Eyebrows

I went and got my eyebrows done for the first time last month. A tint, a shape, a wax. I only went because I discovered there was a salon on my street, three houses down. Friends had been running at me with tweezers for years, cradling my head in their laps as they curled over my face, plucking away. It was only a matter of time before I saw a professional. I pulled on my overalls and my Velcro Tevas, shimmied into my jacket and walked across the road in the rain. 

The room was peach-coloured and clean. The beauty therapist called me darling and invited me to lie down and take the pressure off my back when I walked into the room. Her hair was pushed back into a small bun. There was not a single hair astray. Mine spread out on the headrest like a fluffy blanket.

Do beauty therapists have nice skin because they Do The Work, or are they beauty therapists because they've always had nice skin, and recognise the social currency in it?

I ask if I need to wax my upper lip. Two months before, I found a strip of wax in my best friend's bathroom cupboard and hurriedly wiped it onto my chin and pulled. I was on my way out –– meeting a boy from a dating app at his hotel –– and was concerned that my worth may be measured by the length of the rogue chin hairs I had neglected on my travels. Since waxing my chin, the hairs on my top lip looked disproportionately long.
The lady said something like 'yes, quite a bit of peach fuzz, I think it needs to go', before wiping wax over the blonde hairs with a paddle pop stick and ripping them out.
She asked about my skincare regime. Or maybe I asked what kind of skin regime I should have. There was a wall of black bottles on my left, and I was acutely aware of the fact that I didn’t have a clue what they were supposed to do to your face.

Some of my friends were beauty bloggers now, and they had a drawer of products, each of which they would profile against their hand in their videos, so you could read the labels. I was on the other side of 25 now, so I needed to ensure my skin was maintaining its ‘youthful glow’. I vowed to watch their videos when I got home.

I told her I didn’t do anything to my face. I didn’t even take my mascara off at the end of the day, I just flopped onto my unmade bed and fell asleep in my Kmart underwear.  
‘I think I have a tub of Nivea-something in my car?’, I said.
She pulled out a scrub and an oil and a cream. Maybe a mist, too. I can’t remember which order they were supposed to go in, but the tub of cream was the size of my palm and it was one hundred and fifty-six dollars. I told her it was out of my budget and she nodded and suggested that maybe my best first step would be a scrub, to get me in the habit. I was to apply it with a face washer.
‘Do you sell those?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘A face washer?’
She cocked her head to the side and said no, she didn’t. I think she was surprised I didn’t have one. I found myself feeling surprised too.  
She started telling me about a three-step face-something process. It involved UV light. She said because I had young skin, I only needed to do it every five or six weeks. It was four hundred dollars. I was already spending around one hundred and twenty dollars every six weeks to laser hair off my legs and my underarms and everywhere else. I am afraid of hair and I am afraid of age. Or I should be. Or something.

She complimented me on my Tevas on my way out of the peach-coloured room. It was the first time I had worn them outside the context of a campsite.
I walked across the road and back to my house, with my top lip tingling and my two eyebrows sitting darker on my face, while the forty-dollar face scrub sat in the pocket on the front of my overalls.