it’s all in the eyebrows
a Sunday vignette
This morning, I fixated on my face for too long. Well, actually, it was my forehead. I find it strangely small. As I was looking at it in the mirror, it started to eat itself away and my eyebrows went up, 3 cm from intruding onto my hairline. I closed my eyes, and my face seemed to be back in its place. My eye, with its red lines swimming around my pupil, was still searching for the culprit bringing this terrible image. I saw the trail of hair around my eyebrows. That is when I realized why it all looked out of order. It was my eyebrows! They were somehow too light in their hair count. Had I been losing eyebrow hair??
While I try to not think about all the wrong things that might happen to my face, I somehow end up doing the opposite, focusing on one specific aspect. In this case, I was afraid I had somehow stimulated my brow bone in the wrong way(?) that my eyebrow hair started falling out. I’ve tried to envision myself without eyebrows, and even used that TikTok filter to see how pretty I might look, or if it gave me an edge (which I frankly preferred). I didn’t like it. I secretly wished I could look as diaphanous as my mom without eyebrows. She had been rocking them for a few years in the mid-aughts. So ahead of the curve even though she wasn’t happy with that look either.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised even if my eyebrow hair betrays me and can’t be thicker, fuller, or get into a straighter shape. With a set of hairy arms, it’s actually difficult to believe that my hair is my friend. Despite my eventual acceptance and embracement of the different ways my hair sprouts around my body, I am still very conscious of controlling my eyebrows. I always fill them in, whether I am going outside or not. I’ve tried thin pens, pencils, eyeshadow, brow pomade, brow tints and hair waxing, plucking, and threading. On my latest visit to get my eyebrows threaded, I mentioned I did not want my eyebrows to look arched, I wanted them straighter. I ended up with over-threaded eyebrows. And while at first I was a bit shocked, I took it as a moment to experiment with some sort of 90s aesthetic; but I was so over it in 2 days. Changing the shape of your brows really changes your face. And while hair does grow back, I was too impatient for it to fully come through.
This is when I started noticing that no matter what I used on my eyebrows to manipulate the shape and fullness of them, trying to fix the mistake, it just didn’t look right. Somehow these tiny stubborn hairs seem to appear where they shouldn’t be. Why do I have a hair follicle near my right hand lower corner of my brow bone, empty and bare, while I have an unruly hair pointing east out of some place never seen on my brows?? It’s a dare, I think. They’re goading me into plucking them in line or letting them grow out into a blast of patchy hair.
P.S. good stimulation for eyebrow hair regrowth is dancing to this Carol King song while an LA earthquake happens in the morning.