First let me start out by saying I do appreciate certain things about my eyebrows. Also my husband says if I write another complainy blog post I'll be firmly in Andy Rooney territory. And even that crankypants didn't write about his eyebrows, as wiry and renegade as they were.
So, starting on a positive note, I'm told that the fact that I have relatively bushy eyebrows is a good thing. "You're lucky," my eyebrow plucker Alexis said to me as she yanked hairs out of my face that probably weren't even in the legal eyebrow zone; they were more like rogue nose hairs that had fled their country of origin. "Most women your age hardly have any eyebrows left." I love when the person on the other side of the microscope-glasses says women your age.
I've watched over the years as bushy eyebrows have come in and out of fashion. There are a select few women who can rock some serious eyebrow volume through it all, and yes, I'm talking about Brooke Shields.
But when I was a young girl, Brooke was still doing those baby shampoo commercials and eyebrows were not cool. So of course I, like most other girls going through puberty, had crazy big brows. If eyebrows are the mustaches of the forehead, I had a Tom Selleck on the left and a Ron Burgundy on the right, connected by a Gomez Adams.
I wish someone had told me when I was going through puberty to embrace my eyebrows. I never heard "Enjoy that forestral uni-brow while you can, because when you're old you'll have regular eyebrows while the other women will be penciling, painting and transplanting." Grownups seemed to be limiting their Just Wait lectures to my acne, saying I should be thankful for skin so oily I could - to quote my sister - make salad dressing by squeezing my T-zone because when I was older I wouldn't be as wrinkled-as-a-prune as my contemporaries. In other words, embrace your adolescent awkwardness! It will magically transform into a series of beauty secrets on your thirtieth birthday.
And now, what's this bullshit? The other day I'm looking in my 10x magnifying mirror and there's a skin flake there on my left eyebrow and I start scratching it off and it multiplies until I've got eight to ten flakes and for each flake that brushes off, three more appear.
So I guess I have mange now.
It seems my eyebrows have issued a statement saying they've carried the ball long enough and it might be time for another face part to take over. I've done all the work from thirty to fifty-eight. Now maybe some of the rest of your slackers can take a shift, said my eyebrows. To an audience of none. My eyelashes have taken early retirement, my hairline cowlick has turned to a life of crime, my nose is hell bent on taking over my entire face in a coup, and my lips are on life support. And that beautiful skin I was promised from years of enduring acne despite antibiotics, light treatments and no chocolate for seven years? That was a failed campaign promise if I ever heard one. One of my friends, at age 45 said, "How can I have acne and wrinkles at the same time? This was not what I signed up for." Sing it, sister. I and my face agree with you on that one.
In addition to the mange, about half of my individual eyebrow hairs are getting thicker. You know those pictures of a hair under a microscope that look like small tree trunks right before they're shaved off in the Schick Quatro commercial simulations? That's what my eyebrow hairs look like in a regular mirror. If I mistakenly tweeze one of them, I end up with a bald spot.
The penciling, painting and transplanting is looking more and more viable. But then I'd never get that gig as the next Andy Rooney.
