Lashing Out

What is it about eyelashes that is so intriguing to us? Their purpose is to protect our eyes. Or is it? For some reason, batting eyelashes is supposed to be sexy. Have you ever wondered why? Psychologists would have an answer, likely, but I suspect that there is no particular reason other than fashion or history or whim aping. We human creatures are selective about hair. Some of it is welcome while others of it (?) are not. It depends on where it is: heads, legs or other places. But eyelashes, like wigs and toupees and tattooed eyebrows, have become the latest thing to fake onto our bodies. When I go almost anywhere: a store, a reception desk, a restaurant, a service counter, I am bound to be gazing into fake lashes. They are things that look best from a distance because, unlike stage lashes, they appear obviously not what nature put there. Far back in my memory, I recall a particularly pretty aunt who, before going out on a date, would apply mascara, which in those days, was put on with a brush shaped like a small ax. The user, spat upon the little brush and then scrubbed it back and forth on a block of dark substance before artfully smearing it onto one's actual natural lashes.  Then after that application, the matter of removing the excess blobs of it involved a painful process of avoiding stabbing ones eyes to get rid of the mass of unwanted black material. The idea was to end up with longer lashes, ones that darkly stood out from their usual boring brown. My little girlfriend, Joycie, and I watched with fascination, and not a little envy, as her big sister, Pat, applied her mascara before going out with her beau, Fergie. Ah, we sighed, how lovely to be a big girl and put on mascara. And then we grew up and used it and found it to be a great big nuisance. But everyone else did it, and we followed. These times of adding to our bodies or taking away anything natural to look more like our idols has become normal. For two hundred dollars, you too, with a fifty dollar a month budget for replacements, can throw out the ten buck tubes of wondrous promise black stuff and get the glued on kind, so long and curly, they could kill mosquitoes. In the summer, they might even cool down your face if batting them fast enough could be accomplished. As you can tell, I am not a fan, NPI,  of the fake lashes. Still, they do catch my attention. I have been known to tap my card and be so mesmerized by the clerk's eye fringes, that until I am home and onto my computer budget, find that I spent way more than I intended. Perhaps, with more caution, I could have saved enough to buy a set of the fascination fringe flappers for myself.