Guys, I have a confession to make – I have a unibrow.
Unchecked, it crawls across my face like a long, fat wooly bear presaging an
especially harsh winter.
I don’t know if I always had a unibrow; I didn’t notice it
until I got old enough for thick, dark hair to start growing in all kinds of
strange and exciting new places, including on top of my toes and out of my
belly button. At the age of twelve or thirteen, I started plucking the band of
thick hair that grew across the bridge of my nose.
“If you pluck that too much, it’ll never grow back,” my
mother would say in a warning tone that nevertheless gave me hope for the future.
But, as
I’ve already established, my mother wasn’t interested in teaching me how
to, as they say, “be a woman,” so, aside from the removal of enough hair to
grant them plural status, my eyebrows remained unshaped. This changed one day
when I was sixteen. I went to the hair salon a few blocks from my house to get
my hair trimmed; I wore it in a short, masculine cut that my mother approved
of, but that wasn’t well-suited to my curls.
“I’m going to wax your eyebrows,” the hairdresser announced as
he snipped away. I met his gaze in the mirror. He looked concerned.
“Uh, I only have enough for the haircut,” I said.
“I’ll do it for free,” the man replied, too quickly.
So this hairdresser, whose name I didn’t know, applied hot
wax to my face using an implement that looked a lot like a tube of lip balm. I
won’t say that getting my eyebrows waxed was the worst pain I’ve ever
experienced; in fact, on the scale of painful things that have happened to me,
getting my eyebrows waxed is near the bottom, above mild-to-moderate sunburn
but below getting stung by the same wasp twice.
Once the man had applied and
then ripped away both little strips of fabric, the hairdresser returned my
glasses and invited me to regard my new visage in his hand mirror.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t see what my new eyebrows looked like; my eyes were
watering too heavily. But I must have feigned delight convincingly, because the
man said, “You can groom them at home with a pair of tweezers. Just always
remember to pluck from the bottom of
your eyebrows, never from the middle or the top.”
I walked the few blocks home, eyes still watering. When I
let myself into the house, my mother looked up from her book and gasped. “What
happened to your eyes!?” she said.
“I got my eyebrows waxed,” I replied.
My mother cocked her head to one side. “I think you’re
having an allergic reaction,” she said.
I went into the bathroom and squinted into the mirror at my
now quite-inflamed eyes. “I’m never getting my eyebrows waxed again,” I said to
my mother, who was hovering in the bathroom door.
Besides, it turns out that puberty is just the start of novel hair growth adventures in this life. I’ve also started to grow really long eyebrow hairs – which I feel the need to pluck before they can grow more than an inch long. I used to know a guy with really long, bushy eyebrows, like Poirot’s mustache but if he wore it on his forehead. That’s not the look I’m going for.