Sometimes when I look at old pictures of my unibrow, I wonder if karma bit my mom in the ass. See, like a lot of babies, I was super duper bald for a long time. My mom aggressively put bows and pink things on me so people would stop peering at my little bald self in the stroller and telling everyone what a handsome little boy I was. (To be fair, I was, and remain, QUITE HANDSOME.) When I finally did get hair, I got it in spades. I let it grow to Rapunzel lengths. I was super proud of it and reveled in swishing it all over the place like a 3-foot-tall awkward unicorn.
What I failed to notice, however, is that the hair on my head was far from the only hair growing—I soon had a unibrow that would make even Cara Delevingne flinch. To add to the awkwardness, the brows (the brow?) quickly grew in a dark, dark brown that made literally no sense on a blonde human. I dubbed them Tarzan eyebrows back when I thought that was funny. Obviously, that sense of humor about my luscious brow situation changed when puberty hit and I convinced myself that my un-groomed face hair was the only thing holding me back from finding ~true love~ in high school. I subsequently waged a full-on war with them. (High school was some rough sauce for us all.)
Thankfully, we’ve come full circle now, my brows and me, and accepted each other just the way we are. But that doesn't mean growing up and coming to terms with them was always easy. If you also grew up with an extra special furry face friend, then you'll relate to these struggles far too well:
The awkwardness of learning what "unibrow" means
I don't think any human is ever born with an aversion to their unibrow, but alas, #society. At some point, usually between third and fifth grade, someone in your social circle will point them out and explain it to you. It's like a demon seed planted for the rest of your life. You will never look at your own face the same way.
You definitely tried to pick it off when you first noticed it
Specifically using the fingernails of your thumb and pointer finger to try and pull off the peach fuzz. We didn't know how hair worked back then, bless our naive hairy hearts.
People thought it was part of your Halloween costume
A thing I almost never talk about, but I will just for you, internet: When I was 8 years old, I trick-or-treated as the little boy version of Gohan from Dragon Ball Z, and a fifth grader I didn't know touched my unibrow because she thought it was fake. (Friend-making strategy on fleek.) I've heard similar Halloween and non-Halloween tales of the same horrible gist, so I know I'm not alone.
Grown-ups always said that "you look just like Brooke Shields!"
Before Cara existed, Brooke Shields was everyone's go-to brow-spiration icon. Let's be clear: I never did, and never will, look like Brooke Shields. I just had MASSIVE eyebrows and that was the first thing that exploded out of people's mouths to stop them from going, "Holy sh*t, kid, don't get too close to the campfire with those".
Any time you walked into a salon, someone looked at you and said, "Eyebrows?"
Nope. Just waiting for my mom to get her hair done. (You smug monster.)
Only your fellow unibrowed friends understood your struggle (but you could never talk to them about it)
You can't just be like, "HEYYY, you also have a lot of hair on your face? ME TOO!" in sixth grade, because telling someone they have a unibrow is like telling someone Santa isn't real. They might not have noticed if you never told them the truth, and here you are, the bearer of furry news. It wouldn't be right.
Your mom made you wait forever to get them waxed the first time
To be fair, waxing is expensive, and there is no legal parental obligation to take your minor to a salon on a monthly basis so you whine about middle school maybe 1% less often than usual. But you can't hear logic of the sheer mass of your own eyebrows, so you begged and begged and begged until someone finally caved, and the dam was broken forever.
Your first waxing is burned into your brain forever
If I close my eyes, I am there, in that weird lounge seat, with my junior high BFF hovering over me. (She saw me get mine done and promptly looked up at the salon lady and was like, "JK, I changed my mind." Smart girl.)
And you had to try really hard not to cry when it happened
The first time your brows get waxed, your eyes just leak tears against your will, and then the salon employees cluck over you like you've just had a Maury-style breakdown and everything is awkward and painful and bad.
Oh, and everybody knew you'd gotten them waxed the next day
Not because they looked especially fine. Because there was a massive red splotch under each of your brows framing the massive red target in the center of them. HELLO, WORLD, GUESS WHAT I DID YESTERDAY??! *hides in locker room forever*
You realized the hard way just how fast they grow back
I think we all had this fairy tale idea that after the first waxing, our problems would go away forever like ~magic~. Our eyebrows had other ideas in mind, and those ideas involved rallying and sprouting a new mass that put the old one to shame.
Literally no torture was worse than tweezing the first time
I felt like such a grown-up for, like, the first two seconds. Then I just wanted to use those tweezers to stab every hairy ancestor in my family tree who procreated and made me into this veritable eyebrowed monster.
And at one point, you probably over-tweezed by, like, a mile
Moms exist for two reasons: to unconditionally love you, and to warn you to never, ever, EVER over-tweeze your brows. Unfortunately, in adolescence, we take both of those things for granted far too often.
And finally, the realization that you're gonna have to deal with this for the rest of your damn life
Game on, brows. You may have won the battle, but you will NEVER WIN THE WAR.
Thankfully, though, I think most of us can say that eventually made peace with our unibrows. While most of us don't let them roam entirely free, we definitely let them roam more than we did in the militant tweezing of our high school years—and hey, we must have done something right, because strong brows made a comeback in a major way. Be proud, fellow unibrow-havers. We are changing the world one brow at a time.
Images: Giphy(11)
