By BR Tabatha
There's much to love about a good beauty ritual. The way your skin feels soft and clean post-facial. Running your hands over silky-smooth skin after a wax. Looking into a mirror and seeing impossibly long lashes after you've curled your lashes, added falsies, then applied mascara. Good times.
Then there are the not so good times. The times when you wonder why you go to the effort to beautify yourself only to endure pain, embarassment, and sometimes bruises and scabs.
So, what are the horrific beauty moments we pray to never repeat? Check these out... and prepare to cringe.
The razor slice. Perhaps you're shaving while daydreaming, perhaps your razor's a little on the old side, perhaps you slipped in the shower... No matter how it happened there's no denying the pain and ugh-ness of seeing a good inch of skin peeled away to reveal red, rawness, that will scab over and take its sweet time healing.
Hair colour that's not to dye for. 'I'll colour my hair,' you think. You buy your box dye. You take it home. Get things under way, and then you find yourself sitting butt nekid in the bathroom with only a towel around your shoulders, plastic wrap in your hair, and your scalp starts to burn. Burn. Burn some more. No pretty hair colour is worth that kind of pain, so in the shower you jump and down the drain the dye runs.
The evil epilator. Who are you people who can handle the pain of epilation? How do you handle the pain of epilation? Having hair after hair ripped from one's leg is agony. Agony!
Ban the brush! Who knew a basic hair brush could be an instrument of torture? The long-haired folk who've used one only to have it tangle in their hair, then had to grit their teeth in pain while trying to pull, yank, twist and turn the heck out of it, all the while wondering if large clumps are being torn from their scalp, that's who. Thank goodness for kind and caring brushes, like the Mita TanglePRO - innovation is a beautiful thing.
The depilatory cream - it burns. A BR Kellie story that has imprinted itself in our heads is the story of her attempt at using depilatory cream on her armpits. Slather it on, she did. Sit back and relax, she did. Feel the fiery burn, she did. Whip it off, she did. Spend the night with cold flannels under her armpits, and the next day unable to lower her arms due to the bulging inflammation, she did. There's a reason they say to patch test first.
When wands attack. Applying mascara appears to be an innocuous job. Remove wand from tube, swipe it on lashes, go about your day. All fun and games until you sneeze mid-swipe or find yourself distracted, and next thing you know you've stabbed yourself in the eye and the world's gone a blurry shade of black.
The cruelty of curling tongs. There's nothing like a bouncy head of Victoria's Secret model-eque hair. So beachy, so alluring, so fun and free. You know what won't put a bounce in your step? The moment the curling tong magically attaches itself to some part of your face or the back of your neck and sizzles your skin.
Speaking of sizzling... My ears are burning. There's nothing like straightening your hair for a salon chic look. Except for when it clips the top of your ear, sending a bolt of pain through you. The only thing worse? It's done by your hairdresser and instead of swearing black and blue you have to smile sweetly and proclaim 'it's fine, doesn't hurt at all' because you're hardly going to tell the truth least you annoy them by telling the blatant truth and find your ear repeatedly clamped by accident, or straight out sizzled off.
Time to toss out the tweezers? Tweezing eyebrow hairs, nose hairs and random body hairs can feel a little dangerous at the best of times, but it's even more so when your tweezers are at the end of their life, blunt as anything, and you have to snatch repeatedly at hairs in order to grip and rip them, which can lead to skin being gripped and ripped instead. Ow.
Pucker up and say bruise. The things we lasses will do for bigger lips. Suctioning our smackers into a glass or piece of plastic to get that bee stung look is a thing, and so are the painful bruises that result. A bad look, a bad feel, just bad all over.
Probably losing too much hair after a mornings’ brush... knowing i don’t have a lot to spare on my small head... who knows when I’ll start going bald. That’s one thing that keeps me worried time to time.