How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Brows.

I actually have decent eyebrows, well defined and dark - even when I was a child and my hair was blondish. They'd be really good, except one of them is higher than the other. I know, I know, nobody has a balanced face. I've seen computer images where they've made people with perfectly symmetrical faces and it's creepy as hell. It's just that my eyebrows are uneven. Really uneven, like one is way more arched than the other, making me look like a sarcastic smart-ass Mr. Spock*

I had always thought I'd gotten my eyebrows from my dad. Dad had awesome eyebrows, thick dark and black.

My parents' wedding photo. Note the awesome brows on Dad.

 

 

 When he was young they were sort of Elvis-y. As he got older they were picking up a hint of Brezhnev.

Wowza

Sadly, he died before his brows could fully realise their destiny, but I am absolutely certain that he would have eventually rocked an eyebrow combover. The man had brows.

Being a child of the eighties, I appreciate full, well-defined brows. Elizabeth Taylor, for example. Nastassia Kinski. So I've never really plucked mine, except for a few odd hairs that want to go for a unibrow, and to try and level them out a bit, so I don't always look like I'm going to say "Fascinating!"

One of the more recent pictures of my brows.

Behold, my brows in all their glory. One of them is headed north. It always does that. And it drove me nuts for years. And then it happened.

My sister does genealogy. And she happened to come across a really good picture of my maternal great-grandmother.

Sadly, I did not inherit her hair.

The first time I saw this picture I thought- Hey! Those are my eyebrows! And they are. Actually, I pretty much look just like her, I think, barring a few stylistic differences. And her brows don't look weird. They give her serious face a quirk of amusement, a hint of strength. This picture was taken sometime in the 1920's and you can see she's cropped her hair. I love knowing that Gramma had a bit of the rebel in her. And you know, after I saw this, I stopped perceiving my wayward brow as an insult to my face. I never met Pauline Navarre, but now I feel, every time I look in mirror, that she's looking back at me, and that one odd eyebrow isn't a defect, but her way of saying hello to me across the generations, a special gift from a woman who only saw me once, on the day of my birth.

*Many of my friends would consider this to be a perfect description of my actual personality, but still...