Alta

Alta is a thin red dye painted around the edges of the feet. Women in West Bengal wear it for religious and social occasions, and at some Hindu weddings the bride steps into a plate of it before she crosses the threshold of her husband’s family’s house for the first time.^[1] It goes on with a twist of cotton or a fine brush, as a band along the edge of the sole and across the toes. Classical dancers paint it on the palms and feet as well: it is applied, a Bharatanatyam teacher explained to The News Minute, “to make the mudras more dramatic and to project our movements to the audience”.^[2]

It is not henna. Henna is a leaf paste whose dye is released slowly and binds to the protein of the skin to stain it;^[3] alta is a coloured liquid, painted on. Its old name points to its old material: the Sanskrit lexicon Amarakosa lists alaktaka among its names for lac dye.^[4]

Lac is an insect’s red, part of the resinous secretion of scale insects, from which the dye was traditionally drawn by grinding the crude resin to a powder and treating it with a weak alkali.^[5] Little of it is in the bottles now. When dermatologists analysed three brands of alta in 1998, after women developed pale patches where they had worn it, they found two synthetic dyes, Crocein Scarlet MOO and rhodamine B; in patch tests, both the alta and the scarlet dye left depigmented skin, and the authors noted that azo dyes such as that one had not been reported as removing pigment before.^[6] A later review adds that alta can cause dermatitis before the colour loss, that it accounted for 1.2 per cent of chemical leukoderma cases in one series, and that the chemicals found in it include azo dyes and p-phenylenediamine, the hair-dye ingredient behind “black henna” reactions.^[7]

In the United States every colour used on the skin must be approved for that use. Neither lac nor rhodamine B is among the colour additives permitted in cosmetics,^[8] and a cosmetic that uses a colour outside those rules is adulterated; the Food and Drug Administration’s import alert for colour-additive violations exists to stop such products at the border.^[9] p-Phenylenediamine is not permitted in any cosmetic meant for the skin.^[10] A bottle that names no colours at all gives no way of knowing which side of the rules it is on.

Wash and dry the feet first. Dip a cotton bud, a twist of cotton wool or a fine brush in the bottle and paint a clean band along the edge of the sole, where it meets the top of the foot; then fill the tips of the toes or draw a line across them, and let the colour dry completely before you walk, because wet alta marks floors and cloth. Keep it off cracked heels and broken skin, and wash any spills off the skin at once.

Because some altas take the colour out of the skin, stop at the first itch, redness or pale patch and see a dermatologist.^[11] If you wear it for a single occasion, choose a bottle whose label names its colours, and try it first on a less conspicuous patch of skin, as the FDA advises before a temporary tattoo goes on the face.^[12] Dancers who paint alta on their palms for every performance have the most reason to check what is in it, and the felt-tipped alta pens now sold for dance raise the same question: a pen is only as safe as the colour inside it.

Lac red on the feet runs through the literature Moti Chandra surveyed in 1940: queens whose feet were coloured with clotted lac and stained with saffron above, and women who dyed their feet with lac in the hot season. Of one ancient reference he added simply that the feet were dyed with lac “as today”. Nor was the red only for women or only for feet: men in the same sources applied collyrium to their eyes and lac dye to their lips.^[13] The red was worth the trouble. Insect dyes were among the most expensive colourants of the ancient world, and lac, which can be taken from the resin without killing the insects, moved along the Silk Roads between India and north-west China in the first millennium CE; its chemical traces have been identified in textiles from Xinjiang dated between the second and ninth centuries.^[14]

The practice has kept moving. Guru Usha Dattar, a dancer of Bharatanatyam, Kathakali and Mohiniyattam, told The News Minute in 2018 that when she learnt to dance, performers in the south used henna, and that alta came later: “once, alta was brought to Kalamandalam at Kerala and that’s when we discovered it.” In the paper’s account, henna faded from the dance stages of the south as the Bengali custom travelled there.^[15] What the bottles contain has changed too. By the 1998 analysis the red was synthetic,^[16] and the sources used here do not say when the resin gave way. The red border on a bride’s feet has stayed; what makes it red has not.