Freakish Eyebrows

Yesterday, I finally bowed to the inevitable and performed eyebrow maintenance on myself. Let the torture begin! But it was necessary. I like people to see my eyes, after all, and if I don’t pluck my eyebrows every couple of weeks, they don’t resemble human eyebrows so much as two dark muppets clinging to my forehead. Sort of like this.

You think I’m exaggerating. But that could be me, in that picture. Except that my hair only looks like that when I first wake up, and my skin is not the color and texture of old leather, and, you know, the thing about NOT BEING AN OLD MAN. But other than that, the resemblance is eerie. So you see, desperate measures are called for.

I don’t mind the pain of plucking so much; I’m used to it. It’s all the decisions involved that get to me. Easy decision: all the hairs between the eyes, on the bridge of the nose. No unibrow. But what about these poking up here, here, and here? If I pluck them all out, will I have a bald spot there? I find hairs that were supposed to belong to the eyebrows an inch away from their friends, growing alone on my temples—that is weird. And what about the arch? Underneath the brow is, to me, the most painful part to pluck, yet it must be done.

Why don’t I go to a professional? Well, I did, for a while. She has waxed my brows quite a few times, and she knows I don’t want a super-thin eyebrow. That would send me into shock when I looked in the mirror; you’d find me clutching my face, wailing, “WHO IS THIS WOMAN?” But the last time I went to her, when she was done, I couldn’t tell any difference. “What about these growing right above the normal brow line?” I asked. “Most people don’t want me to touch the top of the brows,” she said. I had her get what I was talking about, but for $20 my eyebrows didn’t look any better than the plucking and trimming I can do for myself.

I hear that the "fuller brow" look is in right now. Maybe that means I can wait two extra days before deforesting the top half of my face.