New Thing #209--Wax On

I have really blond eyebrows; you can't even see them. That's good because I usually don't do anything to them. No pencils, no coloring, nothing at all. I only get rid of the stray hairs when I have a big event coming up. Since this weekend I'll be seeing a friend for the first time in many years, today I got my eyebrows waxed.

I went to a beauty school that's not too far from me. Although I've only been there for haircuts before, the students do a great job, and it costs less because they're practicing on you. The student who did my wax had only been in school since February, but said she had been doing brows for a LONG time.

I went back to one of the waxing stations, and laid on a table similar to a doctor's examination table. The student gave me a little scalp massage before wrapping a warm towel around my hair and forehead. Of course, I had to take off my glasses, so after that point I couldn't see exactly what was going on. However, it was pretty straightforward.

The first step was to clean my skin with a cotton ball saturated with something that smelled antiseptic. Next she applied very warm wax over the parts of my eyebrow with excess hair, placed a strip of linen on top and massaged it into the wax. She asked if I was ready, pulled my skin taut, and ripped the strip (with the hairs stuck to it) off. I'd heard this was the painful part, but it was no worse than having a bandage ripped off quickly. She repeated the process again to get the hairs in between my brows, applied some aloe gel, and I was ready to go!

I had to go to the bank afterward. As I was waiting in the drive-through lane, I looked in the mirror to check out my new brows. I had bright red lines over my eyes, where she had pulled off excess hair! No one told me that this would happen. However, after I came home and showered, I used some witch hazel and antibiotic ointment on the areas she had waxed. The redness went away in an hour or so. My new brows make my face look very different.