Aug 10, 2017 4 min read

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know that faces are all about eyebrows now. I’ve lived through all the iterations of facial grooming, including the following: thin, frosty lips in the ’70s; bright eyeshadow in the ’80s (accented by crunchy, poufy bangs); I don’t remember the ’90s because I had young kids and didn’t wear make-up or even look at my face very much; the chubby, pouty lips of the ’00s; and now the strong eyebrows of 2017.

Go into a Sephora and you’ll see proof of this latest trend everywhere. The women who work there are decidedly eyebrow-forward – the better to inspire shoppers to peruse the aisles of eyebrow products. And I mean aisles of them. There are pencils, crayons, brushes, stencil patterns, fake fibers and, most interesting, eyebrow wax that in the hands of the opposite sex would be used to tame a mustache.

I was in the store to find some eyebrow guidance. Somehow, I reached the age of 50-something having neglected my brows all my life, including while anchoring TV news, having professional photos done, and on my wedding day. Maybe it’s because I’ve always worn bangs to disguise my lofty forehead, and the bangs covered my brows.

More likely, I’ve ignored my brows because I came of age in the ’70s, when thin brows were considered stylish; to allow them to grow full was as serious a grooming boo-boo as not shaving one’s legs. And, so, I plucked.

“Never pluck above the arch,” went the advice in my “Cover Girl” and “Seventeen” magazines. What they didn’t tell us was that, unlike the hair on legs or on other parts of our bodies, eyebrows will resist growing back. It’s part of the sad hair redistribution of middle age, when brow hair migrates to the south, and resettles on the upper lip and chin.

Teenagers know not to neglect their brows. Have you seen 17-year-olds? Each one is more beautiful than the next, their youthful softness enhanced by eyebrows that in their natural state are full and perfectly shaped, and when penciled in are bold and stunning. My daughter applies her makeup like a “Vogue” photo-shoot pro.

“You need eyebrows,” she told me one day recently. I was headed to an evening event, and had spent more than the usual three minutes on my face. Looking in the mirror, I saw what she meant. Where her brows are a pair of thick underscores, mine are barely hyphens. Actually, they’re something between hyphens and apostrophes.

This called for some enhancement. Not having a proper eyebrow pencil in my shade, I went for the closest thing, a brush and some brown shadow. Although I worked carefully, I ended up looking like I’d applied eyeshadow to my lids without using a mirror.

I went through a year without any eyebrows at all. In 2009, chemotherapy killed every follicle on my body, leaving me as smooth as a plastic baby doll. I avoided mirrors that whole year, but I did notice that, even more than baldness of the head, the thing that made me look like a cancer patient was baldness around the eyes.

I didn’t draw on eyebrows then, but maybe it’s time to do it now. At Sephora, I walked up to an eyebrow-forward worker, pulled up my bangs and asked for help.

I left the store with $50 worth of products. If the wax doesn’t work on my brows, I can always use it on my mustache.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.