Beauty Can Be Painful
I am 24, my sister is 15 and comes to me in tears about how some kid at school made fun of her eyebrows. I look at her bushy eyebrows, making the occasional "uh huh" "yep" "Oh yes we can do something about this".

Touched by her adolescent vulnerability, I offer to help her pluck her eyebrows. She is relieved beyond belief, believing that in a few short minutes, she will be looking like a movie star.

I get a hot washcloth, nice sharp tweezers and some anabasol (numbing gel) and do the prepatory work on her like I am a doctor in the ER. Very efficient. Very smooootttthhh.

Grab the tweezers and instruct my dear sister not to move. She asks, "Is this going to Hurt?" I say, "No, not at all".

With a ferocious grasp on the tweezers, I move in for the follicle kill and pull as hard as I can.

In an unbelievable show of grooming ineptitude, I grabbed her EYELID instead of her eyebrow. Ripped the skin right open.

If I had photographed this touching moment, the next scene would be my bleeding and cursing sister, half-blind, chasing me around the house and cursing - blood running down her face. She now has a memento from this day - a tiny little crescent scar on her eyelid.

This is the same child that asked me to teach her to play softball (I hit her directly in the nose, leaving a nice bump that is still there) and also to cut her hair (I screwed it up very very badly - no scars on that one, though).
(Igneous, Tue 8 Feb 2005, 14:13, Reply)