Unfinished eyebrows
A preview of a piece I’m currently working on.
I went to the interview with no eyebrows.
Well, technically no real ones. I drew two on using the few sparse hairs I had left on my forehead as a blueprint for the arch that once was.
Rimmel promised me a precision finish, but their marketing team didn’t account for my aptitude with a stick applicator, which was ironic, because the role I was interviewing for was with a beauty company.
Make-up has never been my strong suit. I was never very good at looking at myself, even if the entire point of it was to change what was reflected back at me. I just didn’t have the patience or the stomach for it. It was a lot easier to say, “I don’t have a knack for this stuff,” and conceal my insecurities with sarcasm - the unofficial uniform of radio presenters.
My new eyebrows were undeniable, in that you couldn’t deny their existence. They were thick, dark and utterly uneven but, to my credit, they were evenly spaced apart.
I asked my mum what she thought, and her initial response was, ‘Yes, good.’
Then, upon further pressure: ‘Why don’t you just take them off? You don’t need them anyway.’ Which, to borrow a more psychiatrically appropriate term, translates to: “You look totally fucking insane.” But there’s a time and place for honesty, and two weeks after your daughter has finished chemotherapy is not one of them.
Oh yes, I must have forgotten to mention: I was sick. Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage one. The cancer Delta Goodrem had, my haematologist told me when I was diagnosed. Celebrities are just like us after all, though something tells me that my name will assimilate into a thousand-person-plus statistic about youth cancer while Delta takes the headline.
When I arrived at the office, I was met with a teenage boy’s wet dream and my honest-to-God worst nightmare: hot skinny bitches in denim shorts. The bar at the entryway was covered in half-drunk Bloody Marys. The girl who greeted me said they had their Christmas party last night, so everyone was “easing into the day.” It was 3pm.
A converted warehouse would be too generous a term to describe the office space. It was, at best, a garage with a sink, but the mismatched antique furnishings, greenery and Persian-style rugs lent it a grammable edge.
The boardroom overlooked the backstreets of Cremorne, a suburb so entitled it refuses to concede it is in fact Richmond, and therefore rebranded itself with a name no one can pronounce. Naturally, it is home to a slew of creative agencies, start-ups, exercise studios and men named Dalton.
We spent the interview talking about beauty and not the elephant in the room, which, on a 35-degree day, had begun to melt down my face. The two women who interviewed me had a penchant for expensive clothes and dental hygiene, which they made quietly evident by smiling tooth-first at the end of every third sentence. They were curious about me and considerate with how they expressed their success, which in 2019 was an estimated two million-dollar business. They had rich-girl hair, plump skin and a post-graduate vocabulary they wielded with such nonchalance it pierced my brain, and I was ashamed how much I envied them.