More brides are opting for portrait mehendi

If you still want the regular, intricate, bride and groom on your wedding mehendi, you are living under a rock. Now, getting your partner’s face — complete with every detail — on your palms is the new trend. TV actress Divyanka Tripathi, who got married recently, got hers and her groom Vivek Dahiya’s face drawn in the middle of her palms, and it was so detailed that it looked like a painting.

Mehendi artiste Bishwanath Mondal, who goes by the name of Bishu, has been doing this for a couple of years now. “I like to try new things in mehendi, so this is something I figured out after experimenting,” he says, adding, “It is a complicated process. No free-hand drawing will give results like this. So we get hold of a photo of the bride and groom, sketch it, then make a decal of it. It is stuck on the middle of the bride’s palm, and water applied for the tattoo to stick. Then the sticker is peeled off. After that, we put a paste of mehendi on the area. Once the mehendi dries, we take the sticker off and proceed to draw designs around it. The area that is covered by the tattoo does not take the colour, and the rest does, making the design look exactly like the bride and groom.”

It takes 3-4 days to get the sketch done. However, mehendi artistes ask for your picture one month before the big day. This designer mehendi’s pocket pinch? Approx `3,000 just for the faces on the palm.
Homemaker Ruchika Gupta, who got it done for her wedding, says, “Everybody appreciated my mehendi on my big day. It was something different, and it also came out beautifully. My husband was especially excited as he is fond of getting his picture taken.”