I had my eye­brows threaded at the Beauty Plus con­ces­sion in my local depart­ment store.  Thread­ing, very com­mon in Asia, uses twis­ted lines of cot­ton thread to remove hair. It’s low-tech, and demands crafty fin­gers. Ten minutes of rel­at­ive pain, some rose­wa­ter and an hour of red­ness and then ready-made arched eye­brows. The last time I went, though, it tickled; this threader’s tech­nique was not assured and she takes 5 minutes longer to fin­ish than does Shruti, work­ing on another cli­ent next to me. Lying there, teary-eyed (as I learned from watch­ing Grease a hun­dred times as a 13 year old, ‘beauty is pain’), I think about why Carly, who has NVQ level 2 in Beauty Ther­apy and is now the only white girl work­ing at Beauty Plus, doesn’t have the craft in her fin­gers like her col­leagues do.

Carly was appoin­ted to do eye­lash exten­sions and was trained to do this at col­lege. She has since been taught to thread by her Beauty Plus col­leagues: there just weren’t enough takers for the exten­sions to keep her busy. She learned wax­ing dur­ing her NVQ, an alto­gether more bru­tal and messy hair removal tech­nique. The shift to thread­ing doesn’t come eas­ily to her– as Ingold says, part of skill is the “coup­ling of per­cep­tion and action” (2011; 53), and Carly can’t help but to stop and think. Whilst the other women who do the thread­ing are employed because of their eth­ni­city — they learned to thread as a mat­ter of course, as part of being a girl with Indian her­it­age — Carly is employed des­pite her eth­ni­city. She has her qual­i­fic­a­tions but few of the skills of her col­leagues.  It’s been a few months since I saw her work­ing there.

Ref­er­ence

Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Move­ment, Know­ledge and Descrip­tion. Lon­don and New York: Routledge.