The eyes have it

My God-given eyebrows and I parted ways more than ten years ago, sometime during my freshman year of college, to be more precise. I didn't realize there was such thing as a 'sculpted brow' until the age of 18, and those were the years when big round framed glasses were in, and I have a small face so pretty much all you could see of my face were the glasses anyway. But in case you were wondering, my God-given eyebrows are thick, unruly, curly, and rather mannish.

Anyway, off I went to college and my roommate had such pretty eyebrows and it was such an awakening. Every morning, she'd stand in her little cubby and pick at her eyebrows, and unlike mine, her eyebrows never misbehaved. And in a sad, sad case of trying to imitate her lovely arched brows, I think I plucked most of mine out. Thank God for the big round glasses!

The following summer, my aunt declared the glasses to be object non grata, and persuaded me to switch to contact lenses. My mother, on the other hand, concerned about her eyebrow-less daughter, found someone who could 'fix' what was left of the eyebrows and hence became what is now an addiction to lovely, perfect eyebrows, especially now that I can no longer hide behind big round glasses. I started off getting my eyebrows waxed, but for the last three years or so, I've been getting them threaded.

Threading is... well, exactly what it sounds like. The stylist takes an ordinary spool of thread, loops it around her fingers and through her mouth, and at some point, lassos each individual eyebrow hair and pulls it out by the root (there's an interesting bobbing head action involved as well, but my eyes are closed for much of the process). The thread itself is taut, so it's a similar sensation to feeling something with an edge scrape across your skin. In addition, at some point, the stylist asks you to pull your own skin tight; the tighter you pull it, the less it hurts (and when I talk about hurting, we're not talking massive amounts of pain; something similar to plucking, but for longer durations of time -- say 5 to 10 minutes an eyebrow. The more hair, the more the pain).

The positives of threading is that you end up with lovely eyebrows that are very nicely shaped and very rarely does skin crack or get pulled off or loosened. With wax, the pain is over quick, but it can pull at your skin and leave it feeling raw.

Visual aids of eyebrow threading, courtesy of Google, over here.