My friend, uh, we’ll call her Lydia, did a very brave thing yesterday. She had her eyebrows and eyeliner tattooed on! Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch!!! This procedure is just like getting a regular tattoo, except they’re basically putting on permanent makeup. Here are a bunch of before and after photos of this sort of procedure. She didn’t want photos taken of her (wimp!) which is really too bad because apparently there was a good bit of blood from all the poking with a hot needle, so you’ll have to settle for these poor sods folks to get an idea of the process. The thought of somebody coming at my eyes with big needles makes my skin crawl. I have no right to talk really, as I was blessed with a black unibrow. That was the first thing my sisters checked for when my mother brought me home from the hospital as a baby – did I inherit the infamous unibrow? Sadly, it was clear from birth that I had. While men can sport a unibrow and it’s considered quite cool, for us women it’s a real drag as it means a lifetime of tweezing. I’ve never gone overboard on the tweezing, mostly just weeding the bit over my nose. Except for this one time. It was in the spring of my senior year in high school. I actually tweezed almost all of them off. This was not a good look for me. I unfortunately chose the day before senior pictures to do this. Yep, I will forever have to remember this really stupid act as it is immortalized in my high school yearbook and high school graduation pictures. Lydia, unlike me, has very few eyebrows or eyelashes and what she has are all very light-brownish blond. She is pretty self-conscious about this so will never leave the house without eyeliner and mascara and eyebrow pencil applied (this is a real drag, I’d imagine, in times of emergency: “Fire!” somebody yells, and with the flames licking at her feet she heroically applies the mascara before fleeing the burning building).

She called last night to report on this FOUR AND A HALF HOUR event. She seemed pretty nonchalant for someone who had endured that many hours of torturous tattooing, which was surprising until we learned that she had taken two valium right before to take the edge off the discomfort. This also explained why getting her to actually answer any of the questions we asked her was harder than pulling teeth, or in this case, tattooing eyeliner.

She came over today and looked surprisingly okay, though I thought she could have auditioned for a part in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado. They tell her the color will calm down over time, and (joy of joys!), the tattooing will only last about five years before needing to be reapplied.

I’ll take my unibrow any day. Thanks, Mom and Dad!