Last Chance Saloon: The Magnifying Mirror

"Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the hairiest of them all?" is the not-quite-classic-fairytale line that springs to mind whenever I get up close and personal with a handheld magnifying mirror. I originally bought mine in the hopes that it'd make a bit easier for my short-sighted eyes to see what I was doing when plucking my eyebrows, and while it worked well as a plucking aid for a while it wasn't long before all that magnification went to my head and, being able to see every.last.solitary.hair up close and personal, I started to get a bit tweezer happy.

Once I - eventually - made the connection between my incredible new mirror and my incredible shrinking eyebrows, it was retired to the depths of the bathroom cabinet.

Which is pretty much exactly where I found it while looking for something else a couple of weeks ago. Impressed all over again by its 10x magnification abilities, I decided to cautiously reintroduce it to my routine. Being mindful of the previous disaster it caused I'm being super careful to only pluck stray, previously removed stragglers this time around and it's working really well; as a bit of a brow Nazi, I love that I can clearly see and get at even the teeniest tiniest shortest hair almost before it's visible to the naked eye.

Unfortunately, there's a catch: my squeeze-happy fingers (probably my worst beauty habit) have discovered that magnified pores make it nigh on impossible to resist the temptation to excavate them. The opportunity to pore over (sorry) every blemish and blockage and blackhead in that kind of detail is a dream come true for a skin obsessive, and if I could just leave it at an examination that would be fine. But I can't, and for that reason the magnifying mirror has had to be retired permanently.

Sadface.