Day 13 It all started with a quandary. I want long eyelashes but I don't want to wear mascara. It's not the mascara itself that I'm opposed to. It's the daily ritual, wax-on-wax-off, that I despise. And I'm not even talking about the time it takes to put mascara on and take it off. It's a ridiculously quick process, I know. It's that no matter what, I have to embrace sometimes having dark circles around my eyes from smudgy mascara and/or remove the mascara with a product such as make-up remover in addition to the face cleanser that is already a part of my routine. And inevitably I forget that I am wearing mascara and rub my eyes. I'm just getting too darn old to pull off the smokey eye at 10am while running to Walmart to pick up diapers.
So I tried falsies. False eyelashes, that is. Basically a strip of someone else's real hair knotted together to form a row of lashes that I then glued onto my eyelid. With cement-grade glue. Because we false-eyelash wearing gals don't mess.
I'm not totally sure how or why I thought this was a good idea. My sister, who is incredibly hip and pretty and magazine-cover worthy on so many levels, she pulls off the fake eyelash thing like nobody's business. For her, it's just the next step after putting on deodorant and before glossing her lips. Effortless and lovely and all the things that I soon learned are not ever going to be a part of my fake eyelash experience.
My experience went like this.
I spent almost one whole hour attempting to glue the falsies to everything but my eyelids. I had glue in my eyeball, in my eyebrows, and in my hair. Did I mention that my fingers became affixed together with eyelash glue? I never back down from a challenge.
The entire process was made all the more encouraging when I went downstairs and received this reaction from my usually adoring husband, "Oh. Wow. What happened?" I thought that was a tad harsh, but I was so late for where I needed to be, having spent an extra hour getting ready, that I grabbed my keys and was on my way without thinking much of how I might appear to the general public.
As soon as I was driving, my appearance was the least of my concerns. Try driving with somebody else's hair glued to your eyes. Now is probably a good time to apologize to the squirrel that did not run out in front of me but I hit anyway because I was driving on the sidewalk. Just nevermind.
I soon realized how shocking my appearance was when I arrived at my destination, and rather than being greeted with, "Oh, hey, Ali, you look pretty today," I received a lot of, "Hi. Um, so, like, what's different?" and "Ali, I think there's something on your face," and the real confidence booster, when my friend took her hand and made a motion like she was casting a spell to my face and said, "What is going on here?"
I guess you could say I rocked those eyelashes.
Kind of like a clown rocks a red ball on his nose.
Except my lashes didn't squeak.
Needless to say, I peeled those suckers off my face as soon as I got back home. They took a couple layers of eyelid skin off with them, but at least I can now drive like the rest of the sober population.
And all the squirrels rejoice.