Showing posts with label beard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beard. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

To Shave or Not to Shave, That is the Question 5/13/09

Do men like women with beards? I’ve been looking in the magnifying mirror this week and have noticed some dark hairs below my bottom lip, and it has me seriously worried.

We’re not yet talking Brian Blessed here, but I’m more than a little worried by the hint of Cyrano de Bergerac. At least he had the nose to distract from any unwelcome attention onlookers might give to his face, but for me it’s the hairs that seem to stand out.

I think it must be my age. I’ve always had an excess of upper lip hair, which nobody has ever seen, owing to the fact that I whip it off roughly every three hours. Friends have told me that I could get it cosmetically removed and, in Beverly Hills, I am in the best place to get both it, and everything else done, but it would mean growing the hair first. And if there’s one thing that a 90210 postcode definitely doesn’t need, it’s a moustachioed woman in the street, frightening the horses.

But I’m not quite sure how to deal with the chin issue. I’ve been busy plucking away for the last half hour, and when I turn my 7x magnifying mirror round the other way, you can’t see one hair, let alone the forest it has become in my mind.

So, if I can’t see it, it is unlikely that any man will, which is my real worry. It’s not the kind of thing men inspect on a first date (unlike women: I’ve been known not to stay past the hors d’oeuvres if I notice a man hasn’t even been bothered to squeeze the blackheads in his nose before the date); but, still, I don’t want to take the risk.

Not that men are exactly queuing at the door. Honestly, you have to be really quick to nab one between the office and the gym. Once they’re on that treadmill or lifting those weights, women are the last thing on their minds – well, short Welsh birds, anyway; they seem to manage to take a breather when a blonde, 6 foot streak of sinew walks past, so it’s just like being back in the UK in that respect.

Beard aside, there are other imperfections I’ve been looking to correct, and they, too, seem to magnify when I view them alongside the perfect figures and faces of the women I see around me.

I’ve been considering a breast enlargement for some time, but am now worried that with all the exercise I am doing, they might get in the way; I’m going to take two melons with me next time I go and try to negotiate them along with the controls for the machine, TV and my Apple headphones, and see how it goes.

I recently considered a tummy tuck, too, but now that I’ve lost weight might not need one. Maybe I’ll just eat a bit more to justify one.

The weight loss is great in one respect, in that I am healthier and fitter, but it has given me a whole new set of problems. When I was well over nine stone, I had a really great backside: firm, rounded and, though I say it myself, rather appealing. Now it’s tiny, with lots of folds of skin where it meets the top of my legs, like rows of worm hills on the beach, all queuing up to be washed away – by, in this case, liposuction, I think.

My eyelids could do with a tiny lift, but I don’t want to look Korean, as people tend to do after this procedure; and I’m saying no to Botox, too. I’ve seen too many post-Botox, expressionless people to go down that path. I swear that you could go up to all of them, tell them your entire family had been wiped out in a plane crash, and they would not be able to wipe the stunned look of smiling joy from their faces.

I might consider getting the floppy skin removed from my upper arms, although it seems to be tightening up with the weights work I am doing. My teeth, which I started having done in the UK, are nearing completion and have been bleached and partly veneered. I say partly, because I’m having only the front two re-done, and they each came back a different colour, the one now revealing the black behind it that was the whole reason for covering it up in the first place. With my black tooth and beard, I fear mothers will be rushing to shield their small children from me in the park.

I’ve also been reading about an operation in which you can have your legs broken and bits inserted to make yourself taller; that one may be a bit further down the line, too, and I’m going to wait to see how much I shrink in the LA summer sun before resorting to such drastic measures.

But for the moment, I’m just concentrating on my beard and taking lots of natural hormonal supplements to keep it in check. There’s a saying that a man with a beard is a man with a secret (Ha! Show me a bloke who isn’t hiding SOMETHING!), and the antithesis has to be that a woman with a beard is a woman without a razor.

I’m not sure how much longer this plucking can go on, so it might have to be a Gillette job after all. My only comfort is that if and when I finally get to date a bloke, he’ll be so busy trying to unfold my arse, he won’t notice the audition for Captain Hook taking place on my chin.