Beauty is Pain, First Impressions are Forever

I started a new job last March, and a few weeks into my tenure as Middle Manager in Industry Parents Don’t Know How to Explain, our primarily international team was flying out to Tahoe to meet each other and sit through four straight days of meetings to plan the upcoming year. I was a little nervous about this, as it had been so long since I had met new people in a professional environment, so in order to brighten up my appearance and give me a little superficial pick-me-up, I decided to get an eyebrow wax. In true Katie fashion (i.e. pathology), I waited until the day before I left to get this done. I mean it had to happen at some point. My eyebrows had been unattended for so long I was starting to look like Groucho Marx trapped in Jumanji.

The salon I chose (at random) was small and dimly lit, but clean. There was one slightly frazzled-looking stylist there, giving haircuts to a family of forty-seven. “I have an appointment for eyebrow waxing,” I said, and she led me into the backroom. “Lay down here,” she instructed, pointing at the table. “I want to keep my normal shape, just clean them up a bit,” I said, and she nodded. Without hesitation, she began applying wax and ripping it off my face. When she finished, she asked if I wanted her to trim them, to which I said, “Um sure, if you think they need it.” So she did. And then she casually asked, “Should we do your mustache next?”

Hold the phone. Mustache? I gingerly ran my fingers along my upper lip. Do I have a mustache?? Why hasn’t anyone ever told me?? “Do you think I need it?” I asked hesitantly. Her eyes went wide and she said, with blistering calm, “Oh definitely.”

A little background, before we continue: Taking this new job was the period at the end of a six month sentence of unemployment. I had been slinging pings at my previous company for six years, so beginning a new role at this point was a herculean task, like diving headfirst into fog-obscured depths or dragging yourself to the kitchen pantry when you’ve run out of bed-donuts. As such, I hadn’t exactly been, shall we say, taking care of myself. Or remembering to shower. Or sitting up first before I put corn chips in my mouth. However, I was laboring under the delusion that no one around me had noticed my sloppy spiral of self-negligence, so I was immediately overcome with the almost indomitable urge to wrangle this newfound mustache and lasso her brazen ass into the ground. 

Although... I mean I was 31. I knew this kind of thing could happen at some point. But just how apparent was this mustache? Did everybody else know? Was everyone calling me Katie Hairlip behind my back? Was that why my friend sent me that picture of Snidely Whiplash? I mean, sometimes it gets snagged on my toothbrush, and it does keep me warm on cold winter nights, but I did not in any way realize that those things were unique to me. “Yes, please wax it,” I pleaded. No way was I going to meet all my new coworkers with this nefarious lip weasel. I was going to look like a star.

She slapped the wax on there and yanked it off. I felt it with my fingers. I guess this is a lot smoother, I thought. Looks like she was right. I thanked her effusively, paid up, and then walked home, a slight spring in my step at this brand new me.

The next morning, I woke up bright and early, ready for my trip. I sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes, and then shuffled to the bathroom to shower. It was a pleasant shower, as I had also bought a new hair mask from the esthetician, so by the time I got out and dried off, my hair was silky and smooth, I had shaved for the first time since the Obama administration, and I was ready to kick the crap out of today. I wrapped my hair up in a towel, and then, for the first time that morning, I looked in the mirror.

It turned out that my lip skin was a bit too sensitive to handle the wax. So in place of the hair mustache I had finally rid myself of was now a new kind of mustache, one comprised of dozens of angry red pimples. My upper lip was aflame with a perfectly pustulant eww manchu. Super.

Exfoliating didn’t help. Makeup only caked over the disaster, and I had to leave for the airport in thirty minutes, looking like Alex Treb-acne. I hoped upon hope that they would calm down by the time I got to Tahoe, but the little jerks festered and grew until my lip was just one  bulbous, neon red zit shield protecting my face from positive impressions. I kept touching it compulsively, hoping it would go away, which only encouraged the bastards to swell with confidence. “Welcome to your thirties! Welcome to the end!” I swore I could hear them whispering.

I was consumed by the pus-tache for the entire duration of the trip. I tried desperately to cover it with makeup, a tactic of rationality akin to solving your apartment’s roach problem by dumping a bucket of paint on the floor. This, of course, only aggravated the issue, and the pimples sprung further outward, audacious and defiant. They fed on my insecurity like pubescent dementors, swelling and bulging across my lip in an emblazoned carbuncular middle finger to my ego, a cystic plague of biblical proportions except worse because it happened to me. 

 And so I became them. While walking down the street, cars slammed on their brakes in front of me so as to avoid a traffic ticket. Bees tried to pollinate me. Passerby showered me with sympathy and EpiPens. I was overcome. I was defeated. I was a lot more vain than I had previously realized. Like the Grinch who stole confidence, my lip, but moreover my shame, grew three sizes that day, a chorus of Who-Zits bellowing forth across the conference room, into the furthest reaches of Tahoe and WebEx, howling with the deafening, clamorous fury of piehole pestilence no mortal colleague could endeavor to ignore. Or maybe nobody noticed and I need to work on my self-concept. Who can say?

The pus-tache finally did go away, about three days after I returned from my trip. And I’m gonna be honest, I was lookin’ pretty good once the swelling went down. (You could have slid a tree slug across my lip at 90 mph. It was smooth.) I was, however, a bit deflated by the emotional turmoil I had faced over the previous week (though in all honesty I have not waxed my lip since and will now allow that the esthetician may have been a genius-caliber upseller and I probably need to stop scoffing at all the inspirational “Love yourself!” memes my aunts are always posting.) Nonetheless, in an effort to avoid any threat of perilous self-reflection and to choose, as it were, the lesser of two evils, I vowed to embrace my fuzzy lip for the rest of my life after that, and keep a respectful distance of five to seven feet between myself and any future conversational companions so they don’t get tangled in my lip sweater and require the fire department to free us. I have a clean record, and I don’t think attempted kidnapping will encourage the longevity of this new job. And I really don’t want to be unemployed again. I’m fresh out of bed-donuts.