Written by Isabela Cuenca

 

The women enter with a strut, gossiping. Vibrant pink walls welcome them into the salon as they raise their dresses and long skirts. No one can distinguish between laughter and the sounds of tumbling dryers. They sit one by one in cushioned chairs while holding their reptile skin bags with long, nearly garish nails. All of them use the same perfume. Miss “aluminum scissor hands” swaggers throughout the lines of women waiting for their manicures. One woman wears glasses that seem to be made of cardboard. A piece of underwear has fallen out of another lady’s bag, next to a woman reading a book and almost crying. Then there’s a woman trying to choose between hair colors.

Miss Katerina has a small stature but walks with determination; she brings a bottle with a peculiar color. “I chose Ririsila,” she says, and so it was done. The whole town saw Miss Katerina showing off her new color, and the ladies gossiped and criticized. “It’s too strong.” “It’s too soft.” “It shines too much.”  “It’s too dull.” Secretly, though, they were all fascinated by the color.

From one day to the next, everyone wore Ririsila clothes, and Ririsila shoes became popular as well. Painters only painted works with Ririsila, and it became the mandatory color for medical scrubs. The sunsets undressed and dressed in a new color, and the flowers in every vase in the world began to sing a new song. Ririsila kept growing in popularity until it settled in the clouds, the new favorite color, winning everyone over.

But just as Ririsila’s fame had arrived and grown, one day its popularity began to fall. Bottles of Ririsila—formerly seen as an elixir—were now given away in pharmacies, no longer wanted even in candy wrappers. The following week, Miss Katerina returned to the salon. She walked between the stares and the claws of the seated ladies, holding a new bottle in her palm. She dyed her hair Cuajanela, and the story repeated itself.