Ma'm No Beautiful!

Muslima and I after our outing

I must say, despite all the eggs she feeds me, I do really like our maid. Muslima is very funny and her and I often play charades since neither of us is able to speak the others language.

Today Muslima looked at me and got this sad scrunched up look on her face. She shook her head and said "ma'm, no beautiful". hahaha, okay....RUDE! She then came over and looked at me even more closely and began touching my eyebrows and saying something in bangla to another maid who occasionaly comes to help Muslima. Now I understood...

One of the beauties of living in developing countries is a lack of mirrors. I didn't have a mirror in South Africa or Costa Rica. I do have a small mirror in my bathroom now but it is always so fogged up after my shower that I usually don't bother with it. In addition, shops are nothing like the malls we go to back home so there are not mirrors in every store to check your appearance with. I actually really like this because when I can't see what I look like, I no longer care about make-up etc.

Back to today's issue. I have not bothered to "clean-up" my eyebrows since I arrived here. Muslima was telling me my eyebrows were not beautiful anymore. So, I am going out today to buy some things for my upcoming dance performance and while I am out I will get my eyebrows threaded. I have no idea what that is going to be like, but that is what they do in Asia. Not waxing, threading. I will finish this post after I return.



I'm back! It's actually been about a week since Muslima told me I wasn't beautiful. Things have not worked out for one reason or another to go to the beauty parlor and my eyebrows have continued to get worse. Finally today I told my coworker I wanted to go get my eyebrows done. I told him I would take Muslima with me since men are not allowed in beauty parlors here, they go to barber shops (it's like going back in time 60 years here!).

My eyebrows being threaded

Muslima hailed a rickshaw and we were on our way. We went up to the parlor and I sat in a standard swiveling beauty parlor chair. I was than shown (since they can't ask me, I won't understand!) to slide down into the chair so that my head could rest on the back. Then the cosmetologist began threading my brows with a piece of string. It wasn't too painful but still made my eyes water. It actually went pretty fast, less than ten minutes for sure and possibly less than five. However, my eyebrows are much thinner now than I like them. I thought it would be obvious to just follow the shape and get those stragglers underneath, but no... they really cut them down! Oh, well, I will be able to let them grow back while I'm living in an Ashram in India, no one there will care if I'm beautiful or not.

I know its not my best photo, but
here are my newly threaded, thin
Asian style eyebrows

All in all, with the round trip rickshaw ride to get there and back and the threading itself, I spent 65Taka, that's about 75 cents! Eyebrow waxing in the states costs no less than $10 and sometimes $20-$25. So even though my brows are a little sparse at the moment, what a bargain! And...Muslima says I'm beautiful again :)