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Sara Conrad

Editor, skirt! Jacksonville

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I love thinking and talking about feminism and writing for skirt!. I went to the University of Iowa and I'll put up a good fight about spelling. ...

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thoughts on eyebrows and related tales

My eyebrows are getting really bushy. Only several things drive me crazy in this world (okay, maybe more) and one of them is when my eyebrows get horribly bushy. Why? Because America is not the kind of country that really, well, embraces hair.

It all started when I was in 6th grade. Actually it probably started with my dad, who gave me the bushy eyebrow gene. But men with prominent eyebrows are seen as more prominent in character, and women with bushy eyebrows are often seen as unfeminine and less attractive. It’s true, Frida is famous for her big eyebrows. But Frida is first known for her amazing art. But I digress. In 6th grade I noticed that my eyebrows were bushier than most of my friends. My hair was also changing from dirty blonde to surefire brunette. My eyebrows were getting darker and thicker and apparently there was no stopping them. So after a long discussion with my mother, she and I decided to go get my eyebrows waxed. We decided to go to her and my father’s trusted hair dresser, who also cut mine and my sister’s hair. We all trusted her. My mother promised it wouldn’t hurt...much.

The day of my waxing appointment, my best friend and I were scaring myself silly with what-ifs regarding the waxing (I would go through much of the same conversation with my best friend in college almost ten years later before I got my belly button pierced) and one of my sixth grade teachers overheard. She looked at me as if I should be ashamed of myself (which resulted in me, of course, feeling very ashamed of myself) and told me,” You have a beautiful eyebrow shape--don’t get them waxed!” 

But it was too late. The appointment had been made. Plus, I didn’t believe her.

So I had my eyebrows waxed that evening (and it did hurt, and badly) and so I continued to wax my eyebrows for years and years until, well, several months ago, actually, when I failed to make a return appointment with my favorite eyebrow specialist at the beach--not because anything went wrong, but because I can be lazy about hair and eyebrow appointments.

My eyebrows, true to form, have been growing back in the past few months to look almost just as they looked in 6th grade before I got them waxed. I remember, before getting them waxed, tilting my chin up to the mirror and looking at the underside of my eyebrows, how the hair spread up evenly and perfectly, “like Brooke Shields” my mom would tell me. Unfortunately, Brooke Shields was no longer in vogue in my circle of friends. Her eyebrows were for sure out of style. Also, according to Cosmo, which I began reading a year later in 7th grade, instructed me that eyebrows “should” begin thick and then taper toward the end. My friend, who sat next to me in 7th grade English, read this out loud to me and then peered at my face and tilted her head. “Yours are like the opposite,” she said. And so continued my obsession with keeping my eyebrows in sync with Cosmo’s instruction. As a disclaimer, I know that I’ve proudly admitted to being a fashion magazine junkie and that fashion magazines are not the devil. But any fashion article that tells you your body “should” be a certain way is full of crap. I mean, it’s not healthy.

So, in these past few months, I’ve been thinking a little more about my eyebrows and how they mark me a little bit as who I am. (It doesn’t keep me up at night or anything, but it comes to mind when I put my makeup on in the morning.) I look at pictures of myself when I was eleven now, and instead of thinking I looked like a weird bushy-browed girl, I think, I was cute and I had character. The eyebrows are a marking trait. Had I seen Frida as a child, perhaps I would have felt better about keeping my eyebrows more natural. Or, maybe not. Maybe I just had to grow to love my eyebrows like people learn to love their strengths.