judyonthenet

May262008

My first threading experience at The Image

I’m getting engagement pictures taken soon (yes, those are completely different thing from the studio pictures I took in Taiwan), so to look less like a hairy freak of nature for my pictures, I decided to get my eyebrows shaped. The cheapest and fastest option seems to be threading, an ancient Indian/Middle Eastern method of hair. Basically, it’s where your hairs are removed by twisting cotton thread by them and having them get caught in the thread. I think it fairly recently became trendy, but there are many practitioners of threading in the Bay Area now. Last Friday during lunch, Anna took me to her regular lady at some hole-in-the-wall place in Sunnyvale called “The Image” or something like that. They offer eyebrow threading services for $8, which is very reasonable, especially when compared to waxing and tweezing prices (closer to $20). My engagement photo session is in a couple weeks, so I wanted to get this done soon in case my face needs to recover for whatever reason.

I thought a place that did threading would be mostly Indian, and while most of the workers were Indian, I think there were a couple white ladies doing hair as well. There seemed to be a lot of old women in the salon getting miscellaneous services. Anna had an appointment for us, so we only waited a few minutes until her thread lady, Ann, was ready to work on us. I was surprise to see Ann is an Asian woman; I didn’t realize non-Indian folks did threading. Ann brought us to one of the chairs furthest in the back and started working on Anna. She immediately went to work as soon as she sat in the chair, pulling thread from a spool, holding one end in her mouth, and twisting the thread together with her hands. Anna made it look painless, giving pretty much no reaction to the threading. She was done in a few minutes, and then it was my turn.

Ann working on Anna

Just so we’re clear, I’ve never done any sort of eyebrow shaping or maintenance. The exception was when I was in Taiwan taking studio pictures, and the makeup lady needed to quickly shape my eyebrows for the shoot, so she shaved them into shape. Obviously, they grew back fair quickly. Ann could tell it was my first time, too. Yeah, she was in for quite some work. At first, it didn’t seem so bad, just some rough tugging at my skin. When she got closer to the thicker part of my eyebrows where she was pulling more out at a time, it started to hurt a bit and make me tear up. I wasn’t surprised, since pulling out one hair already hurts enough. She also had me use my hand to hold my skin taut, and I was pushing on my eyeball a little bit. As I sat there with my eyes closed, I kept hearing the thread snap. I don’t know if that was normal, or my threading was making her break her strings a lot. With each tug, I could feel little hairs fall all over my face. Even though she brushed my face off when she was done, I still found little hairs in my mouth, which was yucky.

When she was done with each eyebrow, she’d have me take a look at a hand mirror. I was worried about getting my eyebrows done since I was afraid the salon lady might see it fit to give me some whole new eyebrow shape, but Ann did a pretty good job keeping the original shape of my eyebrows. She just made it way neater. Because it was my first time doing this, the area around my eyebrows were pretty pink, poofy, and felt really tender. She dabbed some sort of lotion or liquid that was supposed to help them feel better or swell less. Other than that, the area around my eyebrows felt very soft and smooth from the lack of hair (and probably lack of sunshine :P). Later after scrutinizing in the mirror, I did find she missed one single hair randomly, but that was easily plucked out. Now my eyebrows are nicely shaped, and I just need to maintain it for the next couple weeks until my picture session.

It’s not all positive though. I have fairly sensitive skin, so I wasn’t particularly surprised when, later that night, the areas around my new eyebrows broke out into little bumps and became a little itchy. The thing is, I don’t remember her ever touching my eyebrows, except with string. The exception would be when she applied the fluid to help with my skin soreness, so I’m thinking I must have had some sort of allergic reaction to whatever she stuck on my skin. Plus, my complexion has been having issues lately, so maybe I was touching my face too much. Regardless, it just blended in with my bad skin anyway :P After a couple days, it’s mostly gone now, and the swelling and pinkness was gone within a day of the threading. My overall experience is still positive, though. Considering the cost and time it takes, I’ll probably do this again next time I need eyebrow shaping. The experience becomes more comfortable the more regularly you do it. Ann was very friendly and patient with my newbness, plus she doesn’t go nuts with your eyebrows, so I think I’ll stick with her. If I get bored with my eyebrows, maybe I’ll try shaping them more, but I doubt I will because I think Kelvin will get pissed. Much thanks to Anna for helping me with this crazy threading stuff!

Before and after pictures after the jump, so you won’t be forced to look at my disgusting weird-angled closeups of my hairy eyebrows and bad forehead skin.