Pureveen ad: This helped me stop hiding in the supply closet

I’ve been charging $18 for an upper lip since 2021. Wax, strip, a swipe of aloe, 4 minutes, and the woman walks out to her car and checks it in the visor mirror before she even backs out. I can see them do it through the front window. Every single one. For 16 months I did my own in the supply closet. Door locked. Compact propped against the towel warmer. Tweezers in the drawer under the gauze. 2:40 in the afternoon, between the 2:15 brow and whatever was booked at 3. Tuesday through Saturday. Bree, who rents the room across the hall, could have set her watch by me. Last Tuesday at 2:40 I did something I have never done in 14 years at that salon. I want to write down why. The woman who explained it to me lives in Tucson now, and she doesn't text. Here's the short version. This August I did a bride's makeup at 5:15 in the morning, with my cheek pressed against hers under a ring light, while her grandmother sat in the window seat 6 feet away with a cup of coffee going cold. 3 years ago that same grandmother looked up at my chin from my own table and told me, very kindly, with the door open, what she thought I ought to do about it. She watched me the whole morning. When the bride went upstairs to get into her dress, she waved me over to the window and asked me one question. "What did you do?" It took me a sister on the floor of a Kroger, 2 rounds of a doctor saying the same sentence, an $11.99 bottle that lied to me, and a retired pharmacist with a fistful of my wax sticks before I could answer her. Let me back up. My name is Tasha. I'm 36. I rent the back room at Lumen Salon on Far Hills Avenue in Kettering, Ohio, and for 14 years I've done brows, lips, chins, lash lifts, bikini, and bridal makeup in it. Give me a woman's brows for 6 weeks and I can usually tell what's going on in her life. A new baby. A divorce. A new job she hates. They grow back different. Hair is handwriting. I read it all day. Brides are my favorite. A bride books me 14 months out, sometimes 18. Then on the morning, I show up at her mom's house at 5:15 with 2 rolling cases and a ring light, and for 3 hours that house is mine. Somebody's making eggs. Somebody's crying already. The dog is locked in a bedroom. The last thing I do before the photographer gets there is check the foundation at her jawline. The only way to do that right is to put my cheek next to hers, in the same light, and look in the mirror at both of us at once. If there's a line, that's where it shows. Cheek to cheek. Every bride. 14 years. Then there's Carol. Carol has been my fourth Tuesday at 10:15 for 9 years. Brows and lip. She tips $10 in cash and folds it into a tiny square so I find it later in the tray. She's the one who brought me Megan. Megan was 16 in 2019 when she got on my table for her first real brow shaping. She'd been doing them herself with her mom's tweezers and there was almost nothing left at the tails. Carol stood in the doorway the whole time with her arms crossed like a bouncer. When I turned the hand mirror around, Megan made a sound I still remember. Then she made me pinky-swear on the spot. "You're doing my wedding morning." "You're 16." "Pinky-swear." So I did. I wrote it on her card. I keep a card for every client. Index cards, in a green tin recipe box that was my grandma's. Date, service, wax temperature, what she's sensitive to, and how many days since her last visit. The days are the number I care about. They tell me if a girl is plucking between visits, or if something in her life changed. There's one more card, all the way in the back, behind the Z's. It says TASHA. Nobody has ever seen it. There's also the appointment book. Paper. I know. Bree makes fun of me. Every Sunday night I fill in the week in pencil. In 14 years I have never once written my own name in it. There's the intake form. Every new client fills one out, and I read every line, because one of those lines says "Medications," and if a woman is on a retinoid and I put hot wax on her face, the strip takes her skin with it. I've read thousands of those lines. I could recite what Kettering takes in my sleep. And there's the hair tie. Black, the cheap kind that comes 50 to a bag. I keep one on my left wrist and snap my hair back with it before every client so nothing of mine falls on anybody's face. Bree says it's my tell. When she hears the snap through the wall she knows I'm starting. That was my whole life, honestly. The tin, the book, the hair tie, and a bride's cheek at 5:15 in the morning. What nobody saw was the other part. Since I was 30 I've had hair on my chin. Not peach fuzz. The dark, wiry kind. Then my upper lip went darker. Then the sides of my jaw, right under the ear, where a man's sideburns would start. I'm good at what I do, so for a long time nobody knew. I waxed my own lip on the bathroom counter at home with a 10x mirror. I did my chin with the same slant tweezers I use on brides. And I wrote my dates on my card, same as anybody's. Then one Tuesday in May of 2023, Carol was on my table. Here's something about my job. Clients see me from underneath. They're lying flat looking straight up, and the only people who ever see a woman's chin from that angle are her clients and her babies. I was leaning over Carol doing her brows with the magnifying lamp pulled down between us, and she stopped talking about her tomatoes in the middle of a sentence. "Honey." She reached up and touched the underside of my jaw with 2 fingers. Gentle. The way she'd check a peach at the store. "You of all people. Have you tried the laser girl on 5th?" The door was open. Bree was in the hallway with her 10:30. They both went quiet at the exact same moment. I laughed. I said something like, "Right? A dentist with bad teeth." Carol patted my wrist and went back to her tomatoes. The thing is, she wasn't wrong. That's what I couldn't get past, driving home on Dorothy Lane. She wasn't being mean. She was being Carol. She was saying out loud what every woman who'd ever laid on that table had already thought and been too polite to say. Me of all people. That night I took my card out of the back of the tin. When I started it at 30, I'd written 28 next to every lip wax. 28 days between, same as a client. Now the number was 14. Here's what 14 cost me. A bride books 14 months out. I could not promise anybody what my face would look like in 14 days, never mind 14 months. And I could not put my cheek against a 24-year-old's cheek under a ring light at 5:15 in the morning knowing exactly what that ring light would show. So that June I gave every bride on my books to Bree. 9 weddings. Bree charges $350 for a bridal morning, same as I did. I started doing the math in the parking lot and then stopped doing it. Megan's card was the last one I pulled. Her wedding was already set for August 2026, after she finished nursing school. I called Carol instead of Megan, because I couldn't do it to Megan's voice. "I'm going to have Bree do Megan's morning. She's great. She's honestly better at lashes than me." Carol was quiet for a second. "Oh," she said. "Okay, honey. I understand." She understood. That was the worst part. She'd already decided, back on my table, what I'd just decided. I'd only confirmed it. That fall I went to the laser girl on 5th. Of course I went. 6 sessions, $190 each, $1,140. It cleared the ones it hit. By spring there were new ones coming in right next to the spots it had cleared. By the summer of 2024 the card said 7. 7 days meant every Sunday night at the bathroom counter with the 10x mirror, and by Friday afternoon a shadow I could see from across a room. So I started wearing a mask at work. A black one. I told everybody it was allergies. Fall allergies, then winter allergies, then spring allergies. Nobody really believed me and everyone was nice about it, which is worse. And I stopped doing lash lifts. A lash lift is 45 minutes with my face 6 inches above a client's face, both of us holding still, her eyes closed but mine wide open, close enough that when she sneezes her nose hits my chin. 6 a week at $85. $510 a week. I took them off the menu board in August and told people I'd gotten bored of them. By the end of 2024 the card said 1. Every day. What I took out Sunday was back Monday, and by afternoon the coarse ones under my jaw caught on the inside of my mask like Velcro. That's when the tweezers moved to work. Into the supply closet, in the drawer under the gauze. That's when 2:40 started. Between the 2:15 and the 3:00. Door locked, compact on the towel warmer, 6 minutes, then back out with my mask up and the hair tie snapped and a smile for whoever was next. I was doing in a closet exactly what I charged $18 to do in the open. By spring of 2025 once a day wasn't enough. By 4 o'clock it was back. So I stopped booking after 4. I had 3 Thursday evening regulars, nurses mostly, who'd been coming at 5:30 for years because it was the only time they had. I told them I was cutting back my hours. I gave them to Bree too. And Marcus, my husband, stopped ever seeing me in real light. He got home at 6. By 6 I'd done round 2 in our bathroom with the door shut and the fan on. I kept the big kitchen light off and told him I liked the under-cabinet lights better. For 6 months I said that. He'd come in, kiss my forehead, and I'd turn my head just enough that his hand wouldn't land on my jaw. Brides, gone. Lash lifts, gone. Evening clients, gone. My husband's hand on my face, gone. 28. 14. 7. 1. Twice. That was the card. In June of 2025 I went too fast in the closet. My 3:00 was early and I was trying to get the ones under the left side of my jaw, and I caught the skin with the tweezer tip and took a little piece of it. It bled onto the white towel. I came out with a tissue pressed under my mask and told my client I'd cut myself shaving my legs at lunch, which makes no sense, and she didn't say anything. I put the towel in my work bag to wash at home. Marcus found it that night looking for gum. He stood in the kitchen holding it, under the cabinet lights. "Tash. What is this." So I told him. All of it. The closet, the drawer, 2:40. He folded the towel in half and set it on the counter and didn't say anything for a long time. "You're hiding in a closet," he said. "At your own job." Then, quieter. "When's the last time you saw a doctor about it? Not the laser place. A doctor." I didn't answer, because the answer was 7 years. I was diagnosed with PCOS at 19. Periods every 3 or 4 months, an ultrasound with a row of little circles on it, and a gynecologist who said "polycystic ovary syndrome" like she was reading it off a cereal box. She wrote me a prescription for the pill. I was on that pill from 19 to 29. It kept everything quiet. Then at 29 I started getting migraines where half my vision went sparkly, and my doctor took me off it that same week because of the stroke risk. The hair started inside a year. That's when I started my card. Between 30 and 35 I tried every single thing a woman on my table has ever told me about, and I know because I wrote those down too. Spearmint tea, 2 cups a day for 4 months. DIM, $28 a bottle. Saw palmetto. Inositol, $42 a month for 14 months, the powder that tastes like nothing in my coffee. Vaniqa, $119 a tube, rubbed on twice a day. The laser, $1,140. Threading, by me, on me. Every one of them moved the card for a month or so. Then it went right back where it was headed. Marcus made the appointment himself. July 2025, a Dr. Ostrowski at a women's health practice in Centerville. She was nice. I mean that. She sat down, she looked at me when I talked, and she ordered every lab I asked for. Total testosterone: 41. "Right in range," she said. Free testosterone: 8.9. High. SHBG: 17. Low. I didn't know what SHBG was. She said it was "a protein, it runs low in a lot of PCOS women, don't worry about that one." Fasting insulin: high. "Classic PCOS." "We could start you on spironolactone," she said. "No." She waited. So I told her about Nicole. My sister Nicole has the same thing I have. She's 2 years older. She went on spironolactone, 100 milligrams a day, 4 years ago, and I'll be honest, it slowed hers down. She plucks about every other day instead of twice a day. It also makes her dizzy. She stands up too fast and sees stars. In March she stood up from bending over her cart in the checkout line at the Kroger on Wilmington Pike and went straight down and split her chin open on the edge of the belt. 4 stitches. Under her chin. Of all places. I drove her home from urgent care with a gauze pad taped over the stitches. In the car she started laughing, and then she wasn't laughing. "At least I don't have to pluck under there for a week," she said. That's Nicole. I love her more than anybody alive. I hold hot wax an inch from a woman's eye 9 hours a day. I don't get to go lightheaded at the table. Not once. Not for a drug that only slows it down. "Okay," Dr. Ostrowski said. "Then let's go after the insulin. Exercise and eat right. Cut the carbs, move more, and we'll recheck in 3 months." I was sent home and told to exercise and eat right. So I did it. I did it RIGHT. No bread, no pasta, no rice, no sugar, nothing white. Orangetheory 4 mornings a week at 6:15, before my first client. I lost 11 pounds by October. October: free testosterone 8.2. SHBG 20. "It's moving. Keep going," she said. "Exercise and eat right." My card didn't move. Twice a day. So I did 3 more months. I held it through Thanksgiving and Christmas and Marcus's mom's lasagna. I did not miss one 6:15. January 2026: free testosterone 9.1. SHBG 18. Worse than October. Dr. Ostrowski looked at her screen for a long time. "Okay. Let's add metformin. 500 at dinner. And keep doing what you're doing. Exercise and eat right." I was sent home and told to exercise and eat right. Again. I hadn't been doing anything else. I took the metformin. I still take it. It did what metformin does to my stomach for 3 weeks and then settled. My card didn't move. 28. 14. 7. 1. Twice. If Carol had asked me her question that January, all I could have told her was that I was trying harder than anyone she knew. Irene was my fourth Monday at 9. She'd been coming for 4 years. Brows only. She was 74, a retired hospital pharmacist, 38 years in the pharmacy downtown, and she walked to the salon from her condo off Dorothy Lane every single time. 40 minutes each way, in white New Balance, in sleet. She'd come in pink in the face and sit on my table and want to know what I was reading. She never once mentioned the mask. That sounds like nothing. It wasn't. Everybody mentioned the mask. "Still with the allergies, hon?" Every week, from somebody. Irene talked to me like I was a woman who did brows and read books. Like there was nothing on my face to look at. When she first started coming she got her lip done too. Then about 3 years ago she just stopped booking it. I figured she'd quit caring, the way some women do after 70. I never asked. In my job, nobody asks a woman why she stopped getting something waxed. Her last appointment was the last Monday in January, a week after my January labs. Her daughter had finally talked her into moving to Tucson, and her son-in-law Doug had flown in to drive her down in her own Camry. I did her brows. She sat up. And instead of reaching for her coat, she said, "Sit down a second, Tasha." I sat on my rolling stool. She looked at my mask. First time in 4 years. "Can I tell you something about you?" "Okay." "You were on the pill a long time. You came off it around 30. Since then it's the lip, then the chin, now along the jaw on both sides, worse on the left. You had laser and it came back. You've done the tea. Somebody offered you spironolactone, or somebody you love is on it. And this past year a doctor told you to lose weight, and you did, and nothing happened." I didn't say anything. I couldn't. "And at 20 to 3 you go in that closet," she said, "and you come out with your thumb on your jaw." "How do you know all that?" "I counted pills for 38 years. Tasha, you're the most common woman who ever walked up to my window." She pointed at the clipboard on my counter. My intake forms. "You read those all day. The Medications line. How many say spironolactone?" "A lot." "Metformin? Inositol? The pill?" "A lot. Most of the girls with chin stuff." "How many say anything for the liver?" I thought about it. Thousands of forms. "None." "That's the whole problem," she said. "In one line." She reached over to my counter and took the jar of wax sticks, the wooden ones like giant popsicle sticks, and dumped a handful onto the table paper. Then she started counting them out. Not 1 at a time. By fives. Click click click click click, slide. Click click click click click, slide. Her hands just did it, the way they must have done it at a counting tray for 38 years. "50," she said. "This is the testosterone in your blood. Every woman has some. You've got about what everybody's got. That's why your total came back normal." "41," I said. "In range." "In range." She nodded. "Now watch." She reached over and slid the hair tie off my wrist. She bundled 49 of the sticks together and wrapped my hair tie around them twice. 1 stick she left lying on its own. "Your liver makes a protein that holds testosterone. Sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG. Forget the name. Call it a hair tie. A stick in a hair tie is asleep. It can't get to a follicle. It can't do anything. The loose one is the only one that works." She took the brow pencil out of my apron pocket, drew a little chin on the table paper, and drew an arrow from the loose stick to it. "Healthy woman. 1 or 2 loose out of every 100. That's it." Then she snapped the hair tie off. The sticks rolled all over the table. "When insulin runs high, your liver stops making hair ties. Same 50 sticks. Same total. Your lab says normal. But nobody's holding them anymore. Every loose one goes looking for a follicle, and the follicles on your face are the ones it finds. Chin. Lip. Jaw." She reached into the jar and dropped another handful on top. "And that same insulin tells your ovaries to make more. So it's 2 things at once. More sticks coming in. Fewer hair ties to hold them." My phone buzzed on the counter. Megan. "TASHA. Mom STILL says it should be you 😭😭 last chance before Bree books my trial!!!" I turned it face down. Irene watched me do it. "Who's that?" "A bride." "Yours?" "Bree's." "Hm," she said. That's all. She picked the brow pencil back up. "So. Why is your insulin high. You eat like a bird. You're at that gym at 6 in the morning, I've seen the shirt." "It's PCOS." "That's a name. It's not a reason." She leaned over and tapped me with the pencil, under my right ribs, through my smock. "Here's the reason. Your liver. It's carrying fat. Close to half the women with your diagnosis have fat in the liver, and nobody looks, because nobody's paid to look. A liver with fat in it stops listening to insulin. So your pancreas shouts louder to get the job done. More insulin. And that extra insulin is exactly what's telling the same liver to stop making hair ties." She drew it on the paper. A circle for the liver. An arrow to the word "insulin." An arrow back. "It goes around," she said. "The organ that's supposed to be holding your testosterone is the organ that's full." Then she went through everything. Every single thing I'd ever tried. She touched a loose stick with the pencil for each one. "Tweezers. Wax. Threading. You take the hair off after the loose stick already got there. Laser kills the follicles it hits. The sticks are still loose, so they switch on the ones next door. Spironolactone's a good drug. It stands at the follicle and keeps the stick from plugging in. The sticks are still loose. The pill turned down what the ovary sends. That's 1 route out of 2. It never made a hair tie. Your tea, your DIM, the saw palmetto. Nibbling at sticks." "Inositol?" "Inositol is real. It helps your cells hear insulin. But it's working downstream of a full liver." "And the diet." My voice went up on the end. "Exercise and eat right." "You did eat right. That's the front door. You stood at that front door like a bouncer for 6 months. The fat was already in the house." "And the metformin?" "I filled metformin for 38 years. Good drug. It turns down how much sugar your liver puts out. It doesn't take out the fat that's making it put the sugar out. Keep taking it." She set the pencil down. "Every single thing you've tried counts loose sticks, Tasha. Nothing you've tried makes a hair tie." I looked at the 50-some wax sticks spread over my table paper. The hair tie lying next to them. The little chin she'd drawn. In 14 years I'd never removed a single hair. I'd removed evidence. The hair was the liver's handwriting, and I'd been erasing it for a living. "So how do I make hair ties," I said. "You get the fat out of the liver. Then it hears insulin again. Insulin comes down. And it goes back to making them." "How?" "Milk thistle." I almost laughed. I know how this sounds. I'd seen milk thistle at the Speedway next to the 5-Hour Energy. She didn't laugh. "In pharmacy school we learned it as the thing hospitals in Europe give when somebody's eaten a death cap mushroom. It's what protects the liver when nothing else can. The part that does the work is called silymarin. It helps the liver clear out the fat it's been holding." "So I'll get some tea." "Tea is colored water. Silymarin barely dissolves in water. You could drink a gallon a day and get nothing. And most of the capsules are worse than nothing, because they're heat-dried, and heat ruins silymarin. By the time it's powder in a capsule there's nothing left in it. It has to be cold-pressed. Liquid. Otherwise you're buying a label." Outside, a horn. 2 short ones. Irene looked at the window. "That's Doug." She pulled the table paper toward her, tore off the end, and wrote on it with my brow pencil. Fast. Pharmacist printing. 1. Milk thistle first. Not buried in a blend. 2. Cold-pressed. Never heat-dried. 3. Liquid. 4. Selenium, zinc, copper, magnesium. On the label, with numbers. Then underneath, 1 word. She underlined it twice. Doug honked again. Longer. "You never asked why I stopped booking my lip," she said, folding the paper in half and pressing it into my hand. "That's why. 3 years." She got her coat on. At the door she turned around. "Make a hair tie, Tasha." And she was gone. Doug pulled out before I made it to the window. I had her new address in Tucson on a sticky note and no phone number, because Irene does not believe in texting. That night I got the green tin out at the kitchen table. I went through every client card I had. 412 of them. Every woman whose intake form said spironolactone, metformin, inositol, the pill "for hormones," or the letters PCOS, I pulled out and laid on the table. 31 cards. I'd written days-since on every one of them for years. 31 women, every one of them plucking between visits, every one of them on something, every one of them doing exactly what she'd been told. Not one of those cards had anything for the liver. Not one. Then I pulled my own card from the back and laid it at the end of the row. 28. 14. 7. 1. Twice. I hadn't been lazy on that card. I'd been working that card for 7 years, hard, with every tool I owned. I'd just been working it on the wrong end. The loose sticks. Never the hair tie. I put the cards back in alphabetical order, which took an hour, and went to bed. I still couldn't have answered Carol. But I could see the shape of what I'd say. Here's the stupid part. Irene left for Tucson on Tuesday. On Wednesday I stopped at the Walgreens on Far Hills on my way in and bought milk thistle. Store brand. 60 capsules, $11.99. Milk thistle is milk thistle, I told myself. I put Irene's paper in the drawer in the supply closet, under the tweezers, and didn't look at it again. I took those capsules for 6 weeks. 2 a day with breakfast. And I felt something. That's what kills me. I was sleeping through the night. I had more get-up at 6:15. My stomach was flatter by afternoon. I told Marcus I thought it was working. My card said twice a day. Every day for 6 weeks. In March Dr. Ostrowski rechecked my labs for the metformin follow-up. Free testosterone 9.0. SHBG 17. 17. Down from 18. The hair tie number went the wrong way while I felt better. The feeling was not the proof. The card was. The next Tuesday at 2:40 I went in the closet and opened the drawer for the tweezers, and there was Irene's paper. I unfolded it with the Walgreens bottle in my other hand and went down the list. 1. Milk thistle first. The bottle had that. 2. Cold-pressed, never heat-dried. The back of the bottle said "dried extract." I'd read that label 40 times and never once seen it. 3. Liquid. It was a capsule. 4. Selenium, zinc, copper, magnesium, with numbers. Nothing. The only magnesium on it was magnesium stearate, which is what they add so the powder doesn't stick to the machine. 1 out of 4. And under that, in brow pencil, underlined twice, the word I'd folded up and put under my tweezers 6 weeks before. Pureveen. It was under the tweezers the whole time. It's what Irene takes. Cold-pressed, liquid, milk thistle first, with selenium, zinc, copper and magnesium on the label and the amounts right there. No "proprietary blend." 1 dropper a day. I ordered it on my phone, standing in the closet, before my 3:00. That night I sent Dr. Ostrowski a message in the portal. I told her I was starting a cold-pressed liquid milk thistle and asked if I should stop the metformin. She wrote back the next morning. "No reason to stop. Keep the metformin. We'll recheck in May." So I kept it. I still take it. It came on a Friday. I took the first dropper standing at the kitchen counter in a few ounces of water. It tasted bitter and green, like chewing a stem. Day 12. 2:40. My hand was on the closet door. I stopped. I held my compact up to my chin right there in the hallway, in that terrible hallway light. It could wait until tonight. So I let it wait. I did my 3:00. A sign. Not the proof. The proof was the card. Week 3, the card said 1. Once a day, not twice. At 4 o'clock there was nothing back. So I opened 1 evening slot. Thursday at 5:30. I texted one of my old nurses, Danielle, and she wrote back "OMG YES" in about 9 seconds. That night Marcus came in at 6 and the big kitchen light was on, because I forgot. He came up behind me at the stove and put his hand along my jaw and left it there. "Hi," he said. Like he'd just gotten home. Which he had. Week 8, the card said 4. 4 days between. I hadn't been in the supply closet since the Monday before. On Friday Bree leaned in my doorway with her coffee. "You haven't been in the closet all week." I didn't know she knew. She'd known for over a year. Bree never said one word about it to me. The May recheck came back SHBG 26, free testosterone 6.8. Week 14, the card said 11. 11 days between. On day 11 there was hardly anything to take. The mask came off that week. I didn't plan it. One morning I just didn't put it on. I had a new client at 2:40 that Tuesday, a girl named Ashlyn, first brow wax, lying on my table looking straight up at me under the lamp for 20 minutes. She talked about her son's travel soccer the entire time. She never looked at my chin. That Friday I wrote "Lash Lift $85" back on the menu board in chalk. Bree took a picture of it. I couldn't wait for August, so I paid $69 at the Quest on Wilmington Pike and did my own labs. SHBG 24. Free testosterone 7.1. A step back on paper. I sat in my car in the Quest lot with the engine off for a while. Then I drove back to the salon, and the card said 11, and the next week it said 13. Paper wobbles. The card kept going. Week 20, Dr. Ostrowski. SHBG 37. Free testosterone 4.9. She read it off the screen twice. Then she looked at me, no mask, for the first time ever. That's when I told her what I'd never told her. That for 3 years I'd been tweezing the sides of my jaw too, and I'd worn a scarf to every single one of her appointments so she wouldn't see it. And that I'd wasted 6 weeks on Walgreens capsules before I took what I'd actually been handed. "I wish you'd told me about the jaw," she said. Then she typed something and turned back to me. "Whatever you changed, don't change it." She didn't ask what it was. She wrote "continue current regimen" and printed my visit summary. Week 22, the card said 28. The last time I'd touched my chin was July 18. I counted it on the card in pen, the way I'd count anybody's. 28. Exactly what it said the day I started the card at 30. That afternoon I called Carol. "Is Bree still doing Megan's morning?" Carol didn't say anything for a second. "Bree's booked," she said. "But I'll call her." Saturday, August 22. 5:15 in the morning. Carol's front room on Shroyer Road, because Megan wanted to get ready in the house she grew up in. I set the ring light up in front of the big window. Somebody was making eggs. Megan's dog was locked in a bedroom, crying about it. Bree was there too, doing the bridesmaids in the dining room, and every 20 minutes she gave me a thumbs-up through the doorway like I was 10 at a spelling bee. Carol sat in the window seat in her robe with a cup of coffee and didn't drink it. She just watched me. At 7:50 I did the last thing. I leaned in and put my cheek right against Megan's, jaw to jaw, in the ring light, and looked in the mirror at the 2 of us. No line. On either of us. Megan grabbed my hand and hooked my pinky with hers. "You did it," she said. When she went upstairs to get into her dress, Carol waved me over to the window. She was sitting. I was standing. She was looking up at my chin from underneath, from exactly where she'd looked at it 3 years ago on my table. She didn't touch it this time. "What did you do?" I told her. All of it, in about 4 sentences. My liver. The hair ties. 50 wax sticks on my table paper. Irene. Carol listened the whole way through. Then she set her cold coffee down on the windowsill. "Well," she said. "The laser girl on 5th closed, you know." And she laughed, and I laughed, and Megan yelled down the stairs for somebody to come do her buttons. I'm writing this because of 31 cards in a green tin. If you're reading this with tweezers in your car console, this is for you. If you've got a compact in a drawer at work. If you've worn a mask for allergies you don't have. If you've ever turned your head so his hand wouldn't land on your jaw. You're not lazy. You're not doing it wrong. You've been working hard on the wrong end of it, same as I was. If you're somebody's sister, on spironolactone, standing up slow at every checkout, I wrote this for you first. And if you do faces for a living, go read your intake forms tonight. Count the Medications lines. Then count how many say anything for the liver. Here's what nobody told me in 7 years. Your liver makes the hair ties. When it's full of fat, it stops making them, and the loose ones go to your face. Every tweezer, every laser, every pill you've been handed counts loose sticks. Not one of them makes a hair tie. What made mine was Pureveen. Cold-pressed liquid milk thistle, so the silymarin is still in it, with selenium, zinc, copper and magnesium, every amount printed on the label. 1 dropper a day. I take mine in the morning in a few ounces of water. I kept my metformin. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, and here's how I'd use it. Start a card. Today's date, and how many days since you last plucked. If that number hasn't moved in 90 days, send it back. Even empty. Every penny. Nicole's spironolactone came with 2 pages of side effects stapled to the bag. Nobody ever offered her 4 years back. https://pureveen.com/products/pureveen-liver-support-1 Last Tuesday at 2:40 I had a brow at 2:15 and nobody at 3. I walked down the hall past the supply closet. The tweezers are still in that drawer. I haven't thrown them out. I just don't open it. Irene's paper is taped inside the lid of the green tin now. My card is in the front of the tin, not the back. I snapped my hair back with the hair tie, went up to the front counter, and opened the appointment book to 4 weeks out. Tuesday, November 17. The 4:15 line. Lip and chin. In pencil, for the first time in 14 years, I wrote my own name. Tasha. P.S. Start the card today. A plain index card. Write the date, and how many days it's been since you last plucked or waxed. That's your number. Mine was "twice," which isn't even a number. Take Pureveen and write the new number down every time you need the tweezers. If that number hasn't moved in 90 days, send the bottle back, even empty, and they refund every penny. That's the deal. My laser never offered me that. I paid $1,140 for 6 sessions, and when the new ones came in right next door to the cleared spots, nobody gave me a dime back. The spironolactone never offered Nicole that either. The prescription pad doesn't come with a refund. This does. P.P.S. Here's exactly how it went, so nobody quits in week 1. The first dropper tastes bitter and green. That's the silymarin. It isn't the hair going away. It's your liver getting what it needs to start emptying out, and that part happens where nobody can see it. The first 10 days I saw nothing on the surface. Nothing. I took it at the counter and went to work. Day 12 was the first afternoon I didn't need the closet. Week 3, once a day instead of twice. Week 8, every 4 days. Week 14, every 11. Week 22, 28. The Walgreens capsules made me feel better in a week and did nothing to my card in 6. Feeling better and making hair ties are 2 different things. The feeling is not the proof. The card is. P.P.P.S. Don't stop anything your doctor has you on. I kept my metformin and I still take it, and Irene told me to. Nicole started Pureveen in May, after she watched my card for 2 months first, because that's Nicole. Here's what she did, and it's what I'd do. 1: Take the bottle and this post to your doctor. Show her the label. 2: Get SHBG and free testosterone drawn before you start, then again at 12 weeks, so you both have paper. 3: If the numbers move, let your doctor walk your dose down. Not you. In September Nicole's doctor took her spironolactone from 100 milligrams to 50. She still plucks. Every 5 days now instead of every other day, and she hasn't seen stars at a checkout since. She's not where I am yet. She's on her way, with her doctor, at a pace her doctor picked. P.P.P.P.S. If you're the husband, or the sister, or the mom reading this over her shoulder: don't ask her if she wants to try it. She's been asked enough questions about her face. "Have you tried the laser girl." "Still with the allergies." Don't add one. Order it, put it on the kitchen counter next to her coffee, and say "just take it, for me." Then leave it alone. Don't check her chin. She's already checking it 2 times a day. Marcus didn't find this. Irene did. But Marcus is the one who said the word "closet" out loud, and that's where it started. P.P.P.P.P.S. It sells out. Cold-pressing can't be rushed, and they make it in small batches, which is the whole reason the silymarin is still in the bottle when it gets to you instead of cooked out of it like my Walgreens capsules. In June it went out of stock while I had 4 days left in mine, and I waited 17 for the next batch with my card sitting on the counter. Now I buy 3 bottles at a time so I'm never down to 4 days again. If you've got labs on the calendar, start before them and let the paper show it. 12 weeks out is plenty. And don't wait on it. Every week the liver stays full is another week of loose sticks finding follicles, and every follicle that switches on is one more you'll be pulling in a closet next year. The 90-day guarantee covers the whole order, every bottle in it. https://pureveen.com/products/pureveen-liver-support-1 EDIT: A lot of you are asking if Irene is real. She's in Tucson. Her daughter says it's too hot to walk 40 minutes in the morning. She does it anyway. I mailed her an index card. It just said 28.