No way to save face!

Every women wants to look good. Sometimes, these attempts to enhance your looks do not go as planned. Sometimes there will be a mishap here or there. Other times though, our efforts to look turn into full blown, cringe worthy disasters… and ever more so when your love interest is around to witness it! Four women tell us their most embarrassing moments. 

The flying wig

There is one night last December that 29-year-old Janet will never forget. The night had started out well. It was a first date with an exciting new man. Earlier in the day, she had gone shopping for some new clothes and a human hair wig. Just as she had hoped, her date was impressed with her appearance.

Things started going downhill when she started dancing. Her date had opted to just sit and watch her as she enjoyed herself. Then suddenly, in the heat of the moment, the wig was pulled from her head exposing a shock of shaggy hair underneath. “The worst part was when the weave got caught in another man’s shoe heel. I was there on my knees following his foot on the dance floor trying to redeem my wig. By the time I managed to get it, it was too dirty,” she recalls.

That date, and the romance, came to an abrupt end. 

The wiped off brows

Like many Kenyan women, Alice Chela has very sparse eyebrows. She has to draw them on with eye pencil, an art she mastered when she was still a teenager. It has become such a part of her life that she does not thing about it too much… until she began dating this touchy feely man. “He liked to surprise me. One day, he walked up to me from behind, covered my eyes with his hand and in the process, wiped off my eye brows,” she recalls. The worst part of it was that they were in a roomful of people.

“Instead of acknowledging him, I panicked and started looking around the room for something to cover my face with. He couldn’t understand why I was so upset with him,” she says.

Alice still draws her eye brows on and she is still very guarded about people who try to touch her face. 

The shocking art work

For Elcah Wambui, her most cringe worthy make-up hiccup began with her liking a Facebook page. “It was a beauty parlour in the CBD and they had posted all these pictures of amazing tattoo eyebrow work. I took down a number and visited the parlour later that day,” she recalls.

Instead of the usual eye pencil, after tweezing her brows, Wambui decided to try the henna dye they were offering for Sh200 to fill out her brows.

“It was a small space so I didn’t get to look in a mirror as they did the job. I just showed them a photograph of what I wanted and then sat and waited for them to do the job. I only got to see my face after the dye had dried. The ‘beautician’ had done a very bad art job. I didn’t even pay for it,” she recalls.

She tried wiping and washing her face several times to rub some of the dye off, to no avail.

“I couldn’t remove it so I began telling myself that it wasn’t that bad, only to meet my boyfriend for coffee the next day and have him ask what happened to my face.”

The henna took about 10 days to fade. That was the first and the last time she tried permanent make-up. Now she only wears make-up that she can wipe off.

The burning bush

You know one of those evenings when you are home with your love interest, there is a delicious meal, scented candles and a hot bath? Those evenings when every tiny bit falls in place and it seems like nothing can go wrong? Well, turns out that a lot of things could wrong even in such a seemingly perfect setting. Like your weave catching fire.

“It all happened so fast,” recalls Caroline Mumbi, 32. “One moment we were enjoying a nice, quiet time in his living room, surrounded by candles, and the next, there was a strong smell of burning plastic before I realised that my weave was on fire. He responded by grabbing the throw pillows off the couch and hitting my head with them. Then we both made a rush for the bathroom to look for water,” she recalls.

Caroline still feels embarrassed when she remembers that day. And her man is not about to let her forget it. “He calls it the burning bush. Now, I do not like weaves,” she says.