FORGET the Brexit three-ring circus for a moment. We need to talk about eyebrows. Specifically, the woman who was left looking like "something out of the Angry Birds" when an eyebrow spruce went badly awry.
The saga began when a trainee therapist got a bit overenthusiastic with the wax while tending to the eyebrows of 37-year-old Colline Rees from Llanelli, South Wales. Another beautician at the salon then attempted to fix the mistake "by using a bit of tint".
This resulted in what looked like two thick black slugs being drawn above Colline's eyes. Hence the Angry Birds reference, a puzzle video game/movie where the avian-themed avatars have dark, prominent eyebrows – think film director Martin Scorsese or TV newsreader James Mates.
As a rule of thumb, I don't give much thought to my eyebrows. I'm aware they are there on my face, sitting just above my glasses and doing a grand job of wicking away sweat, rain and moisture while effortlessly multitasking to express a gamut of emotions from unabashed joy to WTF-level surprise.
But that's about the extent of it. They don't factor in my daily routine. I'm not in possession of an arsenal of stencil kits, crayons, pencils, thickening fibres and setting gels that I know is all the rage judging by the heavily defined brows that I see everywhere.
Although that doesn't mean I haven't dabbled. I lived through the 1990s when – unless you were Brooke Shields or one of the Gallagher brothers – eyebrows were thin slivers resembling those found on a porcelain Pierrot clown doll. It was not a good look.
Years ago, I was talked into getting my eyebrows threaded. I watched in the mirror as the nimble-fingered beautician whisked away the tiny hairs. It was like seeing the moon rapidly waning in one of those speeded-up time-lapse videos.
Finally, the beautician stepped back to let me inspect her handiwork. "The caterpillars are gone," she announced proudly. Except my eyebrows hadn't so much morphed into butterflies as something altogether more aesthetically perplexing.
They had been shaped into two alarming-looking semi-circles which put me in mind of the Golden Arches at a McDonald's drive thru. I half-expected to be done for trademark infringement.
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It wasn't so much a light pruning as an archaeological dig which unearthed a couple of chicken pox scars that I didn't even know I had on account of them usually being covered by a thick layer of hair.
That's not even the worst part. Four weeks later I went back and paid to have my eyebrows threaded again. Ah, the foolishness of youth.
Red room of pain
SPEAKING of nostalgia, a fan of the Netflix series Stranger Things has gone viral for asking about the purpose of the "red room" on the sci-fi show.
Or as the question was posed: "In Stranger Things, we frequently see Jonathan go inside this to 'refine' his photos or something. I don't quite understand what happens here.
"He puts the photo in water, and somehow this makes it more clear? An example is in the first season when he refines Barbara's photo and sees a little bit of the Demogorgon. Is this an old film technique, and if so, what is it called?"
The mystical phrase you are reaching for is a photography darkroom. Back in the days of yore before we could take pictures on our mobile phones – to remain suspended in The Cloud for perpetuity – you had to use camera film and then develop this in a dark room to see the images.
One can only imagine the wonder and surprise at a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer. Or the sorcery that was a Betamax video recorder.
Nessie rides again
REGULAR readers will know that myself and fellow columnist Rab McNeil head up the Nessie Sightings Bureau over the summer months. It's not a paid position. More a treasured hobby.
As Rab revealed last week, mooted plans for a "Storm Loch Ness" event were swiftly kicked into touch by the RNLI who reminded any would-be Nessie hunters that the loch's icy depths are more than twice the height of Big Ben and its weather conditions unpredictable at best.
Not that Nessie will be in anyway. We're hearing from our sources that she is heading off to a yoga retreat in the Rocky Mountains with Bigfoot and then plans a beach holiday in Cabo San Lucas with Chupacabra.
In other news, we could be on track for a record number of Nessie sightings with the 12th this year logged by a chap called Richard Cobb who said: "I've been coming to Loch Ness since 1992 and I know what a boat wake looks like. But there were no boats around when this thing surfaced."
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Could the recent flurry of sightings reflect the state of the nation's psyche? Are we seeing monsters everywhere? Does Nessie exist? In a world where Boris Johnson is Prime Minister, anything is possible.
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