Truly Horrifying Beauty Mishaps
These beauty mishaps happen more often than you may think. (Photo: Trunk Archive)
You hope it doesn’t happen to you, but beauty mishaps do indeed happen. In recent MarieClaire.com story, “6 Beauty Horror Stories That Will Make You Rethink Everything,” intern Simedar Jackson covers the fairly innocuous (and kind of hilarious), peeling off eyebrows with a face mask, to the terrifying, getting a paralyzing staph infection from a makeup brush. In the first example, British college student Emily Cowdrey had Tweeted a viral photo of herself with her eyebrows on the table:
Left a face mask on my eyebrows for too long and then my eyebrows peeled off with it pic.twitter.com/TknqzUmvBt
— Emily Cowdrey (@_xemilyyyy) May 21, 2015
“Left a face mask on my eyebrows for too long and then my eyebrows peeled off with it,” she wrote. In another more common example, beauty blogger Juli of BunBun Makeup Tips described a time when she got a facial and ended up breaking out in angry little pimples in areas where she never had acne before. She wrote: “I used to literally have goosebumps when I see people with a skin condition. I’d think to myself ‘Why doesn’t she see a skin doctor?’, ‘Why would anyone leave the house like that?’. […] To me, making up is a form of respect, for the event, for the host, for the people around me.” But after the horrific ordeal, which scarred her face, she realized that dramatic skincare conditions are oftentimes not the fault of the individual.
In another incident mentioned by Jackson, writer Maddie Rubin got a sexually transmitted infection from a Brazilian wax at an upscale salon in Manhattan. After speaking to her gynecologist, she discovered that in a study from France, 93% of women infected with molluscum contagiosum had participated in pubic hair removal within the probably timeframe. It happens when salons double-dip their waxing sticks, reusing them on clients instead of throwing them out after single use. When she called the salon to investigate, the receptionist replied: “I don’t know what your health is. I don’t know what you do.” She wrote, “Insinuating, clearly, that I was sexually promiscuous and therefore brought it on myself for being dirty. Class all the way.”
It’s easy for us to gawk at these cases because it doesn’t seem improbable that they’ll happen to us, but that’s the danger of beauty practices that become part of our everyday routines — we forget that at its core, beauty involves a volatile combination of chemistry, biology, and physics with reactions that we don’t anticipate. Proceed with caution.
Related:
The Hidden Dangers of Makeup Brushes
