Highbrow: A painful tale of grooming gone wrong

So here’s the thing: I’m not that great at being “girly.” You know, like, heels and mascara “girly.” But every once in a while the urge will strike me, and I will attempt to up the feminine ante, so to speak.

Monday was one such night.

My eyebrows, in their natural state, are fine, ok? Really. In fact, my whole life I have plucked them little bits from month to month, and because I wasn’t genetically predisposed to unibrows, I got by with just that.

But here I find myself in a new city, excited about new things in life and ready to take it all in. And so, there I was walking by the Macy’s storefront in downtown San Francisco and I saw a large, shiny, pink, girly sign advertising brow shaping.

I thought to myself, “Sure! Why not? My brows could use the shaping assistance of a professional. Let’s get in there and give my brows a dignified shape. A shape that says, ‘I am perfection in the form of an arc, and therefore am also a manifestation of feminine class.’”

Bet you didn’t think a brow could say so much.

I sat atop a plush stool. Of course, it was pink. What other color would it be? And Janelle, a woman who herself had a lovely brow shape, began to wax, and strip, and brush and trim, and pluck and repeat. And it didn’t really even hurt.

In fact, I hardy noticed it as we chatted about the Occupy protests and our proximity to them. The delays on the BART that day. The various charms of various neighborhoods and so on.

I was doing it! I was being a real girl in a real city. And then she held the mirror up.

My breath caught.

“Oh that will go away. I can cover it if you like,” my new brow bestie said about the red swelling that now surrounded my immaculately trimmed, and very well shaped brows.

I walked home finding relief from the stinging in the cool San Francisco night air, not making eye contact with a soul for fear that my reddened brow lines were glowing.

And as my head hit my pillow for the night, I rest assured that eight hours later it would be gone. Just like Janelle had said.

“OH MY…” I stopped myself before I woke my roommate. I get up earlier than she does.

I stared in the mirror. Stunned. Annoyed. Was I being punished for vanity?

Something had gone very wrong. And the result was not perfect brows. No. The result was bumps. Big and small, these bumps outline my eyebrows, filling every area that Janelle’s wax had touched.

Turns out I am allergic to being a girl.

Ok, that’s dramatic. But my face does have a serious problem with its hair being ripped from its pores via hot, melted wax.

So what’s any gal to do? You bet I put makeup on. And, because they still remain and it is Wednesday, I say a little prayer to the gods of eyebrow grooming every night.

“Oh patron saint of kempt brows, be with me in my time of need. Grant me the serenity to endure this painful forehead rash, the courage to keep my brows shaped evermore, and the wisdom to know never to do it via hot wax again. Amen.”

Celeste & Heidi are lucky my mother needed a video of me explaining the meaning of friendship on the very same night I got my brows ripped off. The pic frame is fuzzy and dark, but even in it, you can see the red.

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