Your worst beauty mistakes?

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Chatting to my mum this afternoon and we started laughing about the first time I used eyelash curlers.
This was the days before false eyelashes.
I applied my make up and then applied my mascara as usual. I had no idea how to use them, so I clamped the curlers on tight on my still wet mascara for a few seconds, I mean, you apply hair curlers to damp hair right?
Tried to release them and found to my horror that they were well and truly welded to my eyelashes!
MUUUUUM.....
Mum ran upstairs thinking I was being murdered to find me walking into walls holding the curlers.
She grabbed a flannel, wet it, rubbed soap on it, then started running it over my eye.
Eventually freed them, along with half of my eyelashes and my eye looking like I'd got the world's worst case of conjunctivitis.
To be fair, once I'd stopped crying, my other eye was a perfect match.
So, care to share your worst beauty disasters?
The curlers went in the bin.

My eyebrows are also a non existent reminder of the early 00s!

I also liked to wear dream matte mousse and blue eyeshadow!

Buying a fake tan wipe from my Saturday job at the chemist and putting in on my legs. Just my legs. The rest of me is porcelain white. I looked like a right idiot in PE.

Plaiting my hair before bed in school in the noughties going for a cool crimped look, woke up with an Afro. Had to go to school like that, think it was the same time as the fake tan incident.

Then only recently I decided to be lazy and that I couldn't be arsed waxing my tache so gave it a quick shave with DHs razor. They were light downy hairs. They now grow back thick, dark and wiry 😩

Love this thread!

I have very, very pale skin/red hair and in my younger days was very embarrassed about my skin colour, especially on holidays. For my first sunshine holiday with friends I thought I had the solution. I patch tested lots of different fake tans to find one that I thought looked sun-kissed but not to dark. The night before the holiday I fake tanned most of my body, but not my neck/face. I bought 'bronzing beads' to brush over my face/neck. When I tried this at home I thought I looked great. I took the fake tan with me just in case, and reapplied it to my legs (my palest skin) every few days.

When I got the holiday photos back (years before camera phones etc!) I was horrified. The re-applied fake tan was streaky so by mid-week I had very patchy legs which were several shades darker than the rest of my body. By day my face/neck were completely white and by night, when I had applied the bronzing beads, it looked even worse.

In 2006, as a pair of skint 19 year old students, me and my best mate decided we would have a sleepover/DIY pamper night one Friday evening. I persuaded her to highlight my dark brown hair using one of those awful kits with the cap and a crochet hook.
We got stuck in to a bottle of Blossom Hill rosé and set to work.
By the time we had done the top section of my hair, we had run out of dye and I couldn’t drive to the 24 hour Tesco because I’d had too much to drink. I had to go to my Saturday job the next morning (in a shop in the Bullring so would be seen by hundreds of people) looking like Pepe Le Pew.

It was a long time ago, I used to go to lovely department stores and buy it, feeling very fancy! I remember thinking that if it illuminates under my eyes then it would make my whole face look lovely. I think I must have dazzled people!

As a teen, I used to soften my eyeliner with a lighter to really get a good thick black line all around them. Perhaps wasn't the best look.

Tan towels, remember them?

Rubbed loads of them them all over my skinny, year 8 legs. They looked like nice n spicy nik naks.

I stood in the bath in my undies, while my mum tried to get the orange layers off with diluted bleach 🤦‍♀️

Putting fake tan all over my legs (the type that goes on clear and the tan develops over 24 hours). Forgetting to wash hands and realising in horror the next morning that my hands were dark brown. (I'm a milk-bottle pale brunette normally.) Think Ross in the tanning salon episode of friends.....

Dying my gorgeous creamy / sand coloured highlights a dark brown which faded in the sun and has left me with am orange Gimme Gimme Gimme vibe.

Blue shampoop doesn't work...

My best friend and I took a bottle of fake tan...the self developing type, to the loos at school in the lunch break and liberally spread it over ourselves..we were 14.
Went back to class (wthout washing our hands) and by home time we were both Oompah Loompah orange... including our palms

Cutting my own fringe. The end result was bad, trust me. Would never recommend.

Ooh, I used to love a bit of sun-in! Or tanning wipes (still occasionally do tbh). I used to love some glittery eyeshadow sticks I used to buy too - liberally applied, cream formulation, sparkly lilac anyone? Quite often under bottom lashes. Probably looked daft, I'd probably buy more now if I saw them though 🤣

Most long lasting is my late 90s/early 00s brows. Combine that with chemo & they're, um, an interesting focal point on my face 🙈 Wonder if they'd have fared better left mostly to their own thing 🤷‍♀️ Annoyingly, I've not touched them the whole time I've been having chemo but have had to shave legs and underarms 🙄

Oh, not so long lasting was the DARK cherry red, super short, hair cut. Teamed with exceptionally dark eyes. Handily the passport containing that photo lives with my ID and the girls find it amusing to pull it out for a look every now and again 🤣 They call me "emo mum" when they do! Even worse, I think I'm wearing a red fleece in the photo, with pink arms. Fuck knows what I was thinking.

@cherrybakewell24 Dream Matte Mousse was great, really easy to blend. I was too dark for the palest shade but too pale for the second palest shade, so had to buy a pot of each and mix them together.
It’s really hard to find now.

I've done the hint of a tint at 14
Followed by too many goes with sun-in hoping that once it would go blonde (every summer it was orange and my poor mum would have to pay for me to get it dyed back to brown before school)

But my actual stupidest mistake was when I had platinum blonde hair. I had been dying it myself for a good few years. Always just touching up the roots, then giving it a good toner.
Then I had a brain fart midway through one day and began "washing" it on my hair, making a lather. So all the delicate very bleached ends were getting rebleached.
Thought I'd gotten away with it, though my hair was a bit fluffy. I was planning on a lot of hair masks and bringing it back to life.
Took DC swimming and my hair got wet and next thing it was floating in the pool beside me. The chlorine in the water had caused it to snap off. Just about died of embarrassment, got a very short haircut and never double bleached again

I let my mum trim my fringe for me and ended up with a proper Blackadder. Never again!

Yup I also did that!! I used the sensitive skin one. Could feel my face tingling slightly but didn't think much to it. Left it on for the desired time and by the time I'd removed it I had chemical burns pretty much all over my cheeks, the bit between my nose and upper lip and chin and jaw area. Though smoothing it in loads of E45 would help sooth it. Did it fuck!! It felt like I'd got a thousand fire ants doing a warrior dance over my face wearing ice skates coated in acid!

Sneezed rather violently whilst curling my eyelashes. My arm jerked forward and I ended up pulling out every single eyelash on that eye. It was mega noticeable too so I had to cut the other side to match it 😅

First time using a heated a hair curling tongs. But this one was a slim round brush. So, I twisted a length of my hair around it and curled the brush up to my roots. Then went to unravel (and reveal a perfect corkscrew curl) but it wouldn’t budge. This thing was stuck fast to my scalp. My mum, dad & sister we ripping our bits of hair, as I howled crying. Eventually my mum got the scissors out…

Ah, this takes me back to young teenage me...

Cheapo Black nailpolish with no basecoat. Nails and cuticles stained for months.

Hint of a Tint hair dye in Mahogany - Used 1 packet per day for 3 days in a row during the school holidays.... Looked like something from the antiques road show with a hint of jaundice and ruined a few towels, I wasn't popular.

I also let my Mum "trim" inches off my fringe when millimetres would have been enough.

More recently, shaving 'down there' and decided to root around for bum hair and nicked myself on the tea towel holder.....😳

Apart from the late 80s trend of the Sperm Shaped Eyebrow (which they didn't recover from and I can hear my brows whine oh no , you;ll just get the Tweezermans out again so refuse to grow without a long and expensive course of serum)

Having short , mid brown hair . Working my way through the Superdrug dye range from 6.34 right through to 10 with some highlights thrown in for good measure .
I had my haircut every 4 weeks and did the dye at home every three .
It was in good condition, but one day I saw a photo of my hair and looked like Donald Trump from the back .

It was cropped and what survived was dyed brown.

Oh , then growing out the Pixie Cut and having to go through the Justin Bieber Hair stage without running to have it cropped off again.

Had a cheap perm done by a student hairdresser for £5 (1982) Not a good idea when my natural hair was already prone to having curly sticky-out bits. There was also some blonde dye in it that I’d forgotten about and it had gone lighter from being in the sun…
OMG…
It was massive!!
And orange from the colour in it! I looked like a clown🤡
The curls stood away from my head in 2 clumps by my ears, I looked like an electrocuted poodle!
it took the best part of 5 months to grow out…
I believe there are photos…..

Same here only it was in the seventies

Veet.... Down there. In the shower

Oh. Em. Gee.

It burned like the pain of a thousand fiery pokers.

I genuinely thought I was going to die for about five minutes, which felt like half an hour.

I was coming round to the idea that I would have to go to the hospital because I'd given myself a chemical burn and how if I didn't die of it, I'd die of embarrassment instead.

Everytime I went to wash it out, it reactivated it and made it worse.

I was crying genuine tears..

NEVER AGAIN

These are hilarious. I'm laughing in bed at 5am trying not to wake everyone up.
I used to fake tan my legs to go out but not my upper body or face. Never realised at the time but now on photos i'm two completely different colours 😂
I also went to work once with only one eyebrow penciled in. I'm in a public facing role and only noticed when I got home.

I got gastric flu 3 days before my wedding. Started feeling dodgy after I had got a spray tan and ended up collapsing into bed without washing it off. I remember my now husband scrubbing me in the bath the day before the wedding saying you look like a bloody oopa lumpa while I cried!