rush on eyebrows. I love to look at a well-groomed pair, to see in which direction the hairs grow – whether they fan or river or both – and examine which sections are full and which are thin. On the face, only the iris contains as much pattern and intricacy, but inspecting people’s eyeballs that up-close is can send the wrong signal. I'm interested in patterns, not a life commitment. Yes, a cool eyebrow is hard to beat. From their high perch, they speak volumes about the person whose forehead they adorn. For example, you know that woman standing next to you at the deli counter, the one shaped like a tiny snowman with the red rinse in her beauty parlor perm and a set of thin, drawn-ons that no one’s been able to get away with since Claudette Colbert? She got into her own groove in 1962 and nothing is ever going to disrupt her lifestyle choices. Her now equally diminutive husband has been feigning hearing loss for at least two decades. I can tell. Who needs Lillydale? It’s all in the eyebrows.
Yes, eyebrows speak volumes. A former sister-in-law plucked most of hers out in high school, and they didn’t dare come back. That’s all you need to about her. (That and when she thinks you have visited long enough, she’ll start vacuuming under your bed at six in the morning.) Then there was the time my twelve year old noticed that her eyebrows were growing in so much darker than her long locks, and I insisted on experimenting a la L’Oreal. She wore orange eyebrows for several weeks, eyebrows that told everyone the truth: she is a sweet, trusting child and her mother doesn’t know her limits.
My fascination began in high school, after a gym class when I was privileged enough to watch the prettiest girl in the school put on her make-up. She grabbed a tool I’m not sure I had ever seen before, an eyebrow pencil, and extended an already beautiful brow one half inch further out. For reasons probably known only to street corner characterature artists, that tiny extension seemed to create her face – without it, she would have been stuck scrapping it out for the Miss Cong
eniality award. It was also traumatic because then, of course, like any insecure teen, I had to inspect my own. Yep, there they were. Plastered across my forehead as if dragged there one car trip by the magnet in a Wooly Willy face game. The hairs didn’t follow any particular growth pattern, except to be mashed there in a shape my brother called the Lake Superior look. Widely dispersed and caret shape to boot, I was lucky he didn’t conjure up the Wicked Witch of the West moniker. I was afraid to pluck them, actually, out of fear that a thinner shape would make the caret more pronounced and turn me into Julie Newmar. Having Catwoman’s forehead while under the roof of a mother who would never let me wear a catsuit didn’t seem worth the effort.
But after about two decades, I began to notice. Eyebrows were all over Hollywood. Pixie-featured with man brows, Winona Ryder stole the stage with her Tayloresque ridge runners. And I never once over-estimated Julia Roberts big grin, understanding that her brow power deserved almost equal credit. Now, you can spot one Olsen twin sporting a set of brows thicker than her forearm, and as a second to putting meat on her bones, it works. Frido Kahlo’s unibrow was so intense she had to balance her canvas with images of black cats and monkeys, while Pam Anderson channels Jean Harlow by shaving off and starting over. She doesn’t count, though. As a man in my office said, “Who knew she had eyes?” All I needed was something in-between to give me a little drama, a look that said, “Pay attention to me,” instead of “I’m distracted and unkempt.”
I started considering my options. A pair of tweezers and a DIY mentality resulted in a McDonaldsy arch and a look my girls called my “Happy Eyes” period. But more sophisticated grooming tools, from razors and shears, to threads and hot wax, sounded more like yard equipment and cult accoutrements. I found a brow shaping kit at Sephora, but as I read about the shaping guide, all I could imagine was an architect’s template. I would pop $80 for the kit and end up with a half of a handlebar mustache over each eye. I purchased a clear mascara wand to give my eyebrows lift and direction. All I got was a desk full of schmutz. I tried pencils, hoping to recreate that high school magic. But I’m here to tell you, if you rub your temples after the sixth time your kid has called you at the office, your eyebrow extension looks like a stock market chart.
I did the only sensible thing. I walked into a make-up store, found the lone attendant, and cornered him. “I’m here for my brows. Is there any hope?”
He studied my face in that disconcerting way that wanted me to add, “No, just the brows. I’ll dea
l with the rest later.” Then he grabbed my jaw with his hand and said, “I can fix this.” And he did. He plucked under. Of course. Then he plucked over to lose the witch’s peak. Aha! Then he worked up and down, over and above until I felt that by now, my brother would be rendered blissfully speechless. Then he pulled out a little pot of brow shadow and a delicate little brush that I knew I would lose within the week, and said, “Use this, only this.” And apparently because he thought perhaps my make-up bag bore enough sparkle and blue eyeshadow for all the world’s Olympic gymnastics teams, he added, “And don’t be sharing this brush with anything else.”
Although I finally found a fix, the good news for cosmetics companies is that my bad brow legacy continues. “Mom!” my daughter laments. “Whenever I go in to get my nails done, the Vietnamese ladies always ask the same thing, ‘You get eyebrows done? You here for eyebrows, too? No? You sure? I’ll do for free.’ It’s not fair, Mom. I’m getting a complex!”
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