Now I’m scarred by new worry about my teenagers abroad
COLUMNIST
YOU’VE got to feel sorry for the teenager who had what he thought was a temporary henna tattoo on his face and has ended up scarred, possibly for years.
Henna tattoos, like hair dyes, can cause nasty allergic reactions, as 18-year-old James Colley from Cardiff has discovered.
He ended up with a massive scar after having a Mike Tyson-style design in henna applied to his face during a holiday in Laganas on the Greek island of Zakynthos.
The teenager assumed it was temporary but, after having an allergic reaction, had to have the design bleached off, leaving scars he’s been warned may remain for years.
Hair dyes come with warnings on the box to test for allergic reactions. Henna tattoo artists setting up stall in seaside holiday resorts tend not to bother with these niceties. They just want your cash.
Reading his story just as I was waving my 19-year-old off on holiday to Europe this week I had to choke down my list of “don’ts” and tried to replace them with “dos”.
I read in some parenting manual years ago that it was important not to be negative – but it is hard.
Aged eight she had begged for a henna tattoo on her arm during a family holiday to the same island of Zakynthos where James just had a face design he didn’t bargain for.
When she asked to have a design painted on her arm I did think about it for a day or two.
She was young but I eventually agreed. I’d heard no scare stories, other children I could see on the beach had had them and seemed fine and henna is natural, or so I thought. So she got a cute picture of a dolphin done and proudly showed it off.
She was fine, never had an allergic reaction and the mark wore off after about a week.
All was fine, as it usually is in life, but that’s hard to convince yourself of when waving a young person off on holiday abroad.
It’s especially hard if you once went travelling yourself and know it’s a time when you want to smash barriers and try new things – especially if dull, older people tell you not to.
So, “Don’t get a tattoo – henna or otherwise”, “Don’t drink the bar dry and don’t walk alone in risky areas” had to be replaced by a rather lame: “Do take care”.
“I’ll be fine,” she dismissed me with, as a message zapped up on my phone from my 19-year-old nephew currently exploring eastern Europe.
“Sleeping in Sofia bus station. Didn’t book accommodation and got here too late,” it read. Or words to that effect.
That’s the horror of instant communication. Where before what the eye didn’t see the mind didn’t fret over, the eye is now constantly being barraged by electronic images and messages from afar.
Get them and you worry. Don’t get them and you worry. There’s no winning. It’s not like in the good old days, when sailors took off for years without word and their parents had to put anxiety aside or go mad.
My sister responded to this vaguely alarming message from her son by telling him to be careful and sending a cute video of their cat.
By this time he had probably been abducted by Bulgarian gangsters for all we knew, but videos of cats are always reassuring. What else is social media good for?
That’s another thing about teenagers – they send a flurry of messages via their various devices and social media apps and then you get total silence.
Are they dead? Injured? Beaten up and lying in a ditch? No, they have just cut the strings for a while and are probably only communicating on the apps they don’t invite the olds on to.
At this point I have to stop myself asking other teenagers I know if they can check the Instagram and Snapchat forums my daughter blocks me from.
I have only resorted to this desperate measure once, to be told by a slightly patronising 18-year-old “she seems fine on her story just now”.
So, in the grand scheme of the wild imaginings of a relative of a teenager travelling this summer, I suppose that a henna tattoo scar is not so bad – although I guess it must feel very bad for James.
But knowing this has happened I must get on the phone and message my daughter to beware one more bogeyman – the henna tattoo artist.