By Jennie

I have an uneasy relationship with my eyebrows. Maybe it’s just a case of wanting what you can’t have; the short person wishes she were tall, while the tall person laments how difficult her lot is. Those with curly hair envy those with straight hair, and vice versa. Me, I want heavy eyebrows. My niece, who has dark brown brows that head towards unibrow-dom if left unchecked, complains that hers are too heavy. But I have always thought that if you have heavy brows, at least you can shape them nicely.

I have blond eyebrows of no notable thickness or natural shape. They are just sort of there. I’ve been shaping them myself for a long time with tweezers, but I don’t feel that I’m particularly good at it and I didn’t really like the results. They look slightly thinner and better groomed but just as unremarkable as always.

A couple of months ago I decided to stop and let them grow out, so to speak. I only plucked random stray outlying hairs. The plan was to let my eyebrows get as wild and woolly as they were going to get, and then get them waxed. I’ve only gotten my eyebrows waxed once before; the results weren’t impressive enough for me to continue. But I was determined to take my eyebrow destiny in hand.

A few months ago, I read about eyebrow threading, an ancient Middle Eastern technique for removing hair. I’d heard that it was becoming more popular in the U.S., and that it was often less expensive than waxing. According to Wikipedia:

“Practitioners use a pure, thin, twisted cotton thread which is rolled over untidy hairlines, moustaches and so on, plucking the hair at the follicle level. Unlike tweezing where a single hair is pulled out each time, threading can remove an entire row of hair, resulting in a straighter line.

As it happened, last weekend I walked by a kiosk at my local mall and saw that they did eyebrow threading there. This weekend I took myself down to the kiosk. The cost was $15, which I don’t really consider cheaper than waxing, but I suspect there are cheaper places to get it done. It’s a very quick procedure. I sat down in the chair, tilted my head back and the technician went to work on the upper arch of my right eyebrow. It didn’t really hurt – it felt like a tiny series of pinpricks but they weren’t severe enough to be termed pain. For the lower edge of the brow, she had me place a finger on one hand over my eyelid and my other hand on my forehead, pulling the skin taut a bit. The skin there is more sensitive and it did sting a bit, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. Afterwards, she swabbed my brows with witch hazel and sent me on my way. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes; my brows were slightly numb but not red or irritated (as brows often seem to be after waxing).

How do they look? Well, they are still blond and don’t have any dramatic shape to them. But they are quite neat and tidy, and, I like to think, a bit more elegant than before. All in all, this was a success and I’d recommend the technique to others.

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