I'm back in Southern CA for Thanksgiving, and I've cheerfully gotten immersed in the face concious culture by first getting pushed into the facial room at Wamiles Cosmetics (which is a good company with very high quality natural face products) by my mother, and then when I went to get my hair cut, I got cheerfully bullied into getting my eyebrows and area above my lips plucked by a tiny Vietnamese lady that spoke very little English.
The hair salon I go to requires a little back story.
Until I was 22, I had never had a haircut I liked. The reason I wore my hair very long, nearly to my hips, most of the time was that every time I'd gotten a haircut that was more than a few inches off the bottom, it invariably made me want to cry. It wasn't that I didn't want to try new styles or more body or anything with my hair, it was just that every time I gathered the courage to do it, it came out horribly horribly wrong and it took months of baseball caps until it had grown back out and I didn't cringe going out in public again.
Thy changed that. Now he is the only man allowed to cut my hair, ever. I don't know what I would do if he died or moved or became fluent in English.
So I am sitting in the Snow White hair and nails salon (am I the only one that sees the name and thinks of French colonialism and distorted standards of beauty?) waiting for him to be free, when I am approached by a friendly attractive Vietnamese lady who asks if I'd like to have my nails done.
I explain, via pantomime because we don't speak one another's languages, that I climb boulders and play guitar and do martial arts and that nail polish would be laughably pointless. She starts clipping away my cuticles and complimenting the skin on my hands. I tried to explain that was only because I'm not very good at any of the activities that I told her about, but without free use of my hands, the message was lost.
Somehow we get to the point where she is motioning to me that she desperately wants to do something to my eyebrows. Because I know she can't understand what I'm saying, I say slowly and in all honesty, "Please for the love of god don't wax them off entirely and draw them back on like you apparently did with yours."
She assures me in pantomime that she's only going to clear the baby hairs around the eyebrows and shape them a little bit, and then she's ferociously going at them with a set of tweezers and a razor. The war on all facial hair is apparently a fierce one because she then removes all of the hair between my nose and upper lip.
I dunno. I don't get the war on facial hair that ladies have. It's hardly noticeable and I've always liked the hair on my face. Its sole purpose, so far as I can tell, is to keep my face from freezing. As my face has never frozen, it's doing its job perfectly. I don't have any particular desire to tear it all out. )=
And besides, have you ever noticed that all Asian ladies, regardless of nationality, all look the same when they hit their mid forties-sixties? Suddenly the eyebrows (and all other baby hair on the face) are gone, replaced by the letter he above their eyes, and the hair's gone burgundy. (On a related note, when I came home this time, my mom's hair is tinted burgundy. O.O)
I was getting more and more afraid that what started as a manicure here and some eyebrow plucking there would culminate in fashion advice and by the time I was getting ready to leave I'd be dressed in a floral blouse, flat leather shoes, and a black blazer with one of those ridiculously large gold pins on the lapel.
Thankfully the lady restrained herself (possibly because of my frantic hand waving) and left me most of my eyebrows. The right one looks kind of like the Nike swoosh, which shows a good precision job on her part, but I'm going to let them grow back and keep them that way.
Eyebrows are great. They direct the sweat away from your eyes. I will never understand why Vietnamese ladies, many of whom have awesome eyebrows, would ever want to tear them all off. I think that full eyebrows are a very striking feature for the face and very complimentary. I've never acquired a taste for the look in which ladies pluck their eyebrows into very skinny sharp triangles, as if they were trying to point at their hairstyles without using their hands.
My fierce eyebrow inadequacy was driven home to me many a time over the years at SCWA when, 6 or 7 forms into the really hard training days, my legs would be trembling in 4th section, and I'd have the crazy eye twitch because the sweat pouring down my face was dripping into my eyes.
When I think of the Vietnamese ladies waxing off their lovely full eyebrows that some of us less fortunate Asians never got to experience, it fills me with sadness. )=
Actually, I'm not sure why my eyebrows are merely normal thickness. The few other Japanese people I know have great eyebrows. Brandon Sugiyama has awesome eyebrows. Mark Moran has thick eyebrows. I would blame it on my family coming from the north, but even my brother has thick eyebrows. I am not blessed. I am a unique, pitiful, and hairless snowflake.
Time to drown my sorrows in a tupperware container of leftover stuffing. (Which I made with celery, onions, apples, raisins and whole wheat bread and a mess of fresh herbs and ground spices that turned out great, by the way. :D)
I'm going to think of a catchy mantra I can chant to myself while waiting for my eyebrows to grow back.
