Beauty is pain! The unglamorous truth about looking beautiful

I’m having an interesting week. I decided to do my eyebrows over the weekend because the Indian lady that usually does them was not in when  I went to the salon on Saturday. The idea of transformation has always been alluring to me, I actually admire hairdressers, manicurists and makeup artists. I have always wanted to experiment – not on my self though. So I decided to sit home and wax my unruly brows. The result was obviously a total disaster and the experience was excruciatingly painful.

I have no idea how it happened but the wax cream  scrapped off a lot more hair from the right eyebrow that it should have. I stared at my disfigured brow in the mirror wondering how to remedy it. I decided to wax my other brow a little more to make them look identical. This ended up being the hardest thing to do – the left brow looked even worse. After braving the pain for about an hour, I retreated.

On Monday morning as I was getting ready for work, I tried to clear my visibly messed up face by using brown eye pencil. This seemed to help but I still looked like chunks of hair had been bitten off my face. My saviour was a pair of nerdy sunglasses which I’ve owned for about two years but have only worn twice. The frames sit right on the eyebrows hiding the mess. Everyone at work has complimented me on this new look – apparently I look really good in the glasses.  I’ll not be taking them off till my brows look presentable. Of course some of my female colleagues noticed the mess way before I even shared the ordeal with them.

We go through tons of crazy horrible experiences in pursuit of beauty. My friend Stella shared with me that she has burned her forehead a couple of times trying to iron her hair at home. “If it wasn’t for my bangs, I was going to call in sick at work the next morning,” she said. She still uses the darned thing often and adds that she has nothing to do about it other than being more careful.

Whilst I think she must be relieved of that iron before it burns the life out of her , I agree with her on the part where she says there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s a time I used to go to  hairdresser who literally burned my ears with that iron every single day I went to her beauty parlour. The reason I did so was because she was the only one that always did my hair well. I got prepared for a burn or two every time I entered her parlour till I chanced on someone better.

There’s a lady on one of the malls on Kampala Road whose obscenely expensive and traumatizing facials seem to give off the best results. My friends and I always pay her a visit when we have excess money to spend and of course ready to brave her facials. She literally dives her sharp fingers into your heated up skin to extract black heads. The equipment she uses also emits so much heat that sometimes you feel like your skin is peeling off. The results are always impressive though – you leave the place with a ‘faint’ smile.

Stella always laughs off the experience her sister went through when her chest (fortunately not her boobs) got injured during a rushed hair makeover before a highly anticipated wedding. She rushed to the doctor to have the burn cooled and ran off hastily to attend the party where she smiled and danced away despite the pain she was going through. This weird risk taking behavior seems to be a family trait.

That doesn’t mean that some women won’t give up when it becomes too much to handle. One of them is Melissa a good friend of mine who is stupidly obsessed with her ‘bikini perfect’ body. This girl will do anything to keep her body in shape. In her quest for a ‘hot body’ she once went to have her body waxed after which she swore never to let her body or herself go through such pain again. “Even if you are paying me I can never go back to that place,” she talks about her waxing experience. “It hurt so bad. the thought of it sends chills down my spine!”

It is also true that many of us have been enslaved by our own hair and skin. The every two-week ritual of straightening, weaving, facials and the unbearable gossip at the salon. We give up on cravings just saving for a Peruvian weave.

This pain is mostly attributed to the people we go to who actually aren’t so good at what they do but somehow end up with impeccable results. For the D.I.Ys it’s obviously because we don’t know the pros and cons of using the equipment. Steve Mukisa a beauty expert at Steve’s Beauty Clinic+Medspa says that this is all unfair. “A facial must never hurt. And avoid doing D.I.Ys that involve those irons,” he says. “Always fix time in your tight schedule and visit a proper beauty parlour with a skilled skin or hair expert.”

Please share with us the unglamorous experiences you’ve gone through in pursuit of beauty.

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