NO FREE LUNCH

Went for a manicure and pedicure today. My 'nail care professional' has become an old friend and she frequently uses me as a guinea pig when she's learning a new technique. I don't complain cause she hasn't raised her rates (for me) in ten years.

NO FREE LUNCH

Ya get what ya pay for. This is just as valid today as it was when my mother liked to remind me, “If it seems to good to be true, believe me, it is!”
After getting my nails done the other day my manicurist asked if I would like a free eyebrow wax. Guessing I looked a little shaggier then usual, I vowed to wear my reading glasses for any future face inspections. Now, eyebrows aren’t something I spend much time thinking about. Mine are blond and not a particularly noticeable feature so they have never been a priority. No unibrow issues. I get regular haircuts, touchups and manicures but I’m from the school that says if a woman of a certain age spends more than a couple of hours a month in a beauty parlor then she is downright vain. This said I am also from the school that says never turn down a freebie. My ‘nail technician’ assured me she was very good so without further thought I accepted her offer.
Now don’t get me wrong about my personal grooming habits, this wasn’t the first time I had gotten my eyebrows waxed. No sir. This was actually the second time, so I knew what to expect. Positioned in a reclining chair, I would feel the warmth of the wax, placement of the removal strips and a few quick seconds of tear producing pain. The whole affair would last about five minutes and for a few weeks my brow would compare to a Hollywood starlet. That’s what would happen. I thought.
I got the reclining part right. The wax wasn’t very warm so the application process pulled and jerked the hair that was destined to be removed. Instead of doing the tops and bottoms of the brow which would have cleaned up both in four painful but manageable motions, she started dabbing little globs of barely warm, very sticky wax on small areas, affixing the cloth strips to the wax then slooowly pulling the strip, wax and hair off my face. I was beginning to think this girl wasn’t as experienced as she claimed but what the heck, I reminded myself, it’s free even if she was removing one hair at a time.
By the time she finished my right brow I was hearing my mother’s early warnings about gift horses sometimes turning out to be Trojans. I blinked the tears away and took a critical look at my torturer’s eyebrows. Highly stylized, there was a collection of no more than six hairs over each eye. I remembered the time I went to Vidal Sassoon’s in New York to get what I thought would be a really good haircut. I was greeted by a ‘stylist’ with a purple and white Mohawk. You can imagine my trepidation.
Between the waxing and tweezing (I thought the waxing was supposed to make the tweezing unnecessary) the whole job took a good half hour and left me afraid to look in the mirror. When I finally got up the nerve I didn‘t look too bad although my skin stayed red for a couple of days and it took elbow grease to remove the waxy residue. Oh well. You get what you pay for.