The tiny bride-to-be sitting in Rashida Balogun’s high-backed chair is in trouble and she knows it. She waits with her eyes shut, hands folded tightly in her lap, one kitten heel tapping against the chair leg. Rashida frowns into her upturned face and then, obviously irritated, turns to wipe rubbing alcohol over her tweezers and scissors.
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A set of thin brushes stands in a vase on the corner of her table, next to a hand mirror and some tubes that look like oil paints. Conspicuously missing are a pot of wax bubbling on a burner and thin strips of muslin. Rashida refuses to use wax. This is like going in for a checkup and the doctor telling you he doesn’t believe in stethoscopes. Waxing is de rigueur: you go somewhere to get your brows waxed because you can’t trust yourself to do it right. Rashida only tweezes–and what’s more, she charges $45 to do it. That’s triple what most places charge for any method. I’m watching her work today to find out what she does that the 50 or so other women (and two men) who have waxed, plucked, threaded, and trimmed my own eyebrows in the past didn’t.
Over the course of the morning she’ll repeat her mantra, “Waxing is evil,” seven times. “All the beauty magazines say the skin around the eye is the most delicate on the body–don’t pull at it, pat moisturizer on with your little finger,” she says. “Turn the page and they’re telling you to put burning hot wax there and rrrip it off! Keep waxing long enough and the eyelid loses its structure and droops.
Rashida got her own brows done for the first time in high school, the day of senior prom. She was getting a manicure in a downtown Chicago salon when a lady walked in with striking, bold, arched brows–the “perfect diva arch,” she says. A hairdresser asked where the lady went for her brows, and Rashida leaned in for the answer. “I headed straight to the same place after my haircut, to this cute little Polish woman named Margaret at Joseph Michael’s–who waxed, but she knew what she was doing,” she says. She thought the grooming made her face brighter and more open. Her friends noticed, and Rashida figured out how to do their brows just like hers. After a long detour as an accountant for an insurance company, she enrolled in a makeup artistry program at Columbia College. (“My parents are from Nigeria,” she explains. “Nigerian parents don’t want you to go to beauty school. They want you to get a degree in something real, like finance.”) She learned how to fix everything from split ends to broken nails, but knew she’d do only eyebrows once she got her certification.
The young woman hops down and writes a check, still making excuses: surprise visit by the future in-laws, couldn’t go to dinner with brows looking like that. Rashida tells her to make a late-night emergency appointment next time instead of touching them herself. I forget to ask exactly how much such an appointment would cost–I’m distracted by the young woman’s face. She has small ruby lips, a delicate nose, and a clear, wide forehead that I had overlooked. Rashida and I watch her march across the hardwood floor and out the door, her little purse clutched at her waist, and the sun from the high windows falling on her hair and shoulders. I think we’re thinking the same thing: she looks like a bride.
