they were afforded certain privileges I was not.

While I wasn't inundated with filtered images of friends and influencers the way that today's teenagers are, I regularly pored over Teen Vogue and other Western magazines and catalogs that had made their way into Lebanon. Admittedly, at times, I wished I could look more like the blond white girls who stared back at me from the glossy pages. I once fixated on an advertisement featuring a thin, fair model whose eyes were framed with kohl. As I saw it, she embodied breezy perfection because she was everything I was not: the manifestation of Eurocentric beauty norms. (I'd later learn she was Kate Moss.)

But then, at about fourteen, I encountered her—Queen Nefertiti, my queen—for the first time. My father was an avid collector of National Geographic magazines, both old and new. Being half-Egyptian, he was also obsessed with all things Egyptology. One of the issues he'd stumbled on, dated 1961, featured a spread on Nefertiti, with an image of her bust, and a white woman peering at it. The left side of the queen's face was visible, and clearly missing an eye, but the eye socket was lined with kohl. I imagined that the queen—whose name, aptly, means "the beautiful one has arrived"—connected me to a larger constellation of beguiling non-Western women. In the years since, I've remained infatuated with her. And in 2022, I finally made a pilgrimage to Berlin to meet her stucco-coated, multicolored bust. She was as exquisite as I'd always presumed her to be, with her mesmerizing kohl-rimmed eyes, chiseled features, and symmetrical face. Years after I first glimpsed her in the magazine, I still see something of myself in the queen.

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I've been likened to Nefertiti at least three times. First, at sixteen, four years after we had relocated to postwar Lebanon. I used to smuggle my eyeliner into school by way of my pencil case, because makeup was forbidden; I'd sometimes hide it in my bra and reapply it in the bathroom. A tall, floppy-haired boy at school who had a mild crush on me said I resembled the queen. Per my dramatic diary, he told me it was the darkness of my eyes, whose lids were weighed down with straight eyelashes and stained with black kohl, that had captivated him.

On reflection, he was most certainly attempting to impress me with his knowledge of ancient Egyptian power women. That said, I was indeed flattered, and, given my insecurities, I appreciated the name-dropping and unsolicited attention before politely rebuffing him. Thanks to my infatuation with Nefertiti, I had already taken an interest in the history of makeup and had come to the understanding that kohl went far beyond prettification. It carried with it stories about my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and ancestors before them. I saw kohl as a constant companion for the women in my family, one that protected and empowered my proud lineage.

As my interest in this remarkable product deepened, I searched for its meaning in history. There, I discovered an abundance of figures and cultural practices beyond those I knew from Western music and film. I found eyeliner in the Arab world's deserts and in the savannas of Africa, in the hair salons of Iran, and in the alleyways of Kyoto. I found it on the faces of Indian storytellers, Latin American freedom fighters, and Palestinian activists. Even the Arab pop artists I listened to wielded eyeliner as an empowering tool to express their individuality—I thought Egyptian singer Ruby's darkened eyes were particularly daring, as they deliberately enhanced her seductive aura. And so I started to wear kohl more frequently, all the while worrying my father might notice and forbid me from wearing cosmetics altogether. (It was enough that I'd already pierced my ears—twice.)

In the years that followed my troubled time at high school, after I enrolled at the American University of Beirut, my younger, tougher, and only sister, Yasmin, encouraged me to embrace the art of more dramatic eyeliner application by teaching me herself, and later sending me YouTube tutorials. So, I graduated from under-eye kohl to full cat eye—the blacker, the better. I created the look by applying the cheapest Western liquid liner I could find at local drugstores, usually Maybelline, to my upper lids, and kohl imported from Pakistan to Sidon's souks, Hashmi Kajal, along my waterlines. By twenty, my transformation was complete: I had swapped loose clothing for miniskirts, biology textbooks for Nietzsche and Edward Said, and straightened hair for a bouffant that, at various points, was auburn, jet black, and streaked with blond.