His and hers beauty: Eyebrow threading

It’s not just women who go through excruciating pain on a regular basis in the name of beauty. Becca and her boyfriend both partake in the apparently excruciating process of eyebrow threading every few weeks- here are their respective accounts of the process. We on the cheeky Lifestyle team (Ok just Helena the sadist) might try to persuade them to get his ‘n’ hers back sack & crack/brazillians next…we’ll keep you posted…

Becca-Jane: Every time I have my eyebrows threaded I remind myself the comforting reassurance I was told by my friend who accompanied me to my first time in The Chair: each time you have your eyebrows threaded it becomes less painful. Somehow this doesn’t make the self-inflicted torture any more inviting, but with those perfectly pruned eyebrows in mind and muttering my mantra I lean back in the chair and pull the hair off my face, diligently waiting with my eyes closed for when it will begin. I think the worst thing is that you don’t know when it’s coming. That first time you feel the thread in your eyebrow the knot in your stomach forms and you wonder if you could get away by simply sitting up and running off. I find the best method is to force myself to relax; taking deep calming breaths as this woman apparently rips out half of my eyebrow. Who knew I had the orbital ridge genes of Sasquatch? Luckily that hairiness doesn’t seem to have manifested elsewhere. Listening intently for the barked commands of “Hold it” and “Leave it”, I reflect gladly on the saving graces of eyebrow threading. Foremost, whilst painful it is nothing compared to plucking. Plucking means removing each individual hair, whereas threading feels very much like tearing off a plaster, except you’ve hired a strange woman to rip it off. It carries none of the terrors of waxing (who hasn’t waxed off half an eyebrow in a misguided attempt to save money and DIY their brows?) and it results in a lovely natural arch that I think you can’t find anywhere else. Then it’s the final brush and trim and I’m ready to appraise the damage. I can’t deny it, as I look at the place where my former dark caterpillars have been replaced by sleek, streamlined beauties I remember that it is worth the sudden pain for the immeasurable gain. Not for the weak of heart (or bladder), threading remains my all time preferred method of dealing with my furry façade or so I’ll tell myself until next month when I find myself in the dreaded leather chair again.

Ednun: It’s a bright sunny morning and all should be right with the world, but for the fact that my girlfriend and I are having our eyebrows threaded today. You’d think after three years it would actually become less painful, but… “Ow! Bloody hell that hurts!” The small evil woman operating on me chooses to speak only four words: “Hold”, “let go” and finished!” With the devilish precision of a cat playing with a mouse, she attacks my face but I can’t see what she’s holding, I’ve gone to my happy place at this point. How can one have so much hair in such a small area? “Oh, don’t complain!” my girlfriend says. “Mine hurts too.” This is perhaps the silliest thing she has said all day. The hair on both her dainty little ferns if left for a year would not equal a tenth of one of my privet hedges. Why do I do it? When I was but a wee thing of 14, my dear two year old brother decided to take an electric shaver to my eyebrows whilst I was sleeping. Not merely content to trim the little caterpillars down to size or remove them both completely, he instead elected to remove half of one and half of the other. The poor caterpillars have never recovered and my face now resembles something akin to the Amazon forest if left unattended. Was my life so much worse before I met the women of torture, when the monobrow roamed free and uncontrolled? I don’t think so. No one really cared and very few commented unless asked. Perhaps it’s my attempt to tame the large hairy growths, which will now never sprout evenly from above and either side of my nose. Perhaps it’s part of a broader undertaking to make myself look a little more respectable, or perhaps I do it because the image of reasonably sized evenly distributed eyebrows on ones visage, once seen cannot be unseen. The answer is, I honestly don’t know. Ask me again in five weeks when I’m back here again, but for now, I’m going to quietly pass out in this uncomfortable chair.

Phew! After reading that, I think I’m happy with my bushy Cara Delevignes…