Beauty is pain - but how much pain??

"If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is:

who cares ? - Tina Fey

I wasn’t going to share this story on the blog.  Because it makes me sound like the stupidest woman in Ireland.
But two weeks ago, I took it upon myself to comment on the relationship status of a teenager who is a complete stranger to me. 
Last week I blathered on at some length about how other people deal with their children. 

Maybe it’s time that I put myself in for a bit of judgement, I'm feeling brave today.
Here goes.... 

I almost never leave my house wearing makeup.  I go through short phases of putting it on at some stage of the day, but there’s no true commitment there.

I’m no better about my hair.  I wait for the perfect storm before attending the hairdresser.
The perfect storm involves a number of factors.  My hair has to be snow white at the roots, at least one inch at each side of the parting, I need to have been paid that week, and I need to have a Saturday free. 
When all these things are in place, I ring for an appointment. By then it’s too late to book in for the Saturday.  By the following week I’ve spent all my money, and the whole caper starts again.

Now for the worst confession of all.  Once my hair is horrible enough,  I start not caring about my eyebrows. I have mental eyebrows.  Very Ernie-esque, when left to their own devices.

But I decide, sure feck it, things are so bad now, that nothing will improve things.  I’m not proud of it.  But it’s the truth, and I’ve learned to live with it.
Happily, I have a colleague who hasn’t learn to live with it.  She’s the only person in my life who says things like “your hair is ridiculous, sort it out” or “your eyebrows are horrific, have you no shame?”.  Lately, she made a comment on the eyebrows.  I made up some excuse, but she wasn’t having it.
She told me there was a great place around the corner, good beauticians and inexpensive, and to get myself over there before the day was out.
I went over at lunchtime.  It’s a hair salon on the ground floor.  Absolutely tiny, and shabby enough to be called grotty.  Or horrible.  As I walked in, one of the young stylists turned to me, and shouted that he hoped I was there about my eyebrows.  Which caused everyone in the place to spin around and look at them. I went red and shuffled my feet and nodded, and he called a girl who looked young enough to be making her Confirmation to see to me.
She looked sorrowfully at me, and I asked for a 5pm appointment.  She said that would be fine, but made no attempt at all to record our conversation or even pretend she had an appointment book.

I went back at five, and the tiny girl arrived up the stairs, followed by a woman who had perfectly lovely eyebrows.  It crossed my mind that she’d probably been having her legs waxed or something, and had come in with the nice brows.  Because this salon was giving me a funny feeling.  A bad funny feeling.  My brain was telling me to leave immediately. But I knew I looked a holy show, and in fairness, the place had been recommended to me. 

I followed the girl down a very narrow stairs, to the “beauty salon” in the basement.
More bad feelings.  The room was divided in two by a flimsy partition wall.  To the left was a storage area, holding two large hairdressers chairs, presumably being saved up for when they get a premises big enough to house them. 
To the right was what looked like the kind of bunker that kidnap victims are usually hidden in.
There was a beauticians bed, where the waxing was to take place.  Beside this was a cheap self standing shelving unit.  At the end of the tiny room was a washing machine.  Between the end of the bed and the washing machine was a pink plastic shower curtain.  I don’t know what the curtain was in aid of.
When I got onto the bed, my head touched the partition wall on one end, and my feet the plastic curtain on the other.

The girl had very limited English, but it was a lot better than my Chinese.
“What you have done?”
“Ah, well, remember I asked at lunchtime?  Eyebrows, underarm, legs?”
“No.  I no wax leg.  Take too long.  I very tired.”
Jesus.  “What time are you closed at?”
“Seven.”
“We have plenty of time, don’t we?”
I was going on a little spa break the following day with a beloved friend who I have never seen looking less than fabulous.  I needed a leg wax.
“No.  I too tired.  No wax legs.”
I hoped to talk her around as we went along, and I had no time to make an appointment anywhere else, so I suggested we get started and see how we get along.
“OK.  Eyebrow first.  Close eyes please.”
I closed my eyes, but nothing happened.  I opened them again to make sure all was well.
Just in time to see a stick hanging over my left eye, the wax just dropping off the end.
Thank God blinking is so natural.  If it had been any other part of my body in peril, I wouldn’t have been quick enough to get out of the way.  As it was, I closed my eye, just as the large blob of hot wax landed on my eyelid.

She’d fecking well waxed my eye shut. 

There was a brief, horror filled silence.  Then the girl started shrieking.
“Oh no! Oh no!  I sorry.  I so sorry.”
I like to pity myself at times like this (not that there’d ever been times like this before, but you know what I mean).  I would have preferred to lie back and be taken care of, by a capable and intelligent person.
There was absolutely no chance of that happening.  My beautician (and I use the term oh so loosely) was panicking. 
In fact, she’d lost the run of herself completely.
“Please no shout, please not shouting, I have baby in China, I want bring baby here, if lose job, no baby!”
Now.  I really want this girl to get her baby.  But my eye was glued shut by hot wax.  I tried just rubbing it off.  Big mistake.  It took quite a few seconds to unstick my hand from my eye.
“Calm down.  How do you remove wax?”
“Yes, yes, I wax off!” she responded as if I’d made a brilliant suggestion.  She moved to get more wax from her bubbling pot.
“No, no more wax!”  Christ Almighty.  “Breathe, take a deep breath” Why was I calming her down?  “How do you remove wax?  How would you get the extra spots of wax off someone’s leg when you’re finished?”
“I get a strip, I wax it off."
“No, I don’t want my eyelashes waxed off.  Seriously, how are you going to get the wax off my eye?”
She stared at me wildly.  “Cold water?”
“No.  Cold water will only cool the wax, and set it like cement.  Come on now, there must be something you can use to remove wax, think!”
After a few seconds she came to a bit and removed the wax with some sort of cream.  It really stung, and my eye felt raw and sore for ages afterward.
Now I know anyone with a brain would have gotten off that bed and gone straight home, not stopping to discuss payment.  But she’d gotten so upset, and I was still thinking about the poor baby in China, waiting for its mother to return.  She’d panicked, but sure, these things happen, don’t they?  I lay down again, and she carried on and waxed my eyebrows.

She worked in silence.  The atmosphere was tense.  I wished for the soft lighting and plinky music that nicer establishments usually provide. 
Eventually she finished, and turned to the rickety shelf to take down her mirror, so that I could approve the work.  As soon as she moved the mirror, a scissors fell from the shelf and landed, point down, mind you, in the middle of my breast bone.
It didn’t really hurt actually.  But there was a lot more drama.  In all the fuss I didn’t even notice, when she showed me the mirror, that my eyebrows were absolutely awful, messy and barely smaller than when we’d started.

I still didn’t leave.  She wanted to make time to do my legs, just to make sure that I knew how sorry she was.  But even I'm not that stupid.  I'd probably end up in a wheelchair.  We were just going through the “are you sure?”, "It’s fine” conversation when she, for absolutely no explicable reason, rubbed my exposed belly.  (I’d let her do my underarms.  I wasn’t just lying there in the nip).
“You have lovely skin”.

A belly rub.

I jumped from the little bed and flung my top back on as quickly as I could.  I was just leaving when she threw her arms around me, and hugged me.
I had finally, at long last, become terrified of the place.  I paid her of course.  I think I even tipped her.
The following day, when I met my friend in the hotel, one of the first things she did was to take a tweezers from her handbag and tell me I couldn’t go around in the state I was in.  I shaped my eyebrows in the hotel bathroom.
So now I’m doing my own eyebrows.  I’m traumatised, I can’t face another salon yet.  I’m not great at it. In fact, my right eyebrow currently has a bald patch in the middle, and what I can only describe as a combover.

My Tweezers

Tweezers are a cruel master.

They have the power to make me look presentable, or to send me out into the world looking like an utter gobshite.

They even look dangerous.  Pointy, if they’re to be any use, or at least that’s been my experience.  And quite shiny, usually.  Sitting there, at the bottom of my makeup bag, twinkling at me, trying to entice me into their web of pain and torment.

I know what will happen if I allow myself to be tempted by their twinkle.  I’ll end up in agony for the night, and looking bonkers for weeks.  I’m leaving it to the professionals.  It’s faster, easier, equally painful, in fairness.  But somehow I’d rather pay someone else to hurt me than do it myself for nothing.

God knows, those tweezers are always at the top of my “How to Save Money” list.  When the overdraft is high and morale is low, I always decide that I’ll colour my own hair and shape my own eyebrows.

But before I’m paid again I’m using my overdraft for dying and waxing – who has the patience for all that plucking and shaping?  Seriously, who?  I know I’m an eejit and a wastrel and a spendthrift, but Christ Almighty, I have to put some value on my time too. 

And the eyebrow caper is always the same.  I start with the best of intentions.  I always do the right eye first, because I’m left handed, so it’s easier.

After what feels like hours of poking and tormenting myself, I look awful.  Red, shiny and painful.  Or like my lovely Dad used to say,

“with a head like a turkey cock’s”.

I presume boy turkeys are red of face, I don’t know, I’ve never met one.  If not, Dad might have been commenting on my surfeit of chins.

But I’m not going to focus on that possibility.

After the first eye, I have a break.  I have a cup of coffee, trying to ignore the stinging, pinched feeling all around my eyebrow.  It usually takes at least two cigarettes to get me back on my feet.  Gingerly, I approach the mirror.

I always hope that the major clean up operation I’ve done on one eyebrow will somehow, miraculously, make the second one look better.

Obviously it doesn’t.

I just look like the local maniac.

I have to hack away at the second eyebrow, in order that I might be able to leave the house in the morning.

And by now I’ll have lost all morale for the job.  I start thinking of ways to make up the money for the eyebrow waxing.  If we started drinking black coffee, for instance, we could stop buying milk.  Surely that would free up the price of a treatment every three weeks or so?  His Nibs isn’t keen.

Maybe we could cut back on the dog food.  Neither his Nibs nor the dogs seem keen on that idea.

Of course I could give up the cigarettes, that would save enough to bring the beautician to my house every Saturday and give me all treatments I want and a full massage I’d say.  But not yet, I’m not ready yet.  If I’d been able to see into the future when I had my first cigarette, and known that one day I’d consider giving up buying milk instead of cigarettes, I might have thought twice.

I have awful eyebrows.  They’re fine when they’re done, of course, but left to their own devices they sprawl like ivy in every direction.  They’re really dark and there’s no way you could miss them.  My sister and sister in law both have very fair eyebrows, I think they actually have to fill them in with those eyebrow pencils – possibly the only kind of makeup I’ve never ever bought in my life.  They always say how my eyebrows are lovely and strong and a feature of their own.  Yes, they are, I suppose.  But they’re also strong when I’m standing in front of the mirror  trying to pull them out, and my skin stretches so far off my forehead that it visibly pings back into place like something from Tom and Jerry when I finally pluck a hair out.

Bloody tweezers.  They’re only used when I’m both horrendous looking and broke.  No wonder I hate them.