Woman Loses Eyebrows When DIY Face Mask Goes Wrong

Face masks are the latest trend, but one woman learned the hard way that reading the instructions is important.

Genella Pabianes Carabbacan, from Isabela in the Philippines, learned that sometimes being beautiful ends in disaster. The 22-year-old was hoping to get rid of blackheads when a friend gave her packets of a charcoal mask, but she ended up getting rid of a lot more: her eyebrows.

Carabbacan says that she was so excited to try the new mask out that she opted to skip the crucial step of reading the instructions, which would have warned her to avoid applying the mask to eyebrows and hair, and instead went straight to smothering the deep black mask to her face. She realized her mistake as soon as she began peeling it off after allowing the mask to dry for roughly 15 minutes.

In the hilarious video, which was filmed by her brother Mark, Carabbacan is shown struggling to remove the sticky mixture, all while her brother struggles to contain his laughter. It takes her about three minutes to get the mask off, and despite Carabbacan's best efforts to save her eyebrows in the process, most of them were removed along with the blackheads. She was forced to shave the remaining few hairs off in order to allow her eyebrows to grow back properly.

"'I was just crying because I didn't have any eyebrows. I had to shave the rest of the hair for them to regrow properly together," she told the Daily Mail. "It was funny, and emotional. But it was more down to my stupidity. I should have read the instructions. The lesson is to always check and research cosmetics before using them."

Carabbacan's video quickly went viral, gaining more than 23 million views and catching the eyes of several people hoping to help her restore her eyebrows, with multiple clinics offering her microblading and threading.