A lesson on art from the beauty salon
On trusting what you know and see when creating
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Collage by me, 2026.
About once every 3 - 5 weeks, I get my lashes and brows tinted. I always see the same technician: a Russian woman roughly my mother’s age who tells me I am “very welcome” every time I thank her. This is a small thing I do for myself to feel like a human adult woman without putting too much effort into it. But anyway, I am not here to talk to you about that.
What strikes me most is that her process seems different every single time. I have been doing this regularly for years now, and every week … I swear. Sometimes she turns the lights off when she leaves the room for several minutes while the color takes, others she merely dims them.
There are these little paper sheets that sit under your eye so the tint doesn’t get on your skin. Sometimes she puts them on with vaseline underneath. Other times they go on slightly damp. Still others, they’re completely dry. Sometimes she’s chatty (how much she hates bears, conspiracy theories, Russia’s great beauty) and sometimes she almost nothing.
This most recent visit she spent a lot of time with what felt like Q-tips pushing excess tint off my eyelids and I couldn’t stop imagining a handful of mice tending to me. *shrug*
To be clear, and I don’t think this is very astounding, the outcome she arrives at is the same every single time. Obviously. This woman is a professional. But her process, it varies.
It used to worry me on some level, the varied process, until this most recent visit when I realized: She is working with what she has to achieve an outcome she knows by instinct when (and only when) she sees it.
And fuck does it make me want to be an artist in the same way.