Eyebrows over the decades

I was at my hairdresser the other day for my final haircut and waxing with her. We were chatting as she was working on my eyebrows. When I got home and looked at her handiwork it seemed she she may have been distracted with our talk of her coming retirement. My eyebrows had a brushcut!!!! Some hairs had been completely waxed and plucked away. The thin line of grey that was left seemed to be a throwback to the 30’s.

This got me to thinking about eyebrows and how the shape and colour of them has changed over the decades.

Yikes…My eyebrows seemed to have disappeared!!! Adele is in the background wondering how she can help with the recovery process.

A history of eyebrows.

I remember when my son was in grade seven. One day he came home and announced that his teacher’s eyebrows had disappeared. I didn’t think a twelve-year-old would notice eyebrows, but he’d always been observant. I headed to the bathroom and inspected my face. What the heck happened to it? Up close my eyebrows looked… different. Not vanished but wilder, greyer. And when did those wrinkles in my face appear? There was no doubt. I was getting older.

As we get older, eyebrows have a sneaky way of staging their own little vanishing act. Some hairs thin, other hairs whiten, thicken and stick out, overall colour fade. When a group of older women friends gather, eyebrows inevitably gets discussed: Pencil or powder? What dye will last more than a few days? Microblading? Tattooing?

I am aging and my face shows it. As Mary Stewart wrote in her book The Last Enchantment…“Age is nothing but the sum of life”. And what a life my eyebrows are mirroring back at me.