I feel most beauty injuries happen because there is such a fine line between perfection and pain. They also happen when I’m blurry-eyed, tipsy and giggly, trying to wing my eyeliner like a boss. In memory of all the times I’ve messed up, I’ve compiled a series of beauty regimes that don’t mix too well with alcohol.
Save yourself the trouble and don’t cut your cuticles while you’re drunk — even if you think that doing so will help you regain the sense of control in your life that you might have lost along with your sobriety. You have to angle your nail clippers and if (see: when) you accidentally peel the skin off, you’re looking at a Black Swan (2010) situation which isn’t going to end with “it was only a hallucination.” THIS IS REAL LIFE and it will be a bloody mess. The same goes for pumicing, don’t do it.
Your normal pain threshold/ common sense might stop you from sand-papering and exfoliating your entire face and body down until it’s raw, but a couple of drinks down it might seem like a perfectly good idea to scrub your face like you’re Russia trying to exfoliate your way to North America. That’s life on the front line, girls. Also, avoid tweezing your eyebrows. The problem with doing this while drunk is that you’re going to get carried away and not know when to stop. You’re going to over-pluck and end up with uneven comma brows, I promise.
Step away from the safety scissors in an impulsive moment of bang-trimming. This is hard enough to get right when you’re sober. Also don’t dye your hair, you’re never going to end up like the lady on the box and will probably stain everything else in the process.
A lot of women I know use a little trick where they take a lighter to the liner pencil before applying it so it heats up a little and smudges easily, leaving an intense Bridget Bardot sex goddess look behind. Do this BEFORE you start pregame-ing or you risk overheating your pencil and applying boiling black liquid to your eye area.
I’m not sure how obvious this is but do NOT attempt to give yourself an at-home wax to mow your various lawns in an inebriated state. My thought process was something along the lines of “I’m going to have a few glasses of wine and then I will be very calm and this won’t be painful or scary.” This seems understandable, except my interest in following the instructions soon reduced to nothingness and I spent the rest of my night picking bits of wax off my body, giving up and finding a razor. Another time, I was concentrating so hard on my precious hairy elbow, that I managed to get wax stuck in my head hair — which is about as fun as it sounds. You’re welcome.
(The writer is a reporter with TNIE, a hopeless romantic who loves to read, and would like a bottle of wine attached to an IV)