Aker fassi: what it is and how Moroccan red was worn

When someone died in Fez, the cotton covers came off every mattress in the house. The carpets were replaced with mats brought from a mosque. Water was drunk from cheap earthenware vessels bought specially for the occasion. Women came to the house of mourning in simple white clothes, wearing no jewellery.

If one of them had red on her cheeks, she had to wash it off before she went.

Red on the cheeks meant something was being celebrated.

The Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck wrote the rule down.

What the name means

In the records of a hundred years ago this red is called ʿaker. The modern name aker fassi comes from that word. In Arabic it is written عكر فاسي, and fassi means “from Fez”.

There the word stands alone, without Fez. The rule about red and the house of mourning, as it happens, was recorded in Fez.

Red at a wedding

A young man of the Ulad Bu Aziz tribe sent the girl he was marrying a mirror, a comb, soap for washing, henna, red for the cheeks, benzoin resin, dates and things for her to wear. Ten days or more before the wedding, all of it was carried to her family’s tent.

Among the Ait Sadden, seven girls fetched water from a spring or well early in the morning and washed the bride with it, hoping that this would get them married too. That evening, after sunset, her hands, feet and hair were smeared with henna. Her eyes were painted with kohl and her cheeks with red. With saffron, two lines resembling whiskers were drawn over her eyebrows and joined by a third along the ridge of her nose. The other women at the wedding, married and unmarried, were painted in the same way.

Back to the Ulad Bu Aziz. The bridegroom and his unmarried friends rode on horses, mules and donkeys to the tents of their own and neighbouring villages. At every tent they were greeted the same way: “Give us camels.” The young men handed over dates and were given money. When the dates ran out, they answered, “The camels are away to Marrakesh.” People gave them money all the same.

While the men were away, the women of both villages, his and the bride’s, painted the bride’s face and their own: kohl on the eyes, red on the cheeks. The painting was called tezyina.

The seventh day after a birth

The red came back when a child was born. In the same tribe a new mother stayed in bed until the seventh day, while her husband went to the market to buy her food and henna. On the seventh day she got up and had a hot bath in an enclosure inside the tent. She put a spot of red on each cheek, darkened her eyelashes with kohl and dyed her hands and feet with henna.

Westermarck sums it up in one sentence: she gave herself the appearance of a bride.

In Amazigh, it is called writing

Around the same time, the French linguist Émile Laoust described how a woman of the Ntifa tribe washes and makes herself up. She buys scented soap from a pedlar and pays for it with eggs, grain or wool. On the eve of a feast day she turns a large grain basket upside down, covers it with long wraps and has a hot bath inside. This is her tahammamt, her little bath.

Then comes the colour. Putting colour on the face, Laoust writes, is called ara, “to write”, and every woman practises that kind of writing. She colours her cheekbones with ʿaker, bought at the market in small pots called aurtar. She extends her eyebrows with a broad black line and keeps her kohl carefully in a tube of reed.

Laoust also wrote down what the woman of the house keeps in her leather bag: a little mirror, a comb, and glass beads, cloves and thyme, carefully tied up in rags.

Wearing red today

If you wear the same red on your lips and cheeks, start with your lips. Whatever is left on your fingertip goes onto your cheekbone, which is where the Ntifa women put it too.

The cheek takes a softer shade of the same red, so your lips and cheeks match. For more colour, add another thin layer. The full step-by-step method is in our guide How to apply colour to lips and cheeks.

AZGGAGH means red

Our lip and cheek balm is called AZGGAGH. It is the Amazigh word for red. In the Souss, where my family comes from, “it is red” is iga azuggʷaɣ.

So the name is simply the colour. It is easy to remember.

AZGGAGH is a balm in a 20 g pot. On the lips it gives a red that is softer than lipstick and makes them look naturally redder, with no effort at all. On the cheeks it leaves a light flush. While it colours, it softens and cares for the skin of your lips and cheeks. It has seven ingredients: castor oil, sweet almond oil, beeswax, poppy flower extract, shea butter, CI 77491 (an iron oxide, which gives the red) and tocopherol.

Their INCI names are on our ingredients page. A colour is best judged on your own skin, and you can do that at our shop in SCC.

And these days, you can wear red on your cheeks on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.