Ah… so many to choose from! But my WORST ones involve bad hair.
Remember Dorothy Hamill?
At the tender age of five, I allowed my grandmother, bless her heart, to perm my hair. She was enrolled in beauty school at the time and got my mom’s permission to practice perming skills on me. Dorthy Hamill bowl cut + too tight perm = hair of horrors!!!
Finals destination
One time back in college I walked into a random $8 haircut chop shop on a whim and told the stylist to do “whatever she wanted” to my shoulder-length black hair. It was during finals; I was broke, sleep-deprived out of my mind, and convinced that my hair was weighing down my brain. I probably should’ve left when it occurred to me that the other people in the waiting area were screaming children and dudes who looked like they never showered, but I was already in the chair. 🙂 Fifteen minutes later, I had my brand new lopsided triangle haircut, way too short and puffed up at the sides, WHEE! It looked horrible and took months to grow out.
Brow beating
Do not — I repeat — DO NOT attempt to wax your eyebrows unless you’re wide awake and alert. I learned this lesson the hard way last summer…
Care to ‘fess up? Come on, don’t be shy. 🙂 What’s the WORST beauty decision you ever made?
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
shontay says
Aw karen. I remember the brow incident like it was yesterday. I felt your pain. I, too, got slap happy with some tweezers and somehow made my brows hella short and hella thin. I think it’s a right of passage for us women.
Another right of passage is horrible haircuts. I took a picture of rihanna to my trusted and much loved hairstylist. Poor woman doesn’t know anything about rih rih and I ended up looking a 1950s housewife. Sad times.
Kajal Couture says
In my elementary school and jr high days, I used to wear my hairstyle the same way for years….it was a half up half down do, with the half up portion at the very top of my head a la 80s style with a little pouf. It was bad…
Before I discovered beauty counters, I used to be all about the drugstore compact that you keep in your backpack, and I didn’t quite realize that my powder color was a tad too light. My pics from those days are somewhat horrific!
.-= Kajal Couture’s last blog post… Urban Decay Friends and Family is Back!! =-.
Amanda says
Remember when the big “Dinner Roll” bun bangs were in? Yeeeaaaahhh… I was young then and my mother didn’t feel like spending hours making my bangs puffy every morning, so guess what? Perm! Bangs only!! I looked like a poodle! But I thought I was pretty rockin’ in my pink leggings and oversized sweat shirt 😛 Hey, I was in 3rd grade!
My latest bad choice was to buy cheap eyeliner. It’s smudgy, kinda clumpy, and doesn’t go on smoothly. Boooo.
Glosslizard says
Also my hair. At 24 I tried cutting it short, with images of sassy, spiky punk-esque goodness dancing in my head! Unfortunately, naturally fine, curly hair does not do these things, and I ended up with a poodle-y mass that left me feeling shorn and matronly! At 24! I grew it out as fast as I could and never looked back (plus I destroyed a lot of photos 😉 )!
BeckBeck says
Mine’s a hair one too! When I was 20, my mom (who went to beauty school and had cut my hair my whole life) didn’t think she could do the haircut I wanted. So she booked me with the owner of the salon she went to. She admits in hindsight that she should have just scheduled me with HER person, but she thought the owner would have more current information on stylish haircuts.
So, we explained to him exactly what we wanted… and he took a deep drag on his cigarette and said “Nah. You don’t want to leave all this [picks up a handful of my hair] in the back here.”
He gave me a sharply angled “wedge” haircut – shaved-short at the nape of the neck with bat-wings down on either side of my chin. One hundred percent WRONG for my rounded-heart face shape. I cried in the car on the way home. My mom swore like a sailor and ended up cutting the sides off for me. I looked like a boy for a year, and I didn’t let ANYONE but my mom come near me with scissors until I moved away from home four years later.
Sharon says
WORST beauty decision was allowing my aunt to use a hot comb in my hair. It was like a torture tool basically a metal comb heated by charcoal. Unfortunately unlike a blow dryer you can’t regulate the heat so my hair was burned so badly i had to cut most of it off:-(
YJ says
My mom’s a beautician, and when I was in elementary school, my friend and I were playing with her teensy little round brushes, and I got it wrapped around in my long hair. I wasn’t supposed to play around with her work station so when I heard her coming, I panicked and cut the entire chunk of hair off. It was right in the middle of the front of my head! Luckily, I was a tomboy so I didn’t really care, but if it happened to me now, I’d probably die from embarassment!
.-= YJ’s last blog post… Bored, broke, and bothered. =-.
Kristine says
Mine’s also a hair one, it’s an old story, but I keep getting reminded of it whenever I’m at mom and dad’s. I think it was in 1st grade, we were doing some sort of crafts and I managed to get glue in my hair. The young girl I was, I figured I wouldn’t get it out without cutting the hair. And so I did, and was suddenly sans one lock of hair. My mom freaked when I came home and cut my whole hair in a helmet-like hair style, and if I didn’t have pierced ears at the time, I would have looked like a boy. It was awful for an eight-year old!
Sarah says
Hey Karen!
I can relate to the part about not waxing your eyebrows unless you have complete focus! I waxed half of mine off before too rushing out of the door.
Well.. I have two horrible beauty mistakes I’ve made. I am mixed, half white and half black. My hair is very soft, thin, yet curly. So I let my cousins talk me into putting a relaxer in my hair. BAD MISTAKE.. my hair all broke off. After growing it out for years!!!! I decided to bleach it blonde. I know, WTF, right? Well not only did it look horrible, but my hair all broke off again.
Lesson learned: keep it natural! That is what has worked best for me.
.-= Sarah’s last blog post… New York City Spaghetti Packaging =-.
Ellie says
Mine also involves hair!
My mom and I are great friends and get along REALLY well when I was growing up. So, she wanted to give me a short haircut, and I wanted long hair- so we compromised: short in the front and long in the back. I started at a brand new school a week later with a mullet!
Haircuts are now the ONLY thing we can’t agree on…..
Kat says
Mine is hair too. When I was in sixth grade I got the worst haircut ever. I’d always had lovely long hair and I cut it short and layered, I thought I looked like a boy. And since I had just hit puberty I was chubbing up like crazy and it just made the whole thing worse! I didn’t know who that person in the mirror was, lol.
More recently, a few years back I decided to attempt to dye my hair super red. It failed, mostly washed out of my blond hair, but some of it hung around and I had to spend hundreds of dollars to get my hair back to looking good again. I’ve never dyed my hair at home again!
Stasy says
I had long blonde hair down to about my ribcage. For some reason I found a picture of a cute celebrity haircut and asked my stylist to recreate it…copying exactly the chin-length dark dark brown bob. Looked adorable on the celeb, horrible on me (and I totally should’ve taken into account that she and I looked not a darn thing alike). Three years later my hair is finally back to bra-strap length (another 4 inches to go!) and lightened up but I learned two things that day: 1) my face shape and super thick hair do not accept blunt cut bobs and 2) if you’re going to model your hair after a celebrity, make sure you have the same face shape and/or hair texture!
Rori says
Mine was definitely getting my eyebrows waxed for the first (and only) time. It looked great, but the skin on my forehead reacted with the wax resulting in huge, painful, gross boils/acne which lasted for almost TWO YEARS! It was so bad that it actually hurt when I made certain facial expressions!!
.-= Rori’s last blog post… One to watch: David Koma =-.
Celine says
1. Getting tweezer happy. Meth brows don’t look good on ANYONE.
2. Acrylic nails. They look cheap, and leave your natural nails WRECKED.
3. Keeping the same hairdresser for years. I came to realize that she would do the exact same haircut on all her clients. Whenever I asked for something “different,” she’d just cut it a bit shorter.
4. Highlights and not maintaining them.
5. Blue eyeshadow. In 2003.
.-= Celine’s last blog post… maravi: Peanut or peanut butter M&M’s? =-.
nikki says
Hrm my worst decision..My mother is a beautictian. Normally she cuts my hair wonderfully. But we had all been drinking(it was the holidays ’05) and she cut my hair, she gave me a razor style haircut, but it wasn’t the normal type of razor cut. the cut was like a spiral, it went higher up on one side and as lower on the other.
somehow she got “cut my hair like you did last time(2 layers shoulder length hair)” into “butcher my hair”
needless to say i was not happy.
i ended up taking a shower that next evening and leaving my hair wet, i trimmed it and cleaned it up.
Marina says
Getting hair perm *facepalm*
Lehea says
LOL Karen! I rocked the Dorothy Hamill ‘do around that age too. My mom said it was sooooo popular back then.
Kelly says
When I was in 4th grade, I was sitting on the couch one day holding a pair of blue and purple safety scissors. The longer I watched TV, the more creative I felt. (I may have been watching that guy who paints perfect trees.) And more I watched the more I felt the need to utilize the tool in my hands. But what could I cut and NOT in into trouble for? The scissors slowly made their way down to my arm, and tried to slice the tiny blond hairs that lay so sparsely. But it couldn’t cut! THe first attempt was a dud but by now I HAD to cut something! (this was following an incident with my mom cutting my loooong blond hair and the result was a THICK, BLUNT, BOB.) So I didn’t want to take the scissors anywhere near my *sniff* short locks. The only other place where my hair resided was in two perfect lines directly above my eyes. The scissor floated up to my face, angled perpendicular to the brows– and SNIP. Onto the other brow– SNIP. I had cut two spots right in the middle of my eyebrows.
My siblings nicknamed me “scarbrow” and occasionally “Vanilla Ice”
I’ll live it down.
Kelly says
I’ll never live it down***
keerthamina says
Last year (on my birthday, no less!) I let my tipsy, clueless best friend cut my suuuuper thick, wavy, lower-back-length hair while I sat on the floor of our kitchen. She promised me “just a trim”; I wound up with a shoulder-length blunt bob that was good couple of inches shorter on one side of my face than it was on the other. AWFUL!!!
.-= keerthamina’s last blog post… notd: nails inc. the southbank =-.
Citrine says
My worst got to be 2 years ago, (being young and clueless)I saw a tooth brush as a face exfoliator. Well, I tried it twice (as it didn’t seem to do much the first time)and a while later my skin started to look like it got burnt, then it started to be allergic to so many random stuff…
Second worst was probably pore strips, they actually gave me open pores…
amy says
I tried colouring and giving myself highlights at home while I was in university to save money. But I left the dye in too long and it turned out too light and it roasted my hair. Far away it looked like a have a bald spot. I tried dying back my hair dark with brown dye, but it was blotchy and I missed a few spots. I end my going back to my stylist to fix it and paying money to dye it back anyway. When I went back my regular stylist, she was tsk tsk tsk. Another lesson is never to cut my own bangs and always cut at an angle and not straight across!
.-= amy’s last blog post… Enter the World of Daisy: Marc Jacobs Daisy Luminous Body Lotion Review =-.
Shannon says
sun in.. Turned my hair a bobo the clown shade of orange…
Michelle says
My senior year of high school I decided to get a perm. Not a good idea. To make matters worse, I bought one of those at home highlighting kits and did it myself. It reacted with the perm — and I had some lovely brassy orange-y highlights going on. A guy in my class told me I should have left my hair alone LOL.
Shannon says
For me, it was probably during good ol’ Junior High. I had started realizing that groomed brows give the face a certain kind of polish, so I decided to take some tweezers to my own. I wound up plucking away at the space between my eyes, maybe due to some subconscious aversion to the unibrow my brother was fostering… needless to say, my brows got a lot shorter than they ever should have. And in a really weird way, too. That hair has never grown back the same way. *sigh* Fortunately I figured out how to shape my eyebrows in a relatively attractive way in the years following that incident. But still. Not a pretty memory.
Jamie says
where do i start?:
acrylic nails for YEARS…
gluing weave in my hair
over moisterizing my hair
over plucking my brows and then not filling them in
dark lip liner/light colored gloss
.-= Jamie’s last blog post… NK HD Questions for Jamie @ Rural Glamour!! =-.
Alison says
On a whim I decided to cut my waist length hair to a one inch long pixie cut and hated it so much I cried for weeks. I was just so bred with my hair one day that I just cut it all off. I will never have my hair that short ever again, but I will also never have it waist length agin. I think I was 13 at the time!
Nicole says
Before I found my saintly eyebrow waxer – I maintained my brows for years. I had overplucked them to two crescent shaped lines. After letting them grow in, I though it would be a good idea to trim the ends. Instead of having tapered eyebrows, the ends were perfectly blunt and ran vertical. EEk. I am happy to say that I now have beautful brows to frame my eyes with.
DonnaN says
Bad perm circa, 2001 I wanted a cool spiral perm, but instead got a fried MESS, and ended up having to cut it SUPER short (image this….www.devendo1981musicmovies.com/halle-berry.jpg). Thankfully, my hair grows SUPER fast, so by the time I got married in 2003, I had medium/long hair to do an updo!
Moral of story…..stay AWAY from the perm!
Susan says
Oh, Glosslizard, I feel your pain! Why did every hair stylist back in the day feel that if you had curly, fine hair, it would look good cut to the length of about an INCH all over your head?? I had that happen to me in the eighth grade. Traumatized me terribly and I refused to go to a salon again until I went to college. The only reason I went then is because a friend owned the salon, and I knew he had more sense than to give me such an awful style. I still don’t allow anyone to dry my hair after it’s been cut, except me, because I end up looking like a poodle nine times out of ten.
ines, felix and kitten (the office kitties) says
getting a bob… since i have thick, wavy unruly hair, it poofed up and made me look very very FOB-y if you know what i mean (along with being asian & glasses? forget about it!).
another one was probably the decision to pile on a lot of nude, FROSTY lip gloss in high school, made my lips look like an alien from the 5th element or something… NOT flattering for a superpale gal like myself.
.-= ines, felix and kitten (the office kitties)’s last blog post… Product Review – Crabtree & Evelyn Hand Therapy Mini-Haul =-.
Kelly says
I have two to share…both from college. First, my freshman year of college I decided to get a perm. I’d always had long, very straight hair and wanted to add some body to it, hence the perm idea. I should’ve known better than to go to my usual stylist who only ever permed the hair of 90-year-old grandmas. Walking in, I had hair about an three inches past my shoulders; walking out, the parts that “took” the perm were kinky curly and up to my chin, while the rest was ramrod straight. My hair has never been the same. It’s actually wavy now. Weird.
Second incident happened my senior year. My BFF and I decided to highlight my hair, which my mom had been doing for me for several years. I wound up with skunk stripes and had to dye the whole bit another color, but not before having to get my military ID renewed (and picture taken).
Stephanie says
I have 2 bad beauty decisions…thankfully it was when I was young..
1. When I was in 7th grade I decided I wanted to get my hair layered, my mom took me to this cheap hair place to get it done and it was the worst hair cut ever. My hair ended up looking like Carol Brady from the Brady Bunch. I had all these short layers in front..and had an almost mullet in back. It was awful, and of course I had school pictures the next day.
2. When I first started wearing makeup I had no role models to show me colors or how to put on makeup. My mother NEVER wore makeup so makeup was foreign in my house. I went to the grocery store and started looking at foundation colors from Cover Girl. I had this delusion in my head that I had tan skin, even though I am fair-light. I ended up getting a shade called “Tawny” which is basically a med tan shade. I wore this make up for probably 3 years. Can imagine the pictures with a brown face and pale neck? It was bad.
Emily says
ugh… the lipglosses that have the plumpers in them… my bottom lip is naturally larger than my top and when I use them it looks like I got a sucker punch to the face and have no top lip.
classy.
and i used to use them… ALL THE TIME.
Meghan says
i have a two…
i have very thick wavy/curly hair..so when i was little, it would get knotty all the time and onetime i had such a big knot in the back of my hair that was too painful to brush out so i took a pair of scissors and cut it out of my hair. i literally chopped off half of my hair…my mom still tells people that story haha
the other is shaving down there. ever since i discovered brazilian waxes i will never shave again! i started getting them about 4 years ago and i cant believe i ever went without them!
nai says
twasn’t a decision i made, but i suffered the consequences. mom, in her infinite wisdom, had her stylist perm my 6th grade, pinay, above-the collarbone hair. the results? well, a very blunt boy at school asked me, “what happened to your hair? you look like tina turner had a bomb explode on her head.” to this day, pics from that time make me urk.
being the good, subservient daughter that i was, the only protest i made was to scrawl in the biggest sharpie i could find “I HATE MY HAIR!!!” onto a piece of legal pad paper and shove it into the depths of my mom’s bedroom junk drawer. she found it when i was in college.
Karen says
NAI!
That sounds *exactly* like something I would do!!!
Madeleine says
Mine is very recent! I had a moment,big time.I was not happy with my haircut,so I decided to get a new one.So a got a pixie cut,which I had had before and loved it! Well,this time is different,because I hate it (hate = a big word and desbribes exactly how I feel for the past 11 days!),not to mention the hair stylist must have cut too short on left side and longer on the right.I can see that,and it’s obvious 🙁 At least to me.
Should I go back and give a word how I feel about the job she’s done on my head?
Ashley says
Hmm the worst beauty decision RECENTLY & most regretted was purchasing the Sephora Brand Deluxe Antibacterial Brush Set. I should have done more research on the set. I rarely use it & now I’m looking for alternatives 🙁
Ari says
Freshman year of high school, feeling all punk rock, I let a MAC makeup artist sell me on red and yellow eye shadow with navy eyeliner. It looked like Sid Viscous rose from the dead and punched me in the face.
Marce says
Let’s just day that it’s not too good to get carried away with waxing down there…ouch! 😀
.-= Marce’s last blog post… Estée Lauder Pure Color Gloss Stick – Super Hero or Lip Product? =-.
shivotra says
in high school, i used to religiously wear blue eyeshadow pretty much everyday – ya. enough said.
penelope says
my worst beauty decision was when i angrily (lol) cut a piece of my hair of 5 years ago…thank God is grew back!!!
amy says
Without a doubt, sophomore in high school…had pretty long hair…had my Mom drop me off to get hair cut. I came out with a mullet! Oh yeah…business in the front and party in the back. when Mom picked me up, I thought she was going to cry. I thought it was so stylish! For about a week. Yikies.
Christy says
I had my hair permed from when I was 8 to about 12 years old. I battled frizz until I grew it out and chopped the dead ends off.
For the longest time I’d wear lots of foundation and dark lipstick, but wouldn’t darken my eye brows or wear any blush. I looked ghostly. O_O
.-= Christy’s last blog post… FOTD: Victoria’s Secret Beauty Rush Flower Girl, Violet Femme & Plum Crazy =-.
Catherine says
Oooooh, just one?? I don’t even know where to start!? LOL. My mom barely wears any makeup (powder, blush, lipstick and mostly GWP stuff from skincare buys) so I basically had to learn it all myself.
In high school I used to wear nothing but powder on my face… so I would use Rimmel pressed powder foundation to cover up my dark circles and wear nothing else. No lipstick, no blush, nothing. Once, for a presentation I decided to wear a bit more makeup and used black pencil liner all around my eyes with no mascara or eyeshadow – looked so weird on my already small eyes! I also wore the wrong foundation shade for yeaaars (first B.E. Medium Tan & then a custom mix of EDM that progressively became too dark as my sunscreen wearing took effect – totally didn’t even notice until someone on MUA pointed it out in my photos lol). I also learned how to wear eyeshadow before mascara, so I walked around with shimmery lashes for a while. Also when I started wearing lipstick I was afraid of light colors so I wore lighter-than-my-natural-lips colors for quite a long time without realizing it was making me look slightly sickly before my boyfriend gently pointed it out to me.
Most recently, I’ve had some horrid cystic acne due to lack of sleep and stress and at first I tried covering it up with more concealer and powder. Looked horrrrible – all cakey and flaking at the same time. I’ve resigned myself to just wearing nothing but sunscreen on my poor nose ’till it gets better.
.-= Catherine’s last blog post… Koji No. 84 Narrow Tip Eyebrow Tweezer =-.
Jess says
To put too much foundation and shimmering loose powder! And found out from the photos taken , i look like Christmas tree!
.-= Jess’s last blog post… REN Clean Bio Active Skincare Hands-On Workshop =-.
Meghan says
I’ve done the “totally stressed out by finals” haircut as well. Except it was DIY at 2am. I’ve given myself 1 good haircut, the others have all been MASSIVE failures.
In 7th grade I used a 3-shades too dark pressed powder. That was awesome, and by awesome I mean orange.
.-= Meghan’s last blog post… Urban Decay 24/7 Swatches =-.
Celine says
Oh! I forgot this one! In junior high my mother allowed me to wear only clear mascara, and I was not allowed to use an eyelash curler. So I had the great idea of trying to use the wand to help curl my lashes, which would usually end up in me brushing my eyelid with the mascara. Few hours later, I’d have white peely’s from the mascara!
.-= Celine’s last blog post… maravi: Well if I pull my ass together and take a shower, I could get lunch with my mom today. =-.
Jax says
I think mine was also a hair incident. I had a haircut that might as well look like a MULLET. I was trying to tell the lady cutting my hair (she’s this old lady that doesn’t like tattoos cuz she saw mine on my wrist) at the best I could describing it to her, and she took quite literal to what I’m saying but she could at least make it look more “hip”? I wanted a short haircut but still have that edgy look. Gosh, I even tried to show her a picture but I guess she doesn’t work well with visuals. I tried styling it the best I could but still always come out with a mullet. There was this one time I was at a drug store and this lady mistaken me as a man! She bumped into me and she said “excuse me, sir.” She did a doubletake and then she apologized when she realized who I really am.
Nora says
When I was in middle school I had an acne problem as kids becoming teenagers are apt to have and my parents were convinced it was caused by my bangs I was trying to grow out. So my dad instructed the hair butcher they went to to perm only and ONLY my bangs. I was in tears the whole time and the stupid barber just told me to suck it up. I really wasn’t so sad when his salon burnt down when the restaurant next door had an errant fire. So for over a year I had long frizzy hair and a curly asymmetrical poodle sitting awkwardly in front of my head. To this day I fear the hair stylist more than I fear the dentist.
rhania escueta says
in my highschool days, one of our 3hours subject is cosmetology (food trades, dressmaking, and cosmetology for the girls)
my partner, cut my hair, unevenly, my teacher wanna laugh but took pity on my hair.. did a little repair, and when i got home, my mother give me money, and told me i should cut my hair more shorter,, i wanna scream!!! WHAT!!!
hahaha..
.-= rhania escueta’s last blog post… ♥ my darling steph’s giveaway ♥ =-.
Brandi says
When I was thirteen i wanted to look like a cheerleader, even though I’ve never done cheerleading in my life. Somehow, I was able to convince myself that the right way to do that was cutting my bangs. So up went the scissors, chop-chop, and i was stuck with the worst, too short, straight-across bangs you can imagine. Joyful. 🙂