THEY say that your eyebrows are the window to your soul.
That may be why I, and women like myself, have fussed over our brow hairs for decades.
From waxing, plucking, microblading, and even shaving it all off at one point (a cardinal sin, trust me, I know), my brows have gone through it all.
And yet, with all the effort and money spent, I still can’t bear to look at my former brows without cringing.
A similar phenomenon is trending on TikTok, where creators, mostly in their 20s and 30s, share selfies before cutting to a past version of themselves with different eyebrows.
“Eyebrow blindness” has taken the platform by storm, with women rising out of the ranks to admit that they, too, are ashamed, or at the least embarrassed by their former brows.
Brow trends have see-sawed over the decades, often from one extreme to the other, from stick-skinny to bushy to seemingly Sharpie-d on.
“Normal” people are not the only ones susceptible to the trend — celebrities are, too.
Actresses like Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel Green on Friends, have flip-flopped from stick-skinny brows to more filled-in and bushier styles.
Others, like Olivia Wilde and Demi Lovato, have come clean with their over-plucking regrets.
“I do not tweeze my eyebrows. I’ve been letting them grow out for years. I try to fill them in wherever nature has abandoned me,” Wilde said to T Magazine.
I would even argue that many have catapulted the rise of certain beauty trends, including the popularity of “blocky” brows during the universal popularity of pomade and the reign of Kylie Cosmetics in the ’00s.
Needless to say, you can’t understate the importance of a good pair of brows, which makes looking at former photos of myself all the more difficult.
All I can think of while gazing at high school-era Nancy’s thick and dark brows is: People must’ve thought I was one angry teenager.
In retrospect, I should have been angrier.
I am of the opinion that someone’s faux pas is a problem that should be corrected by their community.
If I were to see someone’s fly undone or a friend step out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck on their shoe, I’d want to be the person to spare them any further embarrassment.
For reasons (that I can now begrudgingly understand), my friends at the time failed to inform me of my eyebrow blindness.
Real friends would’ve told me the truth about my Sharpie brows, which looked nearly identical to Red J. Bird’s brows, the protagonist of the popular Angry Birds game at the time.
Real friends would’ve done everything possible to prevent a so-called-pal from going out into the world looking like that.
In retrospect, while I still feel a shudder course through my body when I think about those times, I realize there’s nobody really to blame.
As much as we hate to admit it, we’ve all fallen for trends in an attempt to conform to the insatiable beauty standard.
My friends probably couldn’t care less about what my brows looked like then — they were all probably much too hyper-fixated on their own.
Nowadays, I’ve more or less tuned out the noise of what other people, brands, and trends think my brows should look like.
Instead, I’ve grown accustomed to letting my brows grow out to their natural shape, spare plucking a few strays here and there and waning off the heavy pomades — and it’s probably all for the best.
