hair_symmetry
epitome of incomprehensibility On top of my head, it has reestablished itself. I_got_a_dadaist_haircut was free, but the asymmetry was expensive to maintain, so the two sides are fairly even now.

Baudelaire wrote a poem about a woman's head hair suggesting to the poem's narrator what her pubic hair would look like (among other erotic things) and you can find it at the_cat_vagina_continuum just because. It was one of the poems removed from the first edition of Les fleurs du mal for being too reeskay. Personally I find pubic hair rather pretty (though not in a sandwich - ANY hair would be gross in a sandwich) and its shortening or removal rather desexualizing to men and women alike, especially since the trimming is often a prelude to wearing skimpy clothes like bathing suits, and skimpy clothing in general is desexualizing since it puts all that skin in public view in non-erotic contexts. (And that part isn't necessarily bad! Today's bathing suits, even bikinis, are much more convenient for swimming in than 19th-century outfits. And it's good to be able to wear convenient swimming clothes in public without people gawking and making rude comments either to the effect of how attractive and/or unattractive you are (both are generally unwelcome and harassing, I find)).

Anyway. On to the less sexy and more literal side of hair symmetry: eyebrows! For me, the strangest instance of hair symmetry is the insistence on it in women's eyebrows. I didn't really know that eyebrow symmetry was a desired thing until this past summer, when my friend's mother was getting remarried and she had two people cancel their makeup appointment and so both my mother and I could get our makeup done for free.

Now, when I was a teenager, around where I lived it was the style for a while for female types of people to pluck their eyebrows and make them thinner. (A classmate of mine wore a perpetually surprised expression.) Since I haven't noticed as many women/girls doing that in recent years, I thought, "Okay, that's not a thing anymore, so I don't have to worry about my eyebrows being too big, since they aren't that big anyway, and I'll just continue plucking out the annoying hairs between the two eyebrows every two or three weeks and I'll not have to bother about eyebrows any further, so I'll be TOTALLY FASHIONABLE without exerting myself, yay!"

But I hadn't counted on eyebrow symmetry. After I experienced the makeup artist saying, "Hey, you have a nice skin texture" before covering it all up with foundation, I should have expected weird things to come, but it was still a little strange just have her say, "Oh, let me fix your eyebrows" (Fix? Eyebrows? Are those things prone to malfunction?) and then get out a little electric razor and buzz the things into symmetry before I could say anything.

She did it well, I must admit. They looked nice and symmetrical. But would anyone notice if they weren't??? ...So it was nice for the occasion, but not something I'd do everyday. Same thing for makeup.

And I'm not an expert on the male side of things, but it's weird how people will assume a man has bad hygiene if his facial hair looks messy or asymmetrical. Hygiene and cosmetics are not the same thing, despite drugstore ads. Hygiene means you wash your face, not that you have to shave all your hair off your chin or have it perfectly groomed. It's not as if spiders are going to spin webs in people's beards. It's not a very good spider environment, after all.
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