The girl with Thanaka smeared on her face looked at me curiously.

Walking through a back alley in Pyay, a town in central Myanmar, I came across a small group of girls at play. “Play” might be too generous a word. They were simply standing in front of a bamboo fence, talking about nothing in particular, the way time is often spent in alleys like this. Their hair was neatly tied atop their heads, and their cheeks were painted with thanaka.

In Myanmar, thanaka is entirely ordinary. Men and women, young and old, apply it to their faces for protection against the sun and for the skin itself. It is made by grinding the bark of the thanaka tree into a fine paste. I am told it has a faint, pleasant scent, though I never gathered the courage to lean close enough to someone’s face to confirm this for myself.

When I first visited Myanmar, thanaka struck me as curious, almost theatrical. It looked as though people were wearing face paint for a festival that never ended. But people are adaptable creatures. The longer I stayed, the faster that sense of strangeness dissolved. Customs that seem exotic at first quietly slide into the background once you see them every day. What is unusual, I eventually realized, is not the practice itself but the unaccustomed gaze of the outsider.

As I stood there, camera in hand, turning these thoughts over in my head, one of the girls with thanaka on her cheeks began to stare straight back at me. To her, the truly peculiar sight was probably not the painted faces in the alley, but a foreigner standing still, pointing a small box of glass and metal in her direction.