How I Spent My Easter Sunday, or Insert Landscaping Joke Here

First of all, this is what happens when you use your webcam for a mirror, as I did last Easter Sunday:

At first you'd say, "Great dress! Nice scarf!" Then, if you look closely, you'd notice that I'm barely wearing any makeup (save for Revlon Super Lustrous gloss in Raisin Glaze). And if you really, REALLY look closely, you'd realize that I didn't really have chocolate milk with breakfast.

That's right, folks: Your intrepid blogger here has a mustache.

Upper lip hair has been a problem for me ever since a certain unsavory person from high school (no names in case said person sends his lawyers and paid thugs after me) pointed out that the fuzz on my upper lip was not as "peach-fuzz" like as I thought. Unfortunately, seeing as this was Manila in the early '90s, waxing was still unavailable in my neck of the woods, so I basically covered up that fuzz with tons of foundation (see also: my senior yearbook photos) until I got to college, where I started to attack it with hair-removing creams and tweezers.

Can you say ouch?

As much as I like that photo, I thought I'd do some creative retouching on it anyway. But that took way too much time, and I couldn't get the exact blending correctly. (Yes, I was retouching my own photos on MS PAINT, folks. Sad but true.) So, after I went to Easter mass and helped out with the egg hunt at church, I decided that enough was enough and I might as well splurge on getting both my lip and my eyebrows waxed, since it has been a long time since I've had both of them done. Unfortunately, it did take me a long time to find a place that had a waxer working on Easter Sunday.

Until, that is, I walked into a certain nail salon not too far from Wal-Mart on Keeaumoku, with a name worthy of an Anjelah Johnson stand-up routine. Yes, they said, they were open. Yes, they said, they had a waxer.

On to the back room I go. Waxer doesn't do any of the gentle preamble that I'm used to with other waxers - no baby powder primer, no topical anesthetic. She goes straight to the wax and applies it on my brows, then cuts up the strips. Rrrrrrip. "So much hair," she says, and lays them on my collarbone so I can see how much fuzz she's taken off my now-bushy brows. Then she rubs the alcohol, and it stings a bit, but it's OK.

When she finishes with my brows, she does the same to my upper lip. Again, no preamble. Wax, strip, rrrrrip. She doesn't hand me a mirror, but I am certain that my lip is red. Again with the alcohol to make it all go down. Then I bargain with myself; the whole deal is going to cost me $25 including tip anyway - might as well grin and bear (bare?) it.

Here's what I looked the next day:

(Forgive the phone prop in this photo; I just had to take this call while the camera was running.)

Again, same no-makeup makeup (still wearing the Raisin Glaze), same lighting conditions in my apartment. Notice the brows here: I like how the waxer actually made an effort to keep them angled and tapered just so; the end result looks fuller, yet more sophisticated, than the "before" picture above. It's like I've gotten a whole new face!

Best of all, however, look at how my upper lip actually looks a lot less fuzzy! Still a tad bit pink, but at least I don't look like AJ from the Backstreet Boys any more. What a relief.