A spokesman for the "Legal Initiative" Ksenia Babich about favorite cosmetics
Under the heading "Cosmetic" we study the contents of beauty cases, dressing tables and cosmetic bags of interesting characters to us - and we show all this to you.
Photo: Alyona Ermishina
Interview: Margarita Virova
Ksenia Babich
Spokesman for the organization "Legal Initiative"
One must always uphold the right to be oneself.
About work
I am thirty two years old. After university, I immediately began working as a journalist, wrote about politics and society, worked as a newsman and editor. Now I am a spokesman for the Legal Initiative organization - it helps people fight for their rights and provides free legal support to victims of domestic and sexual violence. Among people who turn to lawyers for help, there are many who live in the regions of the North Caucasus. My task is to convey their stories to others in order to help people who are in a difficult situation to defend their rights. In the past few years, researchers collaborating with the organization have issued two important reports that talk about female genital mutilation (the so-called female circumcision) in the mountainous regions of the Republic of Dagestan. Small girls are damaged by the external genital organs, the procedure itself is carried out in mountain auls with improvised means and without anesthesia. The local residents motivate these injuries by the fact that, growing up, the girl becomes less temperamental, which means that she can maintain her innocence before marriage and loyalty to her husband. It is necessary to fight this terrible tradition and tell people about the inadmissibility of such bullying of children.
About the attitude to beauty
Beauty for me is poise, self-acceptance and good mood. When a person is confident, polite and calm, he is handsome to me. I can say that it was always like this: my parents brought me up outside the context of objectification, so until adolescence I could not say about one person that someone was beautiful and someone wasn’t. With age, this has not changed, I still like personalities, not people who correlate themselves with conventional ideals of beauty.
About well-being
I didn’t have any bad habits, I didn’t even learn to smoke. Of course, as an ordinary resident of a big city, for a while I overly loved fast food, sugar and alcoholic cocktails. But then the peak of enthusiasm passed, and besides, I began to show food allergies. Now I just eat a lot of raw vegetables and fruits, fish, poultry and almost abandoned sugar. I try to wean myself away from food with a high shelf life and eat only fresh, inventing a menu every day. However, the glass of prosecco still did not harm anyone. And one hamburger a month just will not drive me to the grave - I follow the diet, but without much drama. I take supplements, but also very moderately. I can not advise anything: you should always discuss any medications with your doctor.
Always enjoy delicious food and good sex. Astrological predictions on Mercury's Retrograde make it easier to relate to problems: it’s easiest to put troubles into those that have risen somewhere in space. I also adore unusual perfumes, my passion now is Serge Lutens. Once a year, I can afford to buy some kind of incredible smell, I learn about other flavors from the channel of Bogdan Zyryanov. But the main thing is to respect yourself and your body. One must always defend the right to be oneself, and not to adapt to someone's ideas about beauty and "normality."
About make-up and prohibitions
With cosmetics everything is simple: my mother never used it because of the strongest allergy. Until now, all she does is wash her with soap, put on her face an ordinary moisturizer and sanskrin. But I was allowed to use anything: I borrowed some part of decorative cosmetics from my grandmother, and she still loves the bright NYX lipsticks, which I bring to her as a gift.
As soon as I got my first personal money, I began to drop them on the shadows, some kind of pencils, tonalniki and so on. It was painted mainly at home and for itself, considering the magazines "Lisa" and Cool. I went to school at that time when even high school girls were forbidden to come in: I still remember those humiliating mornings when the headmaster stood at the door of the school and checked every girl's face, and if the makeup seemed to check bright, then the girl was made to wash him with cold water household soap. The same applied to hair dyeing - the girls were read off and forced to repaint their hair the next day. Moreover, everyone suffered from this punishment, even the gold medalist of the class. Only at the presentation of certificates I dyed my hair crimson, put on sequins and put on a red pantsuit. True, at first no one even recognized me. I am very glad that now schoolchildren express themselves more freely through appearance.
Two years ago, I changed my apartment, and when I entered a new one, before I even had to disassemble the boxes of things, the FSB and the Investigation Committee broke into me - in their opinion, I had something to do with the case of extremism. I had to go through a search in a new apartment. When the FSB opened the boxes, in one of them, quite large and deep, he saw tubes with cosmetics piled uphill, nail polishes and all sorts of creams. From his face it was clear that he now needed to dig in all this - and this, apparently, is terribly unpleasant. He even asked: "Is this all your cosmetics?" And I answered him: "What is this ?! My."
