My eyebrows are disappearing.  When I was young I had very heavy eyebrows.  Around 13, I developed a unibrow.  It was then that my mother decided she needed to pluck my eyebrows.  That Sunday she showed up with tweezers and announced that it was time.  I laid down across her lap…face up and proceeded to be groomed.  When I went back to school on Monday I looked like I had seen a rat.  My eyebrows were arched like Bozo the clown.  Kids at school knew that something was different, but thank God they didn’t figure out what.  I kind of had to maintain that look for awhile (it’s effing hard to grow out eyebrows once they have been…minimized), but around the time of Brooke Shields appearance I decided to grow them out.

For 20 years I maintained my full brow look.  I loved it.  Minimal plucking and maximum impact.  Then I noticed that in the center of the right brow was a patch of gray hair.  It looked kind of like I had a bald spot.  I started using an eyebrow pencil to fill in the gap.  Then I noticed the gray was showing up at different locations.  I filled in more and more over the years.  I finally reached a point where I felt like I was close to becoming one of those women who just draw eyebrows on.  Then recently I noticed I was developing a drag queen look.  I have decided to forgo the pencil for the time.

One of the problem with the pencil was the limited color choices.  I am somewhere between light brown and dark blond.  There is nothing between light brown and dark blond.  Dark blond makes me look worse than the bald spots, and light brown is too dark.  I look like what my daughter calls a “Chola”.  I bought an eyebrow kit from Sephora that had several colors that could be mixed to achieve the correct color.  It also had something that looked like clear mascara that was supposed to set your color once it was placed on the finished brow.  I found a color that look similar to my natural color…until I stepped out in different light.  Then they looked like a funky burgundy new McDonald’s sign.  Well, no problem…I was just going to take a tissue and wipe the color off.  But, I had used the finishing crap.  Those eyebrows were glued in place.  It was going to take an act of Congress to bust through those walls.  This gunk was harder than a teenage boy at a cheerleader camp.  It took baby oil and tears to finally remove this stuff.

So now, my eyebrows are disappearing.  I won’t draw them in and I certainly won’t set them in cement.  I have decided to go au naturel.  I have noticed, with time, that hair shifts.  The hair on my head is thinning (though I’m nowhere near bald).  The hair on my legs and arms is lightening (thank God), but the hair on my face is thickening…just not on my eyebrows.  It’s like my eyebrows have fallen to just beneath my nose.  My cheeks have also developed, what I refer to as, peach fuzz.  I have quit using my Let’s Sandpaper The Hair Off Your Body because it creates stubble.  That’s a shame too since otherwise it worked well.  So now I look like a Caucasian Whoopi Goldberg with Dennis Weaver’s mustache.  I will wax, but I will not pencil.

There are things I enjoy about aging.  One is the mind loss.  Thanks to it I think there are things I enjoy about aging.  There are other things that just don’t make sense.  The loss of my eyebrows is one.  I have read this little quote somewhere that said, “Of all the things I’ve lost…I miss my mind the most.”  Well, I miss my eyebrows.  Boppy says I’m eyebrow obsessed.  Partly because I trimmed the caterpillars crawling across his face recently.  I told him that I am not obsessed, just observant.  It’s like that observation that when you lose one sense the others become sharper.  When I lost my eyebrows I became more aware of other people’s. 

Well, I’m through whining to you about my brows.  I know there is nothing you can do, dear ones.  I will have to deal with the slowly thinning brows until the day I die.  I don’t believe this is something science will be working on anytime soon.  I don’t think anyone has invented an eyebrow weave, but if they have…sign me up.  Until then I’m just going to keep cutting the mustache and using the eyebrow setting crap to glue it back onto my eyebrows.  I can’t lift them to show expressions, but on the bright side…I won’t be needing Botox anytime soon!