Wedding Blog

I have a confession to make. In high school, I used to over-tweeze my eyebrows. See, here’s the proof:

I’m not sure how this got started, but I have a feeling that one day I must’ve looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Man, I’ve totally got a uni-brow. I must do something about it!’ And then instead of getting a second opinion, I probably grabbed my mom’s tweezers and plucked out about a thousand little eyebrow hairs. I guess I liked how it looked because I continued to do this to myself until my sophomore year of college. I only stopped because two good friends of mine decided they needed to stage an intervention with me regarding my tweezing habits. That’s right—an eyebrow intervention. They told me that the way my brows were shaped I looked like I was in a constant state of surprise. How could I have not noticed for that long?

Since that time, about six years ago, I’ve been doing anything I can think of to get my eyebrows to grow back in the middle. At first, I thought just letting them grow out would do the trick. They started to fill in, but the brows were noticeably lighter and thinner in the middle sections. After a couple of years, I realized that this was as much as was going to grow back in naturally. Occasionally I would fill them in with a pencil, but it always looked unnatural to me.

A couple of summers ago, when I was working in Chicago, I let a makeup artist working at C.O. Bigelow do my makeup for me. She suggested that I try Rogaine for Men to make my eyebrows grow. I was afraid of weird hormonal stuff, so I bought Rogaine for Women instead and diligently applied it twice a day with a Q-tip for several months. I never noticed any changes.

Several months later I was goofing around on the internet and I noticed an ad for Bosley. I found out that they actually do eyebrow hair transplants! It seemed a bit extreme, but I was intrigued. This was pretty recently after the Dude and I got engaged, so I was thinking that my eyebrows had to be perfect by our wedding day. I got a price quote online, which seemed outrageous, but I still wanted more information. I set up a free consultation with a Bosley rep here in Austin to see if I was a transplant “candidate”. I went to the Bosley office in a high rise downtown and was taken into an office where the rep asked me some questions. I kept getting the impression throughout this entire process that no one was paying attention to the fact that I wanted an eyebrow graft and not a traditional hair transplant to the top of my head. The guy took a picture of my eyebrows and said he would send it to one of their doctors in Dallas to see if I was a candidate. A few days later I got a message on my voicemail saying I was not a candidate. They usually only do eyebrow transplants on people who are missing a lot more hair than me, apparently.

Recently, I’ve started to not mind my eyebrows as much. I thought briefly about getting a permanent makeup tattoo to fill in the gaps, but since I never like how my eyebrows look filled in with a pencil, I doubt if I’d like them tattooed on. Getting bangs actually helped me feel better about my eyebrows because they take the focus away from the brows.

What crazy things have you done in the name of beauty? For anyone who has over-plucked in the past, how did you get your eyebrows back to normal?