Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Plaits

Firstly BREAKING NEWS: Teamales we have a logo! I hope you love it as much as I do, it was designed by the wonderful Courtney Myers and you can click on the image below to be taken to her wonderful world.

Secondly, beauty blogs, vlogs and websites are a common occurrence in internetland and I quite honestly struggle to understand even the simplest ones. I’ve scrolled through thousands of images of beautifully made up girls, but the second I try their tips or recreate their styles I end up looking like an Indian flag doing the colour run. As a female fighting teenagehood this could leave me feeling inadequate but, instead of crying into my pillow to the tune of China In Your Hand, let’s make light of the crazy fashion fads I just don’t have time for.

Waterproof eyeliner: this list is in no particular order but I hate you the most. The one product many women can’t live without is the neighbour I can’t live with (we’ve all got one that plays the wrong music at the wrong volume at the wrong time of the day). It’s not because I envy the perfectly matching cat eye flicks you have or the fact it only took you 3 and a half minutes to do them, I hate the fact I can’t remove it after a cheeky late night practise- I hate the fact the blady thing will not budge- which is probably great if you want it to stay put all day but I do not and therefore have to look like the hybrid of a GBH victim reproducing with a panda. So much for that smokey eye.

Hot wax: I was totally happy with shaving but the transition from once a month during winter to every other day during summer was giving me a type of repetitive strain injury called boredom, so a friend recommended waxing instead. They never mentioned what type of wax. So I picked up the hot one. After a dreadfully sticky situation where the strips came off without the wax (I was picking the tshirt fluff from my armpits for days) and a few second degree burns, I decided I would rather go out looking like Queen Kong than go to the effort of putting myself through that again.

Contouring: the problem with contouring is that if you don’t have a trained makeup artist doing it then there’s a 92% chance it’ll look crap. However, if you are in that lucky 8% just be sure you don’t look at someone any way that isn’t face on because then they will be able to see the attractive orange bronzer army stripes across your cheeks and might think you’ve joined a satanic cult and never speak to you again. In fact, if you’re on a first date and they do a runner you might find some solace in the idea that it wasn’t your dishwater personality but your contouring that scared them away. Teamales from now on let’s leave the cheekbones to Angelina Jolie.

Eyebrows: are just not that important to me. And if I’m honest, if the Kardashians didn’t thrust so much attention onto them, I think they’d be one of those arm hair items. The type of feature that some people play with if they’ll really bored and/or have been forced to go to a UB40 concert and have nothing else to do than sculpt their facial hair, but the rest of us would leave them be- for men apparently this is acceptable. Imagine how much easier our lives would be if we all grew groin ferrets and could spend our money on Krispy Kremes instead of sharper tweezers.

Layering: now I’m glad that you look super cute in your lo-fi filtered Instagram picture displaying the top half your outfit compiling a denim jacket + floral scarf + argyle knit + collared shirt + striped scarf but this amount of layering is just impractical for most situations unless your situation involves living in Siberia. I feel like these photos are taken  when they’re at the airport and their suitcases are too heavy for the hold so they wear most of the clothes inside to avoid the overpacking fine. I get too hot in a bra alone so imagine the kind of sweat patches you’d have walking half of Zara to the corner shop (although you’d probably lose weight carrying all that denim around).

YouTube hair tutorials: except from using it to stream all the music that isn’t on Spotify, I’d never been massively into YouTube- and then I discovered it can be a really useful tool when you want to learn what to do with your hair. A typical video is along the lines of ‘Super Quick Bun’ and I want to ask the girl (whose name is always something fluffy like GemmySparkleXoXo) in which universe is 19 minutes classed as ‘super quick,’ ain’t nobody got time for that. Another video will be called ‘Super Easy Plait’ and it opens with a cookbook-esque You Will Need and goes on to list every item I don’t have: tangle teaser bobby pins bumble and bumble ocean sea salt sea spray straightners coloured chalk some mirrors a pretty face over a metre of hair and of course you should always wash it with almond oil before hand like I did hehehehe. Ain’t nobody got time to plait.

Which beauty fads boggle your brains, teamales? Comment below and like/follow if you enjoyed this post!