The Indian Art of Hair Removal

Today I decided to get rid of my 'stache and trim my eyebrow forest, so I went to Girl Talk, a beauty salon in Defence Colony to wax my upper lip and thread my eyebrows. (Male readers, get over it. This is my blog and I can blog about whatever I want!)

When I walked into Girl Talk, I started saying that I wanted my upper lip waxed. Before I could say "and my eyebrows threaded," the woman I was talking to said, "are you sure that's it?" and points to her eyebrows. It's great to know how terrible my eyebrows looked.

She started with the threading. I had been threaded once before, in Bangalore with Angela. At that time, it was incredibly painful. It felt like little knives cutting up my skin. This time, though, it wasn't nearly that bad. (And at the time Angie had said that place just did a bad job.) For those of you unfamiliar with threading: one woman stretches your skin tight while another woman holding thread in a triangle with her mouth and two hands wraps the thread around your hairs and moves the thread back and forth to pull out the hairs. They get rid of the hair on the top of your eyebrows, which they don't always do in the US (I usually leave those hairs), and the shape is different. I feel like my eyebrows are too thin and straight, not arched enough and a little unnatural-looking. (It is also possible that this particular person didn't do a great job, so I shouldn't assume this is what Indian threading always looks like.) I like my usual shape better, but at least I'm cleaned up.

Then we moved on to waxing. I was more than surprised when the woman approached me with a butter knife dripping with wax. She proceeded to smear the wax on my face like she would smear butter on bread. She put A LOT of wax on, more than at home. And then she waxed it a second time (not sure why; I didn't feel any additional hairs being pulled out). You know how at home they clean up the stray hairs with a tweezer? Well, here they did it with a thread.

So that is how all my extraneous facial hair will be removed this year. And for super cheap! Brows and lip for the equivalent of one US dollar.