Louisa Simmonds

I went through another of those middle-aged duty calls in order to meet the aesthetic expectations placed upon womankind the other day – the utter onerousness of a waxing session. I shouldn’t grumble really, hair-care it is the only beauty treatment I pay for to meet society’s expectations of beauty so that I don’t terrify small children. And as men probably say, no pain no gain!

And what a true pleasure it is, lying on a bed in the hands of some aggressive Asian while she hacks out clumps of hair from the most sensitive parts of your body.

It really hurts, waxing. In my experience, it’s an old wives tale that it gets easier the more often you do it or that over time the hairs stop growing back quite as fervently. On a pain scale of “one” being someone running their clammy hands through your hair and “ten” being childbirth, the upper lip wax is definitely an eight. 

But it’s either that or turning into a man.

In the same way that my menstrual flow seems to be defying the biology of my age, I appear to be accumulating more hair in my brows, and they now include a selection of grey, wiry ones that spring out at odd angles and at odd times of the day and are, as you can imagine, particularly attractive. Many of my friends have the opposite problem, and have been forced to invest in eyebrow pencils (with interesting results) or are considering tattoos with which to frown at their entitled adult children more convincingly. Eye brow pencils remind me of my paternal grandmother, who thought that her purple tint coordinated perfectly with her orange brow line.

I could plait my eyebrows if I wanted to and the only reason they have to be yanked out by the Thai psychopath down the road is that I can’t see them, thanks to that other life-changing disability of middle age – long-sightedness. One day I think they look fine, the next day, the look of horror on NC’s face at the sight of the two hairy caterpillars crawling across my forehead, tells me everything I need to know.

How come men can get away with bushy brows? The old man has his own set of salt and pepper eyebrow curtains, yet they look quite distinguished on him – although nowhere is nature’s cruel sense of humor more evident than by that mass of tangled hair that frames his eyes rather than his head.

I know that big brows are in! – thank you Cara Delavinge and Lily Collins – and that you can sculpt them, tint them and even turn them into the Golden Arches if you really want to make a feature of them. Recent styles have included bleached brows, dragon brows –which I assume we can blame GOT for – feather and plaited brows, and now there are even squiggle brows.

The way forward is “micro-blading”, apparently, for those of you that need a bit of help with “filling”. Alternatively, I could donate – at a price.

#hair #middleaged #Funny #Humor #eyebrowsculpting #eyebrows #beautyregime