No, I wont be adding any direct tips or advice here, any advice you can glean by reading through is purely accidental. Maintenance is all very subjective anyway. For those of you who do not wish to wade through my endless written dia_a the essentials are - simplify ur life, use the beauty parlors for most of your personal maintenance needs and unless you have extremely bad skin, dont be taken in by the evils of marketing and an industry which exists to give women a negative self-image.
Go to the doctor for all your urgent needs. Anyone really looking for advice can check out CoolWater’s wonderfully useful writeup on the same topic. To the others still here, this doesnt really have a point, I just started writing and there it was . an amalgamation of experiences, both painful and ultimately mildly epiphanhetic for me, all in some way connected to beauty and maintenance.
-
Wasn’t there this one girl in your school who pioneered waxing(and other things besides, but we wont go there) in the 8th grade? She was the star attraction of the week and girls followed her with envious eyes. Of course, this happened only after she had pointedly drawn attention to her newly smooth and silky legs. There followed endless days of swapping the perfect home made wax recipes in boring civics classes and whispered strategies for convincing uncool mothers to let you get your legs done too. How could they not realise that your life would be blighted if you were *the girl left behind*?
My mom handed me the Braun Silk-e-pil. To be fair to her, this was when epilators were touted as the Wunderkind for hair removal. Mine had to be painstakingly scribed onto a list and given to a clueless father who shopped for it in Germany. Can I just say here how I loathe the epilator! After all the pain my parents took to get me one, I had to actually use this for a year before giving it up and that was a year of torture. Imagine this evil rotary device that grabs and pulls out hair from the roots - one by one! Atleast with wax, a large area is taken off at one time. And dont even get me started on the ingrown hair. So, take the advice of someone been there and done that - after burning yourself with the homemade stuff(has anyone ever had a sugar burn on their skin, u know what that feels like), or getting messy with any other do-it-yourself kind - either shave or leave it to the professionals.
What is the allure of the cosmetics counter for women? After being drawn helplessly, like the ill-fated moth to light, I find myself being scrutinised by the snooty, perfectly coiffed shop assistants and immediately feel my pores magnify horrendously under their critical eyes. To compensate, I usually indulge in an orgy of spending. My bathroom closet, until a year ago, was a chemical factory. I had moisturisers with SPF for daytime and wihtout for night, I had cleansers, astringents, toners, cleansing milks and lotions(never knowing the difference I bought both), face packs, eye creams for that one tiny wrinkle I noticed years ago. The eye cream burned my eyes but I religiously applied it every night until I read that it was a fancy packaging name for moisturiser. Zits were ruthlessly benzoyl peroxided and spots were No-marked into oblivion, or atleast temporarily concealed under the yellow goo that I applied to them. And, how about yellow/ green concealers? I have since learned that the green concealer doesnt do a thing for you other than make you look like the Green Goblin. My desire for self-punishment hasnt extended to the yellow concealers(for dark circles under the eyes, in case the un-enlightened and men were wondering here), but I can imagine my skin turning a hideous jaundice colour and I am infinitely grateful for the tiny restraint exercised by that single functioning brain cell during cosmetics shopping.
For a long time, I religiously pored over magazines for daily cleansing regimens for my skin, but somehow nothing ever worked and I used to blame it on my having the proverbial problem skin. This went on for quite a while, most days my skin would end up feeling stretched tight, dry and flaky . if you have ever watched Batman with Jack Nicholson playing Joker and can visualize his grin/grimace this was what my face felt like most times . and that’s after having oily skin. I wasnt just stripping away the natural oils from my skin, I was probably exfoliating about a layer or two of skin along the way. Until the day I decided enough was enough, and headed on over to the dermatlogist. Hallelujah! and God Bless, this enlightened man has made me literally see the light. So, now my daily routine is wash twice a day with a mild cleanser, no soap, alongwith a good moisturiser and/or sun screen . turns out that’s all I ever needed anyway. And it’s probably what most women need most of the time. My dermat did literally save my life, think of the hour which I used for my night-time routine which has now been reserved for MS browsing:)
-
Until a few years ago I took the hundreds of beauty parlours which dot the up-and-coming Indian city pretty much for granted. Odds were, if you ever needed something done urgently, you would atleast find a tiny neighborhood joint to cater to your needs. And I did take threading for granted too. Little did I imagine that this wasnt the favorite method of facial hair removal for women the world over. So, when I moved to a small town in the back of beyond in the land of plenty, did I dream that the one thing there wasnt plenty of was a woman to thread my eyebrows? NO.
For anyone curious enough, this elusive creature still doesnt exist. Apparently, here the method of choice is using a tweezer. I have a love-hate relationship with this tool, many times I have been so numbed by pain and mechanical motion that I have literally and enthusiastically tweezed away half my eyebrow. And then the realisation hits me that I have to do the other half too. I thought I would face less pain if I got the professionals to do it, but watching a friend go through the experience opened my eyes.
Was this what having a baby felt like? Brrr . Sure, it’s good for thin, fine Caucasian hair but what if you have that thick, lustrous Indian hair?! And tweezing has a drawback in that it damages the hair follicle, so that the hair doesnt re-grow, so too much enthusiastic plucking could make you eyebrow-less at some point of time and havnt we all seen the scary effect of this look at some time or the other. So, I did the next best thing any desperate person could do. On my next trip to India . I learned how to thread my own brows. And now I dont have to spend time explaining to the woman at the parlour the exact curvature and shape of what I wish to achieve! Is there any advice here, not really, I was just proud of being able to do this and wanted to share:)
That’s it . for now! If you are still here, I would love to hear any experiences or any random general thoughts. Have a great weekend everyone!