My 'Ugly Betty' moment

School seems like a lifetime ago, yet I remember it so vividly.  Rewind to 1995, when teenagers wore Doc Marten shoes to school and then went home to watch Friends on TV.  Toy Story was the first entirely computer generated film, and it seemed like every PC ran on Windows 95.  In your Discman, you would have either Alanis Morissette, or Smashing Pumpkins on heavy rotation, and back then it was not only acceptable, but actually cool to listen to Mariah Carey. 

While they say that girls mature faster than boys, that wasn’t entirely the case for myself.   Everyone’s pubescent hormones started to develop a liking for the opposite sex, luring boys with Clinique’s Black Honey lipstick, I happily stayed home and read my Archie comic books while everyone else hit T.G.I.Friday’s on the weekend. 

I didn’t care that I had braces, hairy legs, a unibrow and a flat chest.  In fact, I never even noticed I was Ms. Monobrow until one day, I saw my mom waiting for me with a pair of tweezers in her hand.  After being forcibly held down in a headlock, she finally managed to pluck every eyebrow hair that was out of place until my transformation took me from Ugly Betty season one to season four.

Since then, I slowly started acquiring habits and making changes, like actually starting to wear deodorant, shaving my legs and underarms, and still maintaining my eyebrow grooming.  And when you have so much hair on your body that you could put Cousin It to shame, the excess hair became the bane of my existence.

My most unfortunate disaster?   Over-shaving my pits would top over-plucking my eyebrows (they grew back in), or even cutting my skin with a razor (it eventually healed).  I became obsessed with shaving my underarm hair that it became a daily ritual — I didn’t even give a chance for those suckers to grow back.  The result was tragic, because my white underarms eventually turned into dark, chicken-skinned grossness. It was truly the pits. 

Eventually, in due time with some patience, and the help of Dove Deo — which helps skin repair itself and make it softer, smoother and whiter — my armpits were restored and ready to raise my hands in the college classroom, spike some volleyballs during varsity practice, or give my best pose at a photo shoot.

Today, I am now way past my puberty and well into my twenties. And while Doc Martens and Toy Story have made a comeback (Mariah Carey, we’re still waiting), let’s hope that my beauty disasters will stay in the past.