This could easily be considered an extension of my last post, about things you’d only ever do on a family vacation.

I thought this deserved its own post.

Guys, I got Fake Eyelashes. Like, not the goofy panty-waist paper ones that you glue on by yourself, but the fine-haired mink-fur-or-whatever ones that get glued on, eyelash by excruciating eyelash, to your own eyelashes. The whole process took two hours, a little bit over. The glue made my eyes water. One of the eyelashes got glued on funny and it poked me everytime I squeezed my eyes shut tight. I wasn’t supposed to rinse my face with water for five days; I had to pat it clean and dry, avoiding my eyes.

I did it with a best cousin sitting by my side (her treat) and a cat sitting on my lap, because apparently salons in Taiwan allow kitties. See?

catonlap

What’s that? You want to see the end result? Here:

eyelashes

Can you tell the difference? Here, here’s another photo, this time with Best Cousin.

meandni

BLINK BLINK HELLO!!!

They’ve all fallen off by now. They last for a month and then they slowly drop off, one by one, leaving the wearer with a scraggly bunch of old-man-eyebrow-looking eyelashes while the glue loses its grip and they go.

What you want to know is this: Why did I do this?

1. Hell, I’ll try anything once.

2. When a best cousin wants to do something new with you and you only get to see her once every couple of years, you do it.

3. (Said Best Cousin may have bamboozled you into doing this thing by saying she too was going to do it. It was an inadvertent bamboozling, but a bamboozling nonetheless.)

4. I have always secretly wondered what it was like to have long eyelashes, like my friend Jody, whose bangs regularly get caught in her eyelashes, or my friend Ken, who looks bright-eyed and bushy tailed even if he is six glasses of wine and one shot of Ouzo down.

5. Once in junior high a kid made fun of me for having short eyelashes. My best-friend-at-the-time, Tracy, made me close my eyes so the lousy so-and-so could see my eyelashes. Alas, they are short enough so that I really do have to close my eyes before you can see them.

5a. I cannot and have not ever been able to bat my eyelashes at people. On the rare occasion that I have ever wanted to pull something like that out of my bag of tricks, I have resorted to one of these three:
i. Crying.
ii. Pouting
iii. Crinkling my cheeks and eyes into a sweet squinty close-lipped smile. [Ask me, I’ll do it for you.]

6. Long eyelashes seem to me to be a very key part of femininity. Potentially my lack of eyelashes is why I always identified more as a tomboy. Don’t laugh; I think there’s something to be considered here.

So here’s what happened post-eyelash-extensions:

1. I kept on wondering what the heck was caught in my eyelashes and why the top fringe of everything I looked at was blurry. It wasn’t blurry; it was furry. Hairy. Eyelash-y.

2. Stuff–Sprocket hair; cat hair; sweater fuzz–kept on getting caught in them.

3. When I stood in the wind or rode my bike, they fluttered. I imagined them making flapping noises and encouraged Mr. Gooddirt to take video of the phenomenon. He obliged, because he is awesome, but I must have looked a right proper moron.

4. My dad took six guesses to find out what was different about me, guessing everything from a new dress to new eyeglasses, even after I’d taken them off and batted my new eyelashes at him. My mother took three. My artist-aunt pointed and shrieked right away: “ahhh-yoooooo!” I freaking love my aunt.

5. I got angry at Mr. Gooddirt for something totally unrelated and narrowed my eyes at him. This has always worked before, but this time he just burst out laughing because “Oh, goodness, you just look cute. You don’t actually look angry. You will have to resort to Angry Asian Mouth and Flaring Nostrils until those things fall off.” Great.

6. Eventually they fell off, clump by clump. I mourned each of them and put them sadly in the garbage can. The other day I found one tangled in my eyemask. That seemed really pathetic.

Did I like them? Yeah. Begrudgingly, yeah. Because I told myself I’d never alter myself much (putting on mascara is a chore, if that gives you any indication), but I found I kind of liked the way I looked better with eyelash extensions.

The thing is, though, this is what I have to work with, and I’m more or less okay with that. It sure was nice seeing the other side of the fence for a while. But I’ll probably never spend two hours in a chair again, not even with a bestie at my side and a cat on my lap, making myself something I’ll never be.

 

 

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