Henna has limitations.  Henna's natural color range is narrow.  Henna has to stay in contact with skin, undistrubed, for a long period of time to produce a good stain.  These factors made henna a poor fit for consumer consumption in a global economy.

People love color, sparkle, and convenience. If henna is a benefit to women world-wide working in informal economies, artists will attempt to adapt to the marketplace. The most unfortunate effects of this has been the addition of para-phenylenediamine to henna to create 'black henna', causing over a million injuries since 'black henna' first became fashionable. The addition of benzene to henna to create faster, darker color has caused an epidemic of adult leukemia in the Arabian Peninnsula.  

HennaPage worked on developing safer alternatives to help henna artists serve their clients who wanted a wide color range, familiar application, non-traditional skin placement, a high level of safety, accessible, safe ... and if possible, approved by the FDA and manufactured with clinical safeguards.  Medical adhesive turned out to be one of the best options. 

Every year, a work crew of artists were invited to produce the HennaPage calendar, and every year, they were encouraged to 'push the envelope' with innovative techniques. Each work project had a theme, usually involving solving a technical challenge for henna artists.  In 2012, the hennapage calendar artists met to work on dark skinned people, with the ideal of getting the best henna results on dark skin.

During the HennaPage calendar experimentations with 'white henna' in 2012, the head of the KSU African Studies department and the organizer of a women’s economic development groups in Nigeria visited with us.  We talked about the potential for ways to introduce this to women's economic development cooperatives in Africa where 'black henna' made with para-phenylenediamine has been injuring women for decades. Becoming Moonlight® gilding paste, 'white henna' could be helpful in helping women in Africa, or anywhere in the world, have an independent income without harming their own, or their client's health with para-phenylenediamine.  We hope that sometime in the future, this will happen.

Soon after the calendar work was completed in the 2012, Penni AlZayer illustrated, and TapDancing Lizard published "Enlaced," the most influential book showing white henna: over 2500 copies have been downloaded in the first two years of publication.  People especially loved the cover with Penni's work in Becoming Moonlight® on a young woman's arm ... and they understood the work as 'White Henna'.