- The Guardian
Thursday 1 August 2019
This week, the Sun reported
that 37-year-old Colline Rees
from Llanelli, south Wales, had
a family holiday ruined after
a botched eyebrow treatment
left her too embarrassed to pose for photos. After a
trainee therapist accidentally waxed off most of her
right eyebrow, the salon attempted to fi x the mistake
by painting thick, black dye on Rees’s brows. “All
my close friends and family were saying I look like
something out of the Angry Birds,” she said.
Readers on
their eyebrow
disasters
The barking
trend for
marrying dogs
A woman married her dog. Eamonn
Holmes gave the bride away. The
groom, a golden retriever, wore a top
hat. Love Island’s Kem Cetinay acted
as a ring-bearer. It played out live
and like a David Lynch fever dream
on ITV’s This Morning on Tuesday.
One viewer called it “deeply
uncomfortable viewing”. “There
has to be law against marrying your
bloody dog,” tweeted another.
There is, actually – the only
legal marriage is between two
human beings – but there were a
few giveaways that this was not a
solemn occasion. Alison Hammond,
offi ciating, struggled to keep it
together as she called for those
present to voice any “bones of
contention” as to why Elizabeth
Mary Francis Hoad and six-year-old
Logan should not be wed. No one
said the obvious – “How long have
you got?” – but Logan did off er a
Tim-from-The-Offi ce-style haunted
look to camera.
What would move a woman to
marry her dog, even symbolically?
Before the ceremony, Hoad, 49, told
This Morning that after four failed
engagements , 220 dates and a range
of unsatisfactory experiences in theAge: New for summer 2019.
Appearance: Glamorous, photogenic,
aspirational, related.
Related to what? To one another.
Who are? The #GeneBraggarts.
I’m confused. Can we start again? I think we
just have.
What are we actually talking about? We
are talking, my friend, about a trend. More
specifi cally, about an Instagram trend.
Oh God, these things never make any sense to
me. It’s basically the new #SquadGoals.
That doesn’t help. #SquadGoals was a hashtag
commonly appended to shots of one and one’s
mates having fun, looking fi t and possibly
dressed in matching outfi ts.
I’ll take your word for it. And #GeneBragging?
The term, seemingly coined in a recent
Telegraph article , denotes a new fondness
for posting lovely photos of one’s glamorous
parents, children or grandparents while on
holiday in exotic locations with them.
Glamorous parents? Who has glamorous
parents? Celebrities, and the off spring of
celebrities.
I’m feeling slightly exempted from this.
That’s partly the point. It’s a defl ective form of
showing off.
How so? Because you’re being complimentary
about someone who happens to share a lot of
your genetic material.
And then you add the hashtag
#GeneBragging? God, no. That would ruin it.
So what do you write? Well, in the case of
Holly Willoughby’s pic of her mother sitting
on the beach in a swimsuit , she wrote :
“When I grow up I want to be just like this
please ...”
That’s sort of sweet, I guess. After which she
appended the following hashtags: “#glammam
#glamgran #timelessbeauty”.
Do you have any other examples? Yes: Goldie
Hawn and Kate Hudson snapped walking
together in a sunny street: “Taking a little
mommy daughter stroll in Italy after a 37k bike
ride to this amazing town!”
37km? Do they look sweaty? They do not.
I think I understand, but it still seems odd.
One of the reasons I want to be famous is so
I can stop going on holiday with my parents.
That sounds like an aspiration in search of its
own hashtag.
Do say: “Here’s my hot grandmother
sipping prosecco while bung ee jumping
out of a helicopter over Mount Etna!
#GoNan #TrueBeautyNeverFades
#ObviouslyWhereIGetItFrom.”
Don’t say: “I’ve got some good video footage
of my Auntie Joan falling out of a plastic cafe
chair in the Algarve, but I’ll need to transfer it
from VHS. #24HoursInA&E # Severe Bruising
#StillHilarious #RIPJoan.”
Pass notes Shortcuts
Waitrose has sold off three of its
supermarkets to Lidl, sparking
a wave of middle-class outrage.
It’s not just concern about access
to venison meatballs or pistachio
ice-cream – residents of Bromley
in London, Oadby in Leicestershire
and Wollaton in Nottinghamshire
apparently fear their house prices
could take a dive.
Kal Kandola, 49, told the
Telegraph : “We are regulars at
Waitrose and not very happy
about this at all. I have houses
in Wollaton that I rent out. The
issue of house prices is a concernDoes a Lidl
really lower
house prices?
At least Rees was left with eyebrows- sort of. When Hattie Grylls, aged
13, decided to shape her eyebrows
whil e on a family holiday , her dad’s
rusty old razor was the closest
implement to hand. The now
26-year-old Londoner, who works
in publishing, says: “I still get a rash
from embarassment just thinking
about it .”
At the time, thin eyebrows were
in vogue. “I’d just started shaving
my legs and got my period. I was
like, ‘I’m a woman now.’” Plus,
Grylls had started a tentative holiday
romance with a boy called Alex, and
she hoped her new, adult eyebrows
would seal the deal.
“I was trying to do it
methodically,” Grylls says. The
trouble is, a razor isn’t that precise.
“I’d overdo it on one side, so I’d
do a bit more to even it out on the
other side.” Reader, she shaved her
eyebrows off.
When Ben Horsley-Summer
was 20, he was into “shouty” music,
and had a face full of piercings and
long black hair to boot. Two eyebrow
piercings in an unusual place – the
centre of his brows, directly above
his pupils – seemed like a good bet.
When Horsley-Summer took out
his piercings fi ve years later, he
realised his mistake: he had two
bald spots in the centre of his
eyebrows.
If a calamity should befall your
eyebrows, don’t do as 27-year-
old Kimberley Hall did, and heap
disaster upon disaster. Hall, a
police service adviser from
Edinburgh, bought a precision
hair trimmer with the intention
of tidying up her eyebrows, but a
combination of a hangover and a
momentary lapse in concentration
proved ruinous.
“I shaved half of my right eyebrow
off by accident,” Hall says. “ Then
I thought, I can’t have half an
eyebrow – so I decided taking it all
off was a better decision.” (It was
not.) Looking upon her work with
despair, Hall made yet another
unforced error, and decided to get
a fringe cut to cover it up. “It was a
double disaster,” she remembers. “I
had to tell people about the eyebrow
straight away, because they were
judging my terrible hair.”
To any teenagers who may be
reading this, about to absent-
mindedly do some facial landscape
gardening using your mum’s Venus:
put the razor down. Unless it’s
already too late – in which case,
don’t worry. They’ll grow back.
Eventually. Probably.
Sirin KaleNo 4,026
#GeneBragging
of the
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