How we get ready across the season — from Ganpati to Christmas — and why festive doesn’t have to mean heavy.
By Pooja Chen, Founder – La Nin
The Indian festive season is not a day — it’s a stretch of months. It begins around Ganpati, carries through the nine nights of Navratri, pauses for Karwa Chauth, builds to Diwali, and doesn’t let go until the last of the Christmas lights come down. For a good part of the year, there is always something to dress for.
And somewhere in the middle of it, most women I know end up in front of a mirror, asking the same quiet question. Is this too much? And a beat later, its opposite. Is this enough? We ask it before every function, every photograph, usually without noticing — and we treat the answer like a fact, when it’s really just a habit we all agreed to.
The season has a script
You know the one. Every festive ad says the same thing: go big. Bold red lip, full glam, the whole face finished and ready to be photographed. It arrives so often, from so many directions, that after a while it stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like a rule.
But do we actually have to? Not because there’s anything wrong with a bold red lip — I love a bold red lip. It’s that somewhere along the way “festive” got welded to “heavy,” and a lot of us have carried that weight for years without ever deciding to.
Getting ready used to be a group activity
When I was younger, getting ready for a festival was never something you did alone. Cousins spilled in and out, someone’s mother took over your eyeliner because she was simply better at it, an aunt decided your bindi was crooked and fixed it without asking, and someone always had a lipstick to lend at the last minute. It was chaos, and it removed all the guesswork. There was always someone to tell you what was missing, what suited you, when to stop — so there wasn’t much room for confusion, and not much room for doubt.
Families are smaller now. We live in our own homes, in our own cities, far from that crowded mirror. So the getting-ready has changed. We do it alone — carefully, a little anxiously — and then step into a room full of people. Some are family, some are friends, but more and more often, most of them are strangers. And a room of near-strangers doesn’t reassure; it appraises. We feel ourselves being measured, and we get self-conscious in a way we never did with our cousins running late beside us. Underneath so much of festive getting-ready now is a small, constant effort to fit in.
But does it have to be this way?
Does beauty come with a handbook? Does festive getting-ready arrive with a set of rules you’re quietly failing to follow? The standard that makes you wipe it all off and start again — you carried it in yourself. From an ad, a magazine, a teacher who once told you your lipstick was too bright. And a thing you carried in, you’re always allowed to put down.
The “right” way to look festive isn’t a rule at all — it’s a local habit, regional and temporary, the same way subtraction feels obvious in Paris and luminous skin feels obvious in Seoul. So maybe the real question isn’t whether we’ve done enough to fit into the room. Maybe it’s whether it’s finally time we started getting ready for ourselves.
Soft, bold, or barely there
That’s the whole thought behind our season at La Nin: festive, but make it you. Festive can be soft glam for a Navratri night, one confident bold lip before a Diwali dinner, or barely there — a little lip oil and good skin — for a quiet Christmas lunch. Some evenings you’ll do the whole thing, and it’ll feel wonderful; on others it’ll be the lightest touch, and that isn’t the lesser version of you. It’s simply a different day.
Nude, MLBB, or the deeper shade you’ve been a little scared to try — whichever feels like you that day is the right one. Not the one the ad chose. Not the one the room expects. Your beauty was never defined by the ads, or by any beauty book, and it doesn’t need a room of strangers to sign off on it.
Which is why we make what we make
I didn’t start La Nin to hand anyone another festive rule — there are more than enough already. I wanted colour you could put on without a whole plan attached to it: good enough that you forget it’s on your lips, easy enough that changing your mind halfway is never a chore. Wear the bold one for no reason at all. Skip it the next night. Because in a season that quietly keeps score of how much everyone did, the real luxury is deciding not to keep score at all.
So this festive season — through Ganpati, Navratri, Karwa Chauth, Diwali and Christmas — make it festive, but make it you. Soft glam, a bold lip, or barely there. Whatever feels like you.
