Your Neanderthal Eyebrows...Well They Don't have to be

This kind of fits into some of the previous posts dealing with bodily hair and grooming, however as they deserved their own post, I figured I'd give the eyebrows their own post too. How old were you all when you started grooming your eyebrows? Did you even need to groom them or were you born with perfect eyebrow size, length, and shape?

I wasn't. Neither was my brother. I suppose he had it worse than me but guys usually get a pass for longer than girls do I think. He pretty much had the unibrow look going on. I'm not sure when he started to fix that but I'm sure it had to do with a chick he was dating at the time. It definitely was not my mother. And he solved it by shaving down between his eyes. I wish it were that simple for girls. My problem was more so in shape. I think it was like having two hairy rectangles. They may have been more like triangles. Either way they weren't attractive.

I remember once my dad took me to get a haircut from a lady we went to church with and she decided to experiment on my eyebrows. With my dad's permission of course. I suppose it was gratis. This was when I was about 12 I believe. The pain was not nearly the pain experienced from previously discussed bikini wax, but I do recall some pain. Also I distinctly remember the waxing missing a whole load of eyebrows which meant she followed up with what seemed like a marathon session of tweezing. Every once in awhile the tweezing caused more pain than should be inflicted on a 12 year old child. I knew this was more work than I cared to keep up with. I also decided that if beauty was this much pain, I wanted no part of it. Come to think of it, this might also explain my previously discussed difficulty with getting dates in high school. hmmm funny how writing about somethings can bring enlightenment about other thing...

Sometime during high school, I started to notice that my friends had shapely, girly looking eyebrows. Kind of like what you see in magazines. I vaguely remember having a conversation about it with one of my friends. I also remember reading about shaping your eyebrows in magazines. Between the two of them, I decided that tweezing was going to be my best option, and that I should tweeze bottom up and never top down so as to open up my eyes. But I must say, I wasn't looking forward to it based on my experience years before. This must have been the moment that I decided beauty was worth a certain amount of pain. My hope was that I'd get used to the pain. I suppose I did although it still hurts a little.

If I remember correctly I took a little at a time off the bottom since my impression was that it was labor intensive to do it all at once. Plus I might screw up if I did it all at once. One thing I learned was that I didn't have bushy eyebrows. They were kind of thin. So at one point I tweezed them so much that I had a short line of brow that didn't cover the length of my eye. To the point that most people in the know about all things beauty would have figured out how to draw them in. But not me. Nor did anyone teach me about this. I put up with this for the longest time and figured that was normal looking.

A few years later I decided to go through the painfully awkward process of trying to grow them out. I'm really lucky they grew back. I say painful process because you get used to a look and you have to keep yourself from compulsively plucking hairs that are out of place until you have eyebrows again. Mine aren't the most beautiful, but they are better than they once were. All of this I learned without the advice of my mother. I think she may have been born with perfect eyebrows. That must be why she didn't think to help me with this. That's ok, I had to choose when I was ready to endure the pain of beauty.