IT ALL STARTED WHEN I DECIDED to apply my makeup this morning. This normally takes 5-7 minutes, tops, but I looked in the bathroom mirror and thought to myself, self, you have a few extra minutes here. Why don't you pay some attention to that overgrowth formerly known as your eyebrows?
The light isn't great by my bathroom mirror, so to get a better view, I propped a magnifying mirror on my window ledge, thinking that natural light would make this chore easier.
WOW! Each individual hair seemed as large as a tree stalk. This was helpful for the task at hand. I plucked and plucked and tweezed and tugged, making sure to eradicate my monobrow get every last rogue hair, even that stray one that was closer to my forehead than my brow.
The job done, I further inspected my face. With this mirror, I could also see so much more. Too much. It was frightening. First of all, what are those tiny brown spots around my eyes? Twenty years ago I'd have shrugged them off as freckles, but these aren't that. They are new. So are the broken blood vessels around my nose. Which coordinate nicely with a couple of small red spots in that vicinity. And - GAH! - I have a moustache! Why didn't you people TELL ME??!
Clearly, I had work to do. I pulled out my Sally Hansen home wax strip kit and attacked the moustache. YANK! OUCH! YANK! OUCH!! YANK! OUUUUCH!!! DAMMIT! After inflicting as much pain on myself as I could stand, I looked in the magnifying mirror, which told the sad truth: I'd only managed to remove about half of the hairs. Some things are better left to professionals, I told myself, and made a mental note to schedule an appointment.
While inspecting the 'stache, I noticed that the pores on my nose are the size of moon craters! So I whipped out a Biore strip and as I type this, it's affixed to my nose, transforming into paper mache, at which point I can peel it off, hopefully leaving my epidermis mostly intact.
I'm not even going to talk about the wrinkles. I don't mind them so much; I'm often told I look younger than I am, and not just because I have the same sense of humor as a 14 year old boy. Maybe it's my effective and strategic application of stage makeup; more likely, it's good genes and years of obsessive sunscreen usage. (Thanks, Mom!) But that's OK because there is a trove of other blemishes and flaws that the magnifying mirror revealed.
Despite my horrifying discovery this morning, I take comfort in knowing that the flaws revealed by the mirror will not be visible to most people my age because we are all starting to have vision issues, too. Either we can't read and we have to have magnifying classes, or we can't see far away and we need glasses to drive. I figure this bodes well, for as many flaws as my face has, I will appear to my peers as if photographed through gauze with gentle back-lighting.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to... wait, where was I? Oh, yes, makeup. I need to apply my makeup.
Filed under: Ignorance is bliss, happier not knowing, born in the sixties, the price of vanity, why didn't you tell me?
