NOSE PLUGS - APATANI WOMEN

The Apatani, also known as the Tanni, are a tribal group of approximately 26,000, based in in Ziro, in the Apatani Plateau of Arunachal Pradesh, in India. Nowadays the plugs are mostly worn by the elderly women, but there was a time when all the women in the tribe we required to wear the bizarre accessories. 

     Tradition holds that the Apatani women were considered the most beautiful in the land, resulting in the Apatanis constantly being raided by other tribes and their women kidnapped. Thus, the nose plug was born in order to protect the women from neighboring tribes. In order to make themselves less attractive to other tribes, the Apatani women began wearing massive nose plugs and tattooing their faces. 
     In the middle of the 20th century, with modernization taking hold, this tradition began to die. In fact, no Apatani woman born after 1970 practices the nose plug custom.







SOURCE: scribol.com