The stylist at the salon asked me which style would I prefer. No preference, I said. Whichever you think will suit me, do it, I said.
I sat down expecting scissors on my hair. I got shampoo.
Which was followed by a conditioner. Which was followed by a massage done with some nameless liquid.
Then came the cutting. After the cut was over, she asked which setting would I prefer, normal, straight or curls. There is only one answer to this question, always. It's straight everytime.
She started brushing and drying my tendrils. Then sprayed it with another nameless liquid. When she was through, I could not believe at the apparition in the mirror in front of me. My normally dry, half-curly, fly away hair was transformed into a thing of beauty! In place of my usual bird's nest, I now had a thick sheet of glistening tresses!
'Oh! to be rich and be pampered like this everyday', I sighed, for this operation, dreamy as it was, had considerably lightened my purse...
I thought I was finished with my job at the salon. But no, not with my best friend by my side, egging me on to 'shape my eyebrows'.
I've had this told to me by a large multitude. You can always spot them. These people have the welfare of your brows in their hearts. They're the ones who look keenly at your brows when talking to you. You even start sweating under their close scrutiny. The verdict is always the same. "You have such nice thick eyebrows, why don't you shape them? they'll look more beautiful".
Note the 'nice' and the 'more beautiful'. It's never "shape your eyebrows, they look terrible now". They always aim at the betterment of good brows!
So I thought, 'why not?'.
'Shape my brows', I told her. I ignored the death knells. My mistake.
What followed was pure torture. It was like my brows were being scraped off with sandpaper.
Another operation in the same Spanish Inquisition trend is this thing called waxing. It's when they first pour hot wax on you. Then they apply strips of cloth on it, and pull it up in one fast flick of their wrist. You feel like strips of your skin are being peeled away.
The most horrifying fact about these agonies is that these are a continuous process. Why would girls deliberately go through this torture? It was beyond my comprehension until I did the same. The answer is simple. It's hair. It keeps growing back, with a vengeance. You are forced to become a waxing-addict.
Lesson learnt: 'Beauty' is painful.
Disclaimer: By 'Beauty' here I mean the much-hyped idea of it. The idea that only shaped eyebrows and waxed hands are beautiful and the non-shaped and the non-waxed are just shaggy!
