Bad beauty 07 - Features

We might dabble in the occasional at-home pedicure or hot-oil treatment, but for the most part, we leave the prettying-up to our hand-picked circle of professionals -- and for good reason. After all, who wants to show up for a night on the town with cockeyed brows or a day-glo 'do? We'd be dealing with the snickers and stares for months to come. But despite our best efforts to avoid them, we've all experienced our share of cringe-worthy beauty blunders. The bad haircut, the self-tanning session gone wrong, the botched wax job . . . they're all rites of passage that anyone with style has undergone. The result is an arsenal of mortifying tales worth a few laughs -- now that the scars have faded, of course. We asked some chic city dwellers to share their stories of beauty gone bad; then we checked in with the experts for their professional solutions.