What Is Blue Nila? The Word, the History and How to Use a Nila Mask

In November 1883 Charles de Foucauld crossed the Bani mountains in southern Morocco. He was travelling in disguise and writing down everything he saw. At the oasis of Tisint, on the edge of the Sahara, he noted that everyone was dressed in indigo cotton, "cloth of the Sudan". Sudan, at the time, meant West Africa south of the Sahara.

The cloth was called khent. A man's shirt, the kechchaba, was a single length of it, two to two and a half metres long, with a slit for the head. It had no seams at all. The corners were simply knotted at the sides. Women wore one piece of the same cloth fastened at the shoulders, with a short veil to match.

Foucauld put the prices in a footnote. A shirt of genuine Sudan cloth cost about 60 francs; an ordinary one, five or six. The genuine article was worn by a few sheikhs and marabouts. Most of the cloth in Morocco was a cheap copy made in England and landed at the port of Mogador, today's Essaouira.

So even in 1883, blue was worth counterfeiting. In Morocco the colour is called nila, and the word is a good deal older than the caravans.

A word that means dark blue

In Sanskrit, nīla means dark blue. The word passed into Middle Persian as nīl, and from Persian into Arabic as nīl and nīla.

The same word reached Europe. Arabic an-nīl, "the indigo", became Portuguese anil and Spanish añil. The word indigo took another road, through Latin, from the Greek indikon, "the Indian substance". Europe met one dye under two names: one taken from its colour, the other from the country it came from.

Arabic kept the name taken from the colour, and some traders carried it as their own. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Jewish merchants who dealt in indigo between Egypt and Europe were known as al-nīlī. The name also survived at the other end of the world: in Malaysia, the natural dye from the same plant is still sold as nila.

The river Nile, spelled the same way in Arabic, is unrelated. Its name comes from Greek.

What nila powder is

Blue nila, or nila powder, is the dried, ground leaf of Indigofera tinctoria. On a cosmetics label it appears as Indigofera Tinctoria Leaf Powder. The European Union lists it as skin conditioning, meaning an ingredient that keeps skin in good condition.

The plant itself is a shrub one to two metres tall, a legume with pink or violet flowers. Farmers rotate it into their fields because it improves the soil. It grows wild in three regions: tropical West Africa, Tanzania down to South Africa, and India across to mainland Southeast Asia.

Indigo is one of the oldest dyes people know: the oldest fabric dyed with it, found in Peru, is about 6,000 years old.

In the tanneries of Fez the same leaf traditionally gave leather its blue. Nila is still sold in the markets. In 2023 researchers in Marrakech counted forty dye plants, fourteen of them widely traded. Nila is one of the fourteen, alongside madder, weld, argan and olive.

Indigo from the Draa valley

Morocco also grew its own. In 1154 the geographer al-Idrisi recorded indigo produced in the valley of the Draa, in the south, and sold right across the Maghreb because it was cheap. The same valley, according to a text of 1191, sent its henna "to all the lands".

The Draa was the corridor by which caravans from West Africa reached the Atlas passes and Marrakech. Its oases boomed between the 11th and 13th centuries, under the Almoravids and the Almohads. The indigo grew beside the main road.

By the early 16th century the blue was going by sea as well. Italian merchants brought cloth, silks, coral, glass and arms to the port of Salé, and took away indigo, flax, cotton, almonds, tanning bark and other dyes.

Blue that was meant to rub off

The genuine Sudan cloth from Foucauld's footnote came, at its best, from Kano, in what is now northern Nigeria. The traveller Heinrich Barth was there in 1851. He wrote that Kano cloth was worn as far as Tripoli and Timbuktu, and even on the Atlantic coast, where the people of Arguin, in present-day Mauritania, dressed in cloth woven and dyed in Kano.

By 1855 Kano had more than 2,000 dye pits, worked by men at communal pits. That was the exception. Across most of West Africa, women did the dyeing.

Once dyed, the cloth was beaten with wooden mallets until it shone. In some places extra indigo paste was beaten in at this stage, so that the blue would come off on the skin of whoever wore it. That was the point.

The Tuareg prized this glazed Kano cloth for their veils.

Who the blue men are

The Tuareg live in the central Sahara, in Algeria, Niger and Mali. Among them it is the men who cover their faces, from adulthood, with a veil called the tagelmust. The women traditionally do not. Indigo from the veils and clothes sometimes stains the skin a bluish tint, which is how they came to be called the Blue People.

In Morocco the name was stitched onto their western neighbours: the Reguibat and other Hassaniya-speaking tribes of the western Sahara, from southern Morocco and south-western Algeria down to Mauritania. A well-known photograph from around 1935 is captioned "Hommes bleus de Goulimine", the blue men of Guelmim.

In the middle of the 20th century films fixed the name in place, among them Disney's short Blue Men of Morocco, released on 14 February 1957, Valentine's Day. It is about the Reguibat.

Nila on the skin today

Nila was a familiar blue powder in my childhood. I saw my mother put it on too.

In the south of Morocco, nila is still worn. The traditional melhfa of Sahrawi women, a long wrap of very fine, sheer muslin dyed with indigo, is itself called nila. The dye gives the cloth its shimmer and can pass onto the skin.

A woman wears a special nila melhfa for several days at a time. The dark blue it leaves behind is believed, in the south, to soften the skin and give it a particular delicacy.

The powder also goes straight onto the skin. In the hammam it is mixed with black beldi soap, massaged in and rinsed away. For the face it is mixed with argan oil or rose water. This, too, belongs mostly to the south and to Saharan women. The hammam, step by step, is in our piece on Moroccan soap and the hammam.

A face mask with blue nila

TIFAWT is our face mask with blue nila and prickly pear seed oil, in a 200 g jar.

After ten minutes and a rinse, the skin is very soft, with a natural glow from the prickly pear seed oil. It feels like a salon facial, at home. The oil has its own guide, prickly pear seed oil for the face.

We source each ingredient from where it is made best, and many women's collectives take part in making them. Licensed laboratories in Morocco then fill the jars.

TIFAWT is a word in Tashelhit, the language of the Souss. It means light, and it is related to a verb meaning both to shine and to dawn, so I think of it as sunrise. The name is about seeing your face in a new light.

How to use a nila face mask

Start with a clean face and keep clear of the eyes. Press the surface of the mask lightly with your fingertips and take just enough to paint a thin layer over your face. Do not dig out chunks.

Leave it on for ten to fifteen minutes, rinse with water and use your usual moisturiser. Used once or twice a week, one 200 g jar lasts up to two years. Every step and the full ingredient list are on the blue nila face mask page.

Customers in Sarajevo usually do not know what blue nila is, or they have just seen it trending on TikTok.

Foucauld crossed the south of Morocco in disguise and filed the price of blue cloth in a footnote. I explain nila to them at our counter, more than a hundred and forty years later. Fortunately, no disguise is required.