There is a look that makes Nigerians deeply uncomfortable, and it is not the manufactured grandeur of Instagram baddies or the high-society glitz of aso ebi weddings. It's more delicate than that. It's the woman who wears her hair in full kinked volume, either wrapped in ankara or left to stretch aloft like a prayer. It is the woman who layers beads around her waist, not to seduce, but because she enjoys the weight of rhythm against her skin. It's the girl who walks barefoot in a compound or wears cowries around her ankle. She smells of shea butter, burns incense without apology, and walks as if the ground belonged to her. In other places, she can be referred to as "earthy" or "bohemian." But, in Nigeria? She's either an ogbanje or a marine spirit. She's suspicious. And she is never just a girl going about her business.

What's worse is that these suspicions aren't limited to strangers. It comes from church aunties side-eyeing at fellowship, market women muttering "Na wa o, this one has spirit," and uncles who both want you and want to cast you out. There is a national allergy to any woman who appears too comfortable in her body without permission. Once you choose aesthetics that challenge the conventional beauty contract—no wigs, no contouring, no heels—you cease being ordinary. Your waist beads are no longer adornment; they become Kayamata. Your jewellery isn’t a style; it is a shrine. Everything you wear turns from fabric to fetish in the public eye. You walk into a room and people start praying under their breath.

How did we get here, where the mere act of existing in a natural state becomes a threat? It is not just about fashion—it’s about cultural memory, gender expectations, and spiritual fear. The traditional symbols that once held power and pride have been colonized by suspicion. Waist beads used to be part of womanhood rites, symbols of sensuality, fertility, and confidence passed from mother to daughter. Cowries weren’t ornaments; they were wealth, divination tools, sacred shells holding the wisdom of water. Today, the same cowries are seen as proof of dark affiliations, and beads—innocent strands of color—are assumed to be sex magic imported from some shadowy northern market stall.

The Kayamata economy exacerbated the problem. What began as conversations about increasing desire and libido evolved into stories of manipulation and sorcery. Between advertisements for "sweetener oils" and "grip him forever" charms, people decided that all feminine self-awareness is weaponized. The woman who understands her body and knows how to beautify it, must be scheming. She cannot just be; she must be casting spell. Never mind that some of us wear beads for the music they make on our hips, or for the intimacy of having something beautiful that the rest of the world does not see. In Nigeria, if your beauty does not serve male respectability, it becomes something to fear, not admire.

But this fear isn’t new. It’s just wearing new clothes. The modern-day “earthy” woman is a remix of the village girl who refused to kneel, the river goddess who spoke in tongues the missionaries couldn’t translate, the market women who drummed warnings during colonial raids, the matriarchs who traced nsibidi or uli on skin and walls in acts of resistance and memory. She is what happens when heritage refuses to become relic. She dresses like someone who remembers. And in a society obsessed with forgetting, that remembering looks like rebellion. If she wears white, she is called spiritual wife. If she shaves her hair, she must be in mourning. If she burns sage or rubs camwood, they say it’s initiation. There is no room for nuance. Everything must fit neatly into purity or danger, church or shrine, wife or witch.

The saddest part is how thoroughly gendered this scrutiny is. A man can stack bracelets, grow locs, and people call him Afrocentric, maybe even woke. A woman does the same, and suddenly she’s "too deep" or "too spiritual." Her style becomes a sermon she did not sign up to preach. She becomes everyone's theological project—people want to save her, reform her, cast something out of her. It is exhausting. And it’s revealing. The problem isn't with what she wears. It is with her refusal to explain herself, to centre her femininity on frailty, to make herself smaller or less magnetic for the sake of others.

This witchification,  I dare say, of style isn’t just about religion—it’s about control. It’s about the deep unease society feels when women no longer decorate themselves for male consumption. When the body is not an invitation but an altar, people panic. They project. They accuse. They say it’s ogbanje, marine spirit, Kayamata, anything but what it actually is: a woman choosing herself, dressing for herself, delighting in the aesthetic of her own spirit. There is something radical about that, and every radical woman knows that being misunderstood is the price of freedom.

It is not the beads that scare them. It's the audacity. The boldness to glow without gloss. To dress like a poem. To wear clothes that whisper rather than shout. To reject both the colonial beauty ideal and its modern hyper-consumerist form. The earthy girl does not try to be rebellious. She is defiant because her existence defies easy categorization. And in a country like Nigeria, where women are either saint or seductress, her refusal to choose a side is misinterpreted as witchcraft.

So, no, she's not an ogbanje. She's not a marine spirit. Her waist beads are not soaked in honey or incantations. They are beads. Her anklets don’t  summon men; they summon her back to her body. Her skin glows because she oils it, not because she made a pact with the river. Perhaps, if people stared less, whispered less, and accused less, they would realize that the earthy girl is not hiding anything. She is simply not hiding herself.