As an 11-year-old girl, you never really think the decisions you make will still be affecting your life almost 10 years later. However, if I string together a sentence containing the words “first love”, “hairy face”, “razor blade” and “eyebrows”, then you may begin to understand the trauma of my teens.
How was I supposed to know? How could I possibly know that eyebrows would soon become one of the most glorified features on a young woman’s face? So yes, from the age of 11 until about 17 and a half, my nose and the exceedingly large space between my eyebrows represented the exact shape of a Venus Breeze Five Blade.
At the age of 18, I would say I fully began the recovery process and set myself on my own eyebrow rehab containing a lot of smothering Vaseline, which, by the way, does not work! The road to recovery may have had something to do with the fact that I felt my womanhood being ripped from my very soul when I found my current boyfriend in Superdrug, getting his eyebrows threaded. It also could have been that my eyebrows being compared to two pieces of chewed black liquorice was a step too far. For my own sanity, I tend to believe the latter.
It hasn’t been a particularly easy journey; the urge to pluck is something that I think every girl has gone through at least once in her life. The most embarrassing part of this whole process was the fact that because of the razor incident my eyebrows would begin to grow back in the form of black stubble. As you can imagine, this definitely was not my most flattering asset.
As time has passed I am happy to announce that I have been clean for at least six months now, only plucking when absolutely necessary. I have also begun to fill in my eyebrows creating a shape that relatively suits my face shape. I haven’t gone for the top of the range £40 eyebrow kit from Bobbi Brown (neither me nor my eyebrows felt worthy of such a luxury). MUA have produced a very cheerful £3.99 alternative, so me and my new Cara Delevingne brows are very content. I may not have sold myself as an eyebrow guru, but if you have suffered like I have I hope you know that there is always a way out. Never reach for a razor blade again, because if you do… you’re pretty much screwed.
