The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

American philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once said, “Beauty without expression is boring.” It’s a sentiment that’s difficult to argue against, but one that doesn’t necessarily fit into the loop of that darn tricky thing we call the game of life.

Life is hard. Work is hard. Running a household is hard. In fact, life in Cairo in general is no piece of cake. The breakneck speed of the hustle and bustle of Egypt’s capital can wear down even the most durable of Cairenes – none more so than the women of our community.

We’ll skip the bit about the hardships of women in Egypt – they’re well known. But because our wives, mothers, sisters and the women in our life fight the battles we know of day-to-day, they often put on a front – for many, it’s the only way to get through a tough day at the office or even a tough visit to the in-laws.

It’s something that beauty brand, Ponds, has at the heart of a social experiment that has been going viral across social media.

Using the hashtag ‘weshek_mesh_khashab’, Ponds is encouraging women to drop ‘the act’, so to speak, and embrace the most basic form of freedom of expression – the expression of emotion.

It’s not a complicated concept – Ponds is right in insisting that emotion is strength; it’s not weakness and it’s not vulnerability, whether that expression is of unbridled ecstatic joy, sentimentality or even sorrow.

Now if you begin to experience an intense feeling of discomfort at the thought of baring so much, don’t be alarmed – it indicates only that you’re human. For many, expressing sincerely and organically just isn’t something you do – but in Ponds doing their part with this wave of empowerment, your facial expression – more than your clothes, more than your make-up, more than anything else that can be considered a form of expression – your facial expression is the first thing that anyone and everyone notices.

Is there such a thing as feminine strength? Yes, there certainly is. We’ll leave you to decide what gender-oriented notions of strength says of the wider scheme of things, but one of the fundamentals of a feminine strength is expression.

For more information on Ponds and the weshek mesh khashab movement, click here.