I should have known better…….Court’s Salon Adventure

I keep an ongoing list of things I’d like to write about, but sometimes something comes up that just takes precedent.

Case in point: my adventure last week with eyelash extensions (I apologize in advance-this is a long one)

I have seen these eyelash extensions before-on some of my friends on their wedding days etc, but I didn’t really think it was something that someone would pay money for on a regular basis. In fact-I didn’t even think of them at all until one day at work scrolling through the internal buy/sell list I see someone is selling a coupon for eyelash extensions for $29.

Now, if you know anything about this (and I didn’t) research into various salons will put these bad boys at around $125 and upwards. Which I happen to think is ridiculous (except for special occasions of course) but at $29- that seemed like a fairly reasonable price to see what all the hub-ub was about.

So I purchased the coupon and set out to book my appointment. At this point, I would reeeeeaaallly like to tell you the name of the salon, but to be honest I’m not 100% sure of the legality of that because I’m going to bash them pretty hardcore in the next couple of paragraphs….

So, according to the instructions on the coupon-you’re supposed to text in your appointment request. Ok, a little odd I thought but hey, I’ll get with the times. So I texted “Hi there, my name is Courtney, I have a coupon number ****, and I’d like to book an appointment for eyelash extensions. Do you have anything on May 24^{th or} 25th? Thank you”

I think it was about 5-6 hours later I got this response “No”

Um….okay….

I text back…”What days do you have?” No response. So I figured, ok maybe they’re busy, I’ll just call. First time I called, their voicemail was full. Second time I called, I was able to leave a message but of course they did not return my call. So, at this point, I’m getting a touch testy, so I send this text “Excuse me, I have a coupon that I’d like to use for a service you provide-my texts have been ignored and my calls have gone unreturned. Is this the way you treat all potential new clients?”

Well imagine my surprise when I got an almost immediate response-but not a very nice one. “FYI, you’re just one of the hundreds of text messages we get a day and sometimes they got lost(how do you lose a message unless you delete it?) and we were closed for a couple days last week.” (Hmm that would have been handy to put on your outgoing voicemail…)At this point I was tempted to write something back equally snotty but since I still wanted the service I held my tongue (which if you know me at all is REAAALLLY hard to do)

So, I was able to book an appointment for the following Thursday and on that day I drove to the salon which I have to say was in kind of a sketchy part of E-Town. First little twinge…

I get out and go inside and upstairs where I see: 4 beds all in an open area, a little tiny desk and I think a supply closet….second little twinge...

Then this big giant black dude comes over and says in a voice that can only be described as Mike Tyson-esqe “Ok, You’re over here with me….” Third little twinge (even though that one was a tad judgy on my part)

Why did I continue and ignore the twinges? I generally always ignore the twinges because I’m a big ol’ scaredy cat half the time and I’m not sure sometimes if the twinges are proper gut feelings or just me being a scaredy pants (7 out of 10 times I guess wrong)

So I lay down on the bed and he informs me I can have “luxurious eye patches to help with undereye circles for only $10 or adhesive tape”  I go with the eye patches because a) they sounded lovely and b)I’m allergic to adhesive tape-btw the pads did nothing....

So he tapes down my lower eyelashes with these pads and tells me to keep my eyes shut NO MATTER WHAT! This begins to frighten me a touch, as I’m not entirely sure what the process is at this point. But naïve little Court that I am, figures he’ll explain as he goes along. No-he did not. He just kept moving back and forth from eye to eye, putting on the eyelashes I assumed, and singing along to the very loud R&B station that was thumping in the background…(where was the relaxing spa music?) I then come to find out halfway through that he is also the tattoo artist there….for some reason a big scary tattoo artist putting on little bitty lashes makes me a tad uncomfy but I figure well I’m kind of stuck now.

Then the BURNING started. Now that I know a little more about it, I figure it was the adhesive that somehow got in my EYES and was causing a reaction!!! I wanted to ask what the hell was going on but oh- Mike Tyson has disappeared without a word, and its dead quiet in there and my eyes are burning and closed and I do not know what the hell is going on!!!! So I gather my courage and say “Um,hello? Excuse me? Is anybody there?” Snot head says “Yeah” I say, “This is a tad uncomfy-how long am I supposed to sit like this” “About 10 minutes” I figure Ok, this really hurts but I’m a trooper, I can handle 10 more minutes. (I think about an hour in total had passed by now)

Then all of a sudden I hear a jingle and a rush of air coming at my eyes which startled me quite badly and I jumped. Mike Tyson said “Don’t worry, I just be drying your eyelashes” (no I’m not being racist-that is exactly what he said!!) So I said oh ok….

Then silence again, but this time I know Mike is still there because I can hear his bracelets jingling as he DANCED around the salon....

Then he comes back, puffs of air in my eyelashes again and says I’m good to go, so I sit up and open my eyes and they water and tear and burn so bad. He says that’ll go away when the glue dries…OK. So I look in the mirror and there are my lashes…looking like I went to the Dollar Store and bought myself one of the fake eyelash strips and stuck it on myself. This does not please me and my dander gets even more up when I go to pay for the eye patches and find out that I must now pay a mandatory 15% gratuity on the cost of the full service. $29 for the Coupon-$35 for everything else.

So I go home and notice my eyes are super bloodshot….this is oh so attractive with my new eyelashes but I figured they were just irritated so I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and my eyes were itchy and sore and RED! I looked like I had just come back from a 4 day bender.

I went to work and I think I made it to lunchtime without actually giving into the urge to tear at my own eyes. Got some eyedrops and it helped a bit, but not much. I went home and got some different eyedrops and that helped to clear it up eventually. But I wondered what had gone wrong.

The next day (Saturday) I went to a place here in town and asked one of the girls there what had happened  She said it looked like they were put to close to the lash line and they were all one length (apparently you’re supposed to use 3) No wonder my eyes were irritated!

So I booked an appointment for Monday night to have her fix them (thankfully only $20 because she was still working on her quotas) But I figured hey-she probably had more training than Mike!

It took her a long time to remove his mistakes and fix them up, and she did briefly end up kind of gluing my eye shut, but all in all, it went much smoother. No burning or pain or anything.

Verdict-they are super cute (when done properly) but way too expensive and hard to maintain. They keep hitting my sunglasses and tangling in themselves. Once they drop off, I will likely not get them again.

I did contact the coupon place and they’re working on getting my money back for me.

Thanks for hanging in and reading the incredibly long post!!!

Until next week……