The Tweezer(s) Tale

Something really bad happened to me the other day. I couldn’t find my tweezers. This may not seem like a big deal to most of our readers, or even to most people in the world. But I know there are postmenopausal women out there silently thinking “Oh, no!”

I looked everywhere. They weren’t in the usual place in the bed stand. They weren’t in the back-up location of the drawer in the bathroom. I couldn’t find them on my desk next to the computer (a place they have been known to reside). And I even looked next to my chair in the living room, to no avail.

Many of you must be thinking, “Why would tweezers be anywhere but in the bathroom next to the mirror and make-up?” Even if you don’t wear make-up very much, the tweezers are always in the bathroom next to the mirror and the other tools essential for personal hygiene and beauty routines. And if you can’t find them, just Google tweezers and you will learn that there are 12 pages (count them – 12) of tweezers available for purchase in the “tweezers and brow” section at www.shopstyle.com.

Just as an aside from the original point of this story. Who would have guessed that there are 12 pages of options for tweezers? You have your Tweezerman Mini Slant White Polka Dots tweezers as well as your Lavender Polka Dot Mini Oval Slant Tweezers. There was a particular type of tweezers that advertised it’s ability to be used even with your glasses on. (I apologize that I can’t give you that name because there were so many I lost track of where I read about it). My reaction to that one was typical of an aging woman. “Who can use tweezers without their glasses?” Oh, I forgot, that’s why you always have that mirror handy with the magnifying side. And just for the joy of the English majors out there, is it tweezer or tweezers? (the online oxford dictionary provides both options)

To get back to my panic at loosing my tweezers. If there are any of you postmenopausal ladies out there who don’t yet understand my distress, you haven’t yet had the joy of trying desperately to remove the hormonal gift of a random chin hair. You are sitting there working, maybe writing a post for your blog, minding your own business, and you lean your chin on your hand for just a moment to think. And you feel it. A chin hair. Now you are toast. You can’t ignore it, you can’t grab it with your fingers, you can’t scratch it off, you can’t rub it in. After several minutes (or hours depending on how determined you may be or unwilling to get up and find the tweezers) you start looking for your tweezers.

This may again seem like a simple task. You go to the bathroom drawer, the one near the mirror, and you get the tweezers and remove the hair. Or, go to the drawer and use one of the other pairs of tweezers you have in the drawer. There are two problems with this simple solution. First, your tweezers are usually wherever you most recently removed your last chin hair and who knows where that was. And second, not just any pair of tweezers will do. I suspect that most women have several pairs of tweezers in their bathroom drawers, and in our youth we saw them as pretty much interchangeable. I could pluck my eyebrows (the few times I actually agreed to do so since I was a very fair haired blond – maybe material for another post) with a number of different styles of tweezers. I had my favorites, but the competition between them wasn’t fierce and life altering. That changed when the target of my tweezers became chin hair.

Because I was blond (or sort of) to start with, my chin hairs are light or grey. They typically don’t present me with the public display problem. But if I know they are there, they do present me with the “this is the most annoying thing in the world” problem. But because these are small, light and frequently soft little hairs, tweezing can be a huge issue. I had a very old pair of tweezers that were small and tight and allowed me to get rid of these stupid hairs. You need to understand that not every kind of tweezer will work. These hairs are pretty tiny when you can feel them. When you find a pair that works, they are like GOLD! Hence my panic when I lost mine.

When my searching brought me no closer to my tweezers and the hair had driven me mad over the course of a couple of days, I went to the local drug store. I spent at least 20 minutes studying the various options (not as voluminous as the 12 pages on the Internet, but more than I ever expected). I finally selected two versions, just to be safe. If one didn’t work, surely the other one would. My partner called me when I was in the drug store asking where I was. When she asked me why I was there my answer was “Looking for something I lost.” After a moment she knew what I meant and started laughing out loud. I wasn’t amused.

I brought my new prizes home, tried them out and was immensely relieved to succeed in deporting that chin hair from residence on my face. My relief was quite palpable, albeit hard for anyone else to understand. Now I had two prizes, one for my bed stand and one for my purse.

As I was emptying the washing machine later that day I heard a funny metal sound. I couldn’t imagine what it was, since the clothes were clean and there weren’t any other movable parts. After removing all the clothes, I looked down into the washer and there, lying quietly at the bottom of the washing machine was – you guessed it – my tweezers. And then there were three….. I guess my pocket is yet another place to look.

OK, this might not be the most critical issue for women to face on this blog – but sometimes we just need to make fun of ourselves.