Tonight, I take my final Beauty U Practical Exam. This is supposed to exactly mimic what we’ll have to do at the state board licensing exam, so it involves you assembling a whole big kit of supplies, and then demonstrating how to do an arm wax, a lip/chin wax, an eyebrow tweeze, a facial, and a daytime makeup application.

To be honest, I know most of this stuff cold by now. (We all do.) The only places I get tripped up are on the waxing, where we have to use honey instead of wax, I guess because state board proctors don’t want to worry about test models getting crazy skin reactions. So I use honey, but, because it’s honey, I just squeeze it out of the bottle onto my stick and then “wax,” and it turns out, you’re supposed to dip the stick into the bottle of honey like it’s a real waxing pot. Well, sure.

The other, more major catastrophe comes during my daytime makeup application. There’s a locked in stone, absolute, cosmic truth type of state board rule that if you drop something and then you go to pick it up, you automatically fail. Sanitation issues and all. So if you drop something, you have to just live without it. Which is okay if it’s an Q-tip or a sponge, because you bring about five million of those.

But if it is the brown/black pencil that has your eyeliner on one end and your brow pencil on the other, and you accidentally drop that in the trash while sharpening it, well, then, you’re SOL on the eyeliner and brow pencil applications, aren’t you?

In the end, it only costs me about four points and I get an 88. (You need a 70 to pass.) Which means I’ve crossed the is and dotted the ts and I’ll be done with Beauty U as of this week! I’m not putting an exact day on it yet… you know how the school is about keeping track of hours and such. But I’m already getting emotional about being done with this whole crazy experience.

So while I go off and mull over all of that (plus buy five extra eyeliner and brow pencils to take with me to the actual state board exam, in case I drop all of them), I thought I’d give you a quickie link round-up of cool things that you can go read by other people.

• Definatalie is rejecting the notion of the flattering outfit. For real? We can do that? Why didn’t we do it years ago? God. Genius.

• Echidne of the Snakes is talking about Broken Dolls, as in, those haute couture shots of women looking dead but stylish! What’s your take on this? Is it art or does it just condone violence against women, plus unrealistic beauty standards in some kind of sick two birds/one stone deal?

• Jezebel’s Sadie Stein has a great round-up of The Mind-Boggling History of Fad Diets. I think the Sleeping Beauty one is my favorite because it’s just so darn practical.

• And more Jezebel awesomeness is Jessica Coen’s post about Why You Must See Unretouched Images, And Why You Must See Them Repeatedly. All I can say is, amen sister. (Actually, I also said this, awhile back, when we were talking about airbrushing at Beauty U — you can know it’s fake. But it’s still really hard to believe it.)