The Highbrow Eyebrow

After having my eyelids burned by the people in the nail salons, I decided never to let them near my eyes with hot wax ever again.

Instead, I now go to the Benefit Brow Bar. I'm not sure if they have one everywhere they sell Benefit Cosmetics, but they have one at the Ulta store where I have my hair cut these days.

They charge a bit more than the nail salon, but it's worth a little extra money not to have your eyelids burned.

Let me tell you, those gals at Benefit are well-trained. They have sticks they use to measure from the edge of your nose to the edge of your eyebrow. Then they measure from the edge of your nose to determine where your eyebrow is supposed to start. There's another measurement for the arch. Very much like this drawing. (Courtesy of Cosmopolitan.)

When they are all done measuring, they have essentially drawn in where your eyebrows are "supposed" to be. One day, after drawing them in, the young lady announced to me that she would only be waxing "outside" the lines. I almost laughed. That just wasn't going to do. There wasn't anything to wax outside those lines. I pointed that out and she told me that those lines were where my eyebrows were "supposed" to be.

"It doesn't matter where they are supposed to be, we should work with what we have."

I really don't want to draw them on, no matter how popular that seems at the moment. (Had a gal at a cosmetics counter in Macy's decide that my lips were too thin once and so she drew them on where she thought they should be. Sorry, you're not fooling anyone and I couldn't wait to get into the lady's room to wash it off.)

In fact, drawing them on and filling them in where they are "supposed" to be has become quite popular. I see cashiers, waitresses, and all sorts of people drawing on eyebrows. There was even a guy working at one of the campgrounds where we stayed who had drawn on eyebrows. Add a red nose and he'd have been a very menacing clown - which was a shame because he seemed like a genuinely nice guy and not scary at all.

That aside, I don't know how my eyebrows got "thin". Maybe I over-tweezed as a teenager. Very thin eyebrows were popular then. Maybe they thinned out as I got older. Who knows? All I can tell you is that I don't have those really thick eyebrows that are quite the rage these days. I may have had them as a kid, although I doubt it. But I don't have them now and it's not likely I ever will. And I don't think they'll ever be any thicker than this. And that's okay.