The best eyebrow threading can be found at Spectrum India on Thayer Street in Providence

The first time I had my eyebrows threaded, I was in so much pain tears were pouring down my eyes. The aftermath was red, angry brows, that were in my opinion too thin for my eyes. I vowed never to thread again.

I recently took a quick trip to visit family in Rhode Island, and headed to Thayer Street, where I saw Spectrum India had taken over the old College Hill Bookstore. While I dug for treasure in the awesome, stuffed-to-the-rafters-with-cheap-awesome-shit, a lovely Indian woman asked me if I wanted my brows threaded.

Normally, it would have been an emphatic no, but for weeks I was putting off shaping my brows myself because I kept running out of time. Since my bushy brows were making me crazy, I decided I’d put up with the pain.

I leaned back in a very comfy chair (it tilted back nicely, so I think it was a barbers chair) and asked for a few tissues. I was ready for my eyes to gush from the pain. And you know what happened?

I didn’t feel a thing!

There was only one or two moments that made me shift a little in the chair, but it was no worse than when I tweeze on my own. In fact, this woman’s method (and I did not get her name) was completely gentle, and included me holding my brows taught at certain points to ensure painless and easy hair removal (the last threader didn’t do that!). She shaped them perfectly, keeping them a bit thicker without my prompting.

Even more astounding? The brow threading was $8. Hands down, the best brow-shaping bargain on the planet.

Spectrum India is located at 252 Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island. If you are anywhere near Rhode Island, go get threaded!

These eight simple tips will help give you a more confident pluck. Photo by Martin-dm/istockphoto.com

The internet is full of tips on achieving the perfect brow. Rather than regurgitate the usual–measure from the tip of your nose diagonally to find your arch, etc–here are eight OTHER tips to help you achieve beautiful brows.

• Brush and trim your brows.

It’s tempting to just get plucking, but don’t skip this step. Brush the brows up first, and trim whatever is above the natural hairline. But don’t stop there!  Do the same brushing the brows down. Then smooth them out to their natural shape. You can use a small brow comb, but a clean (unused!) toothbrush will also do the trick. Make sure to use a small brow scissor, however. This is not something you can do with kitchen sheers!

• Use a slanted tweezer.

Don’t use a needle nose one. Once you get the hang of it, a slanted tweezer allows you to move quickly across the brow–pluck, pluck, pluck–without having to pick up the tweezer. This is a spectacular time saver.

• Witch hazel is your friend…

A pre-pluck swipe with witch hazel will ensure that you have a clean surface to work on, while not drying out your skin like straight up alcohol. I swipe before and after plucking.

• But DO alcohol swipe your tweezer.

Wipe down your tweezer before and after with 70% Isopropyl alcohol. It will kill any bacteria that’s festering on your implement!

• Use a black or white eye pencil to help guide you.

It’s hard to remember where that “perfect arch” measurement begins and ends. Sometimes I will mark it with a pencil, which helps not only give a visual of where I need to pluck, but also gives me a sense of what the brows will look like when  finished. I prefer using a white pencil (I find that darker pencils tend to mix too easily with my brow color, making it hard to see the lines). When finished, the lines can be wiped away with the witch hazel.

• Gently, gently, gently (and I mean gently!) pull your skin taught.

This will feel awkward at first, but use the thumb and index finger of your free hand to gently pull the skin around where you are plucking taught. Then pluck out the stray hairs in the direction of the hair growth. Hair slides out so much easier and it will minimize the pain. Just release and check after plucking a few hairs to make sure you are removing what you want to remove–tighter skin can shift the brows out of line at bit.

• Resist the temptation to go overboard.

Sometimes, I get into a groove with the plucking and it gets addictive. I could go on forever. And then I end up with brows that are way too thin. Be conservative. Brows that are too thin can make a face severe.  You don’t want to spend the next few weeks being asked why you are so angry.

• Move from brow to brow, but don’t worry about being “uniform.”

Just like one foot can be slightly bigger than the other, brows are not uniform in appearance, so don’t try to force them to look exactly alike. But do pluck a bit from one side, and then move to the other, to ensure that they are somewhat similar in shape and size.

I am kind of lazy about waxing myself. I have the fancy professional accoutrements, but never the time, energy or inclination to get myself up on the table for a good old strip-n-rip session. I wax, the hair begins to regrow, I don’t have time to wax and then I can’t stand all the hair. So I whip out the razor in the shower. Because of this, I have never been able to put that old “the more you wax the less you have to” theory to the test.

Intellectually, I understand hair-regrowth patterns. Here’s how I break it down for clients–it’s more complicated than this but it gets the general idea across. Your hair is constantly in different growth patterns. So when you wax for the first time, you are removing hair already at a certain point in its growth, and there is another hair right next to it that is just starting its growth path. This is why hair seems to grow back shockingly fast to first-time waxers, who assume that one wax means no re-growth for 4 weeks. The hair basically needs to be “trained” into same growth pattern, which eventually happens with faithful, regular waxing sessions. Waxing at the right stage of regrowth is when the damage to the hair follicle happens. As the follicle gets damaged, eventually the hair regrowth will be less and less. Hence the need for regular waxing.

By July, I was fed up with the constant wax/shave business that was getting my legs nowhere fast. So I became determined to only wax. Even if my legs got so hairy that you’d confuse me with my Manly Man Husband from the knees down, I would not take a razor to them.

Since I have been razor free for almost two months, I am finally able to test out the theory. My first wax session resulted in fairly fast regrowth, as expected. Probably about a week later the hair was back to being annoying enough for the razor to tempt me. My second waxing session was last week and while I can feel a little fuzz on the leg when I run my hands down it, the hair is not visable, even in sunlight. I think I can get away with this for about another week before I grit my teeth and hold out for the requisite 1/4 inch or until I have the time to pull out the pot again.  I hope I can hold out for 5 – 7 more sessions, which is when I should really begin to see the difference.

Mythbuster Beauty reviews Smooth Away, those magic “As Seen On TV” hair removal pads. Kudos to Mo for braving this torture device so the rest of us don’t have to! Those things scare the crap out of me. I am currently trying out my own “As Seen On TV” product which will be reviewed once I go a few more rounds. As they say, stay tuned!

I couldn’t sleep last night so I did a late-night viewing of
Tabatha’s Salon Takeover. I am not a reality TV kind of girl (gave up on them
after the late Anna Nicole’s fabulously trashy show was canceled on E!). I had
never watched Sheer Genious, so I was a total Tabatha virgin.

It is not the best reality show I have ever seen, but
Tabatha, apart from her unfortunate eyebrows, was a delicious blend of
compassion and bitch.  The salon
she took over was filthy, though it appears like it may be one of the cleaner ones
based on teasers for next week’s episode. Some real ewww inducing moments
included a stylist who never cleaned out his brushes and an area of the floor
littered with old nail clippings under the manicure station.  And there was petrified dog shit on the
floor the owner’s office.  Nasty!

Cleanliness in salons and spas is pretty much the most
crucial part of running an upstanding business. Particularly when waxing or
extracting…. Bodily fluids, people!

If you are getting a service at a new salon or spa, and you
don’t think it’s clean, walk out. If you are getting waxed or extracted, your
tech should be wearing gloves to protect both of you. If you are getting waxed
and you see the waxing tech double dip, walk out.  I don’t care what anyone says, double dipping is not
safe.  Some argue that the stick
never touches the skin, but that’s patently false.  If you are being waxed properly, the stick will touch the
skin. 

Many many years ago, before I knew better, I got my bikini
waxed at a small spa in the Village that was recommended to me by a
friend.  At the time, I did not
think anything about the double dipping, but after a few months of regular
waxes, I had the absolute worst in-grown hairs imaginable. They were everywhere
and so badly infected that they turned into actual boils all over my bikini
area. In addition to being horrific, it was incredibly painful.

I did not understand how it happened, since I used TendSkin
daily.  It turned me off waxing
until I went to school in February. 
That’s when I realized that the problem may not have been ingrown hairs,
but some sort of infection from a lack of sanitation…

There is just way too much nastiness out there to take any
chances.  If it makes you uncomfortable, walk away.

I adopt a lot of animals. My
latest adoptee is Mercy, a beautiful 2-year-old Rottweiler that I found at the
local shelter. She is just about the perfect dog—loving, loyal, friendly.  But, she has a thing about poop.

We could not figure out why
Mercy did not follow her adopted brother Elvis out the doggie door and into the
yard.  If we opened the door for
her, she ran in the opposite direction. 
When we finally pushed her out, she would sit right outside the door,
imploring with sad brown eyes to let her back in. She refused go about her
business outside and waited until we weren’t looking to relieve herself in the
basement.

I now have to do scheduled
“potty walks” with Mercy to keep the house pee and poop free. That’s when I
started noticing some peculiar things. She won’t pee or crap in front of the
house EVER.  No matter how bad she
has to go, she waits until we get to the corner. And when she does finally
poop, she runs away like a bat out of hell when she is finished.  One time, the poop bag dangled a little
close to her nose and she jumped back as fast as a rabbit, which is saying
something because she is quite languid.

My big old Rottweiler, a
breed that inspires (unfounded) fear in so many by sheer size, strength and The Omen, is a girly-girl. 
How incongruous it is to her Rottie image to be so…  Well, feminine! 

Which brings me to this
amazing shaving cream, Proraso. 
Created for men, any woman with delicate legs and armpits who longs for
a closer, more comfortable shave should keep a supply in the shower.  The cream, a staple of fine barbers in
Italy for over fifty years, is non-irritating, non-drying and leaves behind a
light, lingering scent of eucalyptus. 
So while the no-frills packaging screams masculine, the product itself
is highly girly-worthy.