Sinead In The City: My $30 tattoo disaster and other beauty regrets

Sinead in the City is your insider's guide to millennial life in Auckland. If you're struggling to pay the bills or find love in the city of couples, you're not alone. Sinead is here to commiserate. Because whatever you're regretting, Sinead has probably done it twice.

Last week I nonchalantly revealed on Instagram that I once got a tattoo with a $30 daily deal voucher.

I was 17 at the time, and obviously thought I'd scored the Bargain Of the Year, babes.

"Idiots!" I'd scoffed at the people who went to reputable tattoo artists for permanent markings on their bodies, while I smugly trotted off down a Queen St back alley arcade.

READ MORE:
• Sinead in The City: I fell in love on an Auckland flight to a dating app event
• Premium - Sinead in the City: What it's really like to go to The Emmys
• Sinead In The City: I got Botox and it's the best thing I ever did, sorry
• Sinead in the City: Forget Instagram, I want Grimstagram

I'm 27 now and guess what folks? Absolute plot twist - she wasn't the bargain of the year.

It's a sh**ty, wobbly little triangle on my wrist, and while one side looks like it was drawn on with a mechanical pencil, the other looks like it was done with a chubby Sharpie. It's terrible you guys.

I revealed this hideously embarrassing tidbit on Instagram because - as I've previously written about - I hate how Instagram is all about projecting a perfectly curated highlight reel of our lives.

While my life often looks very cool and fab on the 'gram because of all the cool sh*t I get to do and free stuff I get sent because of my job - I also make a conscious effort to offset this by regularly revealing the hideously embarrassing things I've done.

I do this by sharing admissions either retrospectively (like the tatt) or in the moment - like how last week I spent three days spewing up because I accidentally gave myself alcohol poisoning, as if I was 16 and had spent the night chugging KGBs in my local park - even though I'm nearly 30 and had finished my duties at a work event.

On that selflessly transparent note, I'd like to present to you five more of my horrendous beauty mistakes of the noughties. Tag yourselves.

2005: Maybe she's born with it, maybe she's a pikelet

I had a very minimalist, two-step makeup routine that consisted of 37 layers of Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse coating the face AND MOUTH (it's called a nude lip, look it up) - paired with a pencil eyeliner scraped around the perimeter of the eyeball.

It was of the utmost importance that my entire face was one colour, like a human Mr Potato Head. No eyebrows, no cheeks, no nose, no lips. Just eyeballs.

The goal was obviously to look like Effy from Skins, despite the fact that I was not a size 6, raven-haired, ethereal London waif. I was a size 12 tween from Glendowie with an orange face.

In 2006, I discovered Bumpits

As an only child who spent a lot of time watching TV alone, I often fell victim to the powers of infomercials. And despite Snooki being at the height of her fame when these were advertised, I'm still quite certain I was the only teen in New Zealand who bought Bumpits.

For those of you normal people who don't know, a Bumpit was a little plastic smile-shaped gadget that you nestle on top of your skull to give your hair an unnatural ridge - because in the early noughties, the higher the quiff, the closer to God/utter sophistication. Or something.

And look, it wasn't just me, all the celebs were Bumpin It Up!

Quintessential bump icons of the time included Beyonce, Ashley Tisdale and LC.

I personally paired my Bump with some extremely aggressive GHD-ing and some clip in hair extennies, and I was away laughing - right up until my plastic grin fell out during a beep test in PE.

2007: A belly button piercing

Not only did I sport a tasteful Swarovski-crystal embellished Playboy Bunny charm a-top my vodka-cruiser filled potbelly, but I had the piercing done in the back room of a Pagani-esque clothes shop - so it naturally got severely infected days later. Tres chic.

>

2008: A tongue piercing

Not only did I sport a tasteful Playboy Bunny charm in the middle of my 15-year-old tongue - but I naturally chipped the surface of all my teeth off with it - meaning a decade later I still scream with pain whenever I drink a frozen Coke.

2009 - Box-dyed hair

Why would I invest my hard-earned Saturday-job-at-Paper Plus-money on a trained professional hairdresser when I could simply pop down to Pak 'n Save and buy the cheapest box of black hair dye I could find? She's angsty, she's panicking at the disco.

Furthermore - why would I pay to then have my Wednesday Adams lewk reversed by a trained professional hairdresser when I could simply coat my head in bleach - rendering my locks the texture of one of those metal brillo pads that you use to scrub pots with?

Yes, she may have looked like Justin Timberlake when he had hair the consistency of mi goreng, but she was a frugal queen!

Gawd, the noughties were a truly viscerally disturbing decade.

I like to think my overall aesthetic has improved somewhat since then, but even to this day no matter how hard I try my fake tan always looks atrocious - case in point, last week when I met the Prime Minister my hands looked like mahogany walnuts.

In 2020 and beyond, I'm channelling a "less is more" approach, excluding of course all the Botox in my forehead - fill me up to the brim, gals.