SQUINTER’S first unaccompanied haircut was at what is now Bradley’s barber’s beside the Gravediggers on the Glen Road. It was around 1971 and if memory serves it was known as Peewee’s at the time, although Squinter can’t remember if that was the name on the shop front or a nickname.
Squinter’s equally unsure of how much the haircut cost, but he has a razor-sharp memory of walking down the Glen with the exact money clenched tight in his fist for fear of it falling out of his pocket. And he remembers with equal vividness the instruction from his mother which he duly passed on to the barber with the money: “My mammy says short back and sides and no oil.”
The simpler days of barbering were in Squinter’s thoughts as he sat in the house on Sunday afternoon after his first haircut of the year. Simpler because when Squinter was a boy you just couldn’t get a haircut on a Sunday or a Monday and now you’ve a big choice: and simpler because of the range of services you’re offered that just weren’t on the menu in the 70s.
It’s only in the past ten years or so that barbers have begun offering Squinter the old ear, brows and nose service. Doubtless it was always available on request, but now it’s part of a much more comprehensive holistic offering.
Squinter gets his eyebrows done along with his hair. For the women reading this, that doesn’t mean Indian threading, artistic plucking or indelible marker. It means having a buzzer passed over the top of your eyes in a process that takes 0.003 of a second per eyebrow. The process takes double the time if the barber is a flamboyant one and uses a comb.
Squinter has never once got his ears and nose done, and there’s a reason. That’s not to say that the reason is a sound one, it’s just to say that it’s a reason. And the reason was that Squinter heard at a very young age that if you get your ear and nose hair clipped just once it grows back ten times thicker and bushier. It’s an old wives’ tale, or since we’re in a new world, perhaps Squinter should be a little more PC and call it an urban myth. Whatever the name, Squinter has lived his life by it. Until Sunday.
For the past few weeks Squinter’s had an itchy nose and he’s been sneezing a lot. He put it down to a post-sickness hangover, but as he sat in the barber’s chair and the three-line question came – “Ears, nose and eyebrows, sir?” – it came to him in a flash that perhaps a nasal depilation would do the trick. And so for the first time he replied: “Eyebrows and nose, please. Not the ears.”
As the haircut came to an end, Squinter found himself wondering what technique the barber would use to clear the old conk. Fire? Squinter has seen barbers wave flame at men’s noses and ears to singe the hairs into obedience. Scissors? Or that small cylindrical ear- and nose-hair buzzer that Squinter sees in YouTube ads from time to time?
In the event, neither of these techniques came into play. After the rapid eyebrow buzz, the barber took two cotton buds from a plastic container and dipped them in a jar of a greenish, gloopy material. The buds were then inserted into Squinter’s nostrils.
Now a lot of you know what’s coming next, but hand on heart, Squinter didn’t. He vaguely wondered if the gloopy stuff was to soften the nose-hair before snipping; or maybe it was some kind of flame-retardant protection for the nose lining if this was going to be a fire job.
Picture the classic Blackadder scene where the eponymous cowardly blackguard stuck two pencils up his nose to feign madness prior to going over the top at the Somme and you have a rough approximation of what Squinter was looking at in the mirror.
And as he pondered what was coming next, around 20 seconds after they were put in, the buds were sharply and quickly pulled out. Along with the nose hair.
Yep. Wax.
Nose stinging in a not unpleasant way, eyes damp but not watering, Squinter paid up and left. But as he made his way back to the car wiping the back of his neck with a tissue, the doubts started to creep in. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had this idea that plucking nose hair – and of course waxing is plucking – is really not a good idea. And as he drove home a vague discomfort started to morph into a real worry as the truth about plucking and nose hair began to take form in his newly-shorn head.
There are two things that we know for sure about looking up your medical queries online: i) If you look long enough, you’ll be told to stop and go see your doctor; ii) If you continue looking after the internet has told you to go see your doctor you’re going to die. Which means that Squinter is generally and robustly averse to Googling anything about his body, but since clearly nose hair plucking could in no way be considered a threat to life or limb, in went the query as soon as he got home: ‘Should I pluck my nose hair?’
Squinter was right, needless to say. But he had no idea of just how devastatingly right he was. For not only is plucking your nose hair a really, really, really bad idea, it is such a bad idea that – contrary to Squinter’s naïve belief – it can kill you.
Stone dead.
A précis is perhaps required here, the info taken not from yer mad uncle’s Facebook account or Donald Trump’s late-night/early-morning Diet Coke fever posts, but from reputable clinical and media sources.
Your nose is covered in hairs, even if they’re not sprouting out to touch your top lip like they used to do with Tory MPs. You have little ones way at the back and bigger ones at the front that serve as a filter to stop unwanted stuff going into your lungs. The littler ones don’t tickle and protrude – the bigger ones at the front probably will at some time, particularly if you’re male.
Pulling a bigger hair out by the root leaves a tiny wound; pulling out dozens of bigger hairs at the same time (ie plucking/waxing) leaves lots and lots of tiny wounds. Now tiny wounds, or punctures, if you will, are not good at the best of times, but when those wounds are in a part of your body which vacuums in unfiltered air 20,000 times a day, then problems are likely to occur; to wit, those microscopic unwanted particles that the non-existent hairs were meant to catch instead stick to or enter the multiple new openings in the lining of your nostrils. And it’s goodbye nose-carpet, hello infection. Nasal vestibulitis, to be coldly clinical about it.
But if you thought a red and angry nose-lining was the worst of your worries – or should we now say the worst of Squinter’s worries? – you’re badly mistaken: If you do pick up an infection then a mere sore nose is to be considered something of a A Result.
Because get this: The space between your mouth and nose is known sometimes as the ‘Danger Triangle’ because the collection of veins there converge with blood vessels in the brain and that infection you’ve just picked up in your plucked nostrils can hit your brain by way of abscess, clot or meningitis.
It’s rare, but it does happen.
In short, Squinter’s barber has put him in mortal danger by opting for the wax option on the old nose hair. Granted, it’s the same mortal danger you face when you get on an airplane or a train, but Squinter didn’t ask to have his nose hair ripped out, whereas he makes a conscious decision to travel.
If Squinter survives his latest trip to the barber, and if in the future he needs his nose hair done again, he’s faced with the choice of DIY via a tiny pair of scissors or a nose buzzer. Or he can switch to a barber more concerned about Squinter’s nose.
Perhaps one of those barbers who set fire to it.
