Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,49

to develop dandruff in my eyebrows, which is thoroughly disgusting. I can oil my scalp, but it’s already oily, which I’ve been told is also bad. Then when my hair is washed and my scalp is glistening and flake-free for five minutes, which of the 132 bottles of styling products crammed underneath my sink is the nourishing, hydrating, frizz-controlling, root-covering, volumizing, texturizing, smoothing, sculpting, shine-enhancing, color-protecting, moisturizing finishing gel-spray mousse-foam that is going to get my shit looking together?

Let’s talk about glowing skin. I don’t drink water and my blood type is pizza, but my skin looks good from a distance, mostly because I put three different oils on it and occasionally rinse off my blush before bed. Your face skin needs to be smooth yet supple yet stretched like a fresh canvas, and you’re supposed to pretend that you haven’t thought about it since you were nineteen. You have to clean it, shave it (perimenopause gang, represent!), tone it, then use a treatment on it, then press a serum into it, then moisturize it, then screen it from the sun, and, bitch, are you kidding me, that is just the skin on your fucking face!!!!!

Eye care is weird, because you don’t do anything proactive for your dumb eyes and, when there’s a problem, you flip the fuck out and remember how delicate and sensitive they are and wonder why you never cared about them before you got some moldy mascara in there and made them pink. I have worn glasses since I was nine years old, so, by default, I have taken care of my eyes at least once every two years. I’m nearsighted with an astigmatism, so I go to an ophthalmologist and get that yellow light shined in my cornea and take that scary test where they blow bursts of cold air directly onto your eyeball while screaming at you not to flinch and ruin the test. I try to wear fashionable glasses and that shit is expensive? But worth it. Because of them, people will decide you are cool, before you open your mouth and shatter their illusion. Because I stare at a screen fifteen hours a day, I invested in UV-protection lenses, which serve as a constant reminder that I had to adjust something in my real life because of all the time I waste in my fake life. That’s sad!

Your eyelashes should be long and fluttery, which can be achieved by painstakingly gluing faux mink ones on top of your own and jabbing yourself repeatedly in the eye with a brush coated in black wax, as you try to paint each individual lash with lengthening, volumizing, water-resistant color. Or you can fork over sixty dollars to a trained lash professional who will attach synthetic lash fibers onto your wimpy lashes with medical-grade adhesive. I have one tube of mascara that I bought from a vending machine in an airport when I was pretending I might be a different kind of person for the two days I was in Minnesota. I wasn’t.

I have plucked, I have tweezed, I have shaved, I have waxed, I have threaded, I have microbladed, I have trimmed, I have tinted, I have filled in, I have styled, I have contoured, and I have microfeathered my stupid eyebrows and none of those things has ever had a discernible impact on my life. Now I do nothing, and it’s fine!

I have my dad’s nose. It has been covered in blackheads and tiny little, I don’t know, blood marks ever since I can remember looking at it in a mirror. I know from years of training from the pages of Glamour that these blemishes are little spots of oil that come to the surface of your skin and oxidize, but after years of squeezing them privately at home and occasionally paying a licensed aesthetician to squeeze them out in public, I don’t think I have ever seen a not-clogged nasal pore. You buy pore-shrinking cleanser when you’re young and naive and believe that a six-dollar tube of over-the-counter face wash is capable of performing science on your face in your messy bathroom. After that, you graduate to the strips, which are extremely satisfying if you enjoy ripping shit and/or inspecting gooey things that come out of your body. As a devout Q-tip inspector, I understand the stomach-lurching appeal of looking