I inherited bushy eyebrows from my father. I somehow managed to make it through all of high school and part of college before realizing I could do something about my eyebrows.

There are many things wrong with this photo. First? The hair. Second? The cheerleading uniform. (Gold is not flattering on ANYONE. And, yes, I was a cheerleader.) Third? You can tell even from this horribly fuzzy photo I stole from Facebook that my eyebrows led me into rooms.

When I was around seven, my older cousin made me play the Big Bad Wolf in a series of family dramatic productions. Little Red Riding Hood? I was the Big Bad Wolf. The Three Little Pigs? Yep. Wolf. She even inserted a Big Bad Wolf into stories not featuring one, such as Hansel & Gretel. When I protested I'd like to play a sweet, adorable little girl, she told me I was destined to be typecast with those eyebrows.

It's a cruel world.

Once I discovered tweezers, I overplucked my eyebrows for quite some time. This unfortunate event coincided with me gaining weight after recovering from anorexia, which lent me the look of a round-faced eighty-three-year-old woman. I also apparently thought eyebrows were supposed to be the same thickness at each end, like a Cabbage Patch Kid's. Even Barbie had better brows than me.

The last few years have been slightly better, however I do have a tendency to get impatient and overpluck the edges. The problem? Even though I'm tweezing these days, and not to excess (I hope), the brow hairs themselves are still striving for Teen Wolf. I trim them with a button-sewing-kit pair of scissors every few days, but I could probably braid my eyebrows at this point if I left them to their own devices.

According to the Internet, my brows are supposed to be dying down with age. (I have lost the link that told me that. Sorry. But the Internet said it, so it must be true.) Many women spend lots of money to make their eyebrows grow. And yet I find myself wielding scissors every few days to avoid my God-given eyebrows.

 

Not my dad. But looks eerily like him twenty years ago.