I’ve spent a lot of time in online parenting spaces (message boards, Reddit, Facebook) over my 13 years of parenting, and I now know which topics have proven to be endless sources of discussion. Screen time, picky eaters, flu shots, sure, but there’s one niche theme that always recurs and hits me wherever I live: “I feel guilty even writing this,” it often begins. “But my daughter has a unibrow. It’s more obvious now that she’s older. I’m wondering if I should tweeze it out or take her to get waxed? I’m worried that if I don’t do anything, she’ll get bullied. You What will happen?
The answers are always well-intentioned, carefully worded, and varied. Interestingly, the most popular method seems to be to suggest that the mom (it’s always the mom) talk to her daughter (almost always the daughter) about her overall appearance and hair removal options. There’s waxing, tweezing, bleaching, and even microplaning (which is just another way of saying shaving).
I appreciate how concerned these people are about this issue. But as a former unibrow kid, I implore you: Please don’t be the one to bring up your daughter’s unibrow.
You might hear “pre-unibrow kid” and think I looked really cute as a kid: a bit Frida Kahlo. No. A baby with one eyebrow? It’s more like that.
I’m sure if you’re over a certain age, you remember very well that in the ’90s, having very thick, very dark eyebrows wasn’t the killer thing it is today. At that time, the name of the game was “Pencil Thin”. If you could travel through time and want to surprise a girl in 1995, you shouldn’t show her your iPhone or tell her about 9/11. Just say, “In the future, girls will really trim their eyebrows to make them look bigger and thicker.” Like her tweezed eyebrows, she never recovered.
My own unibrow has been around since at least my early childhood. While I’m sure it didn’t escape my mother’s attention, no one else mentioned it until middle school.
My unibrow is not a source of constant torment for me. But it’s never fun to pick out your perceived shortcomings to your peers, so after the first few mentions, I did what any red-blooded American girl would do: I scratched He took a razor and cut it straight through my middle without any pretense.
Of course, it’s worse.
So when I asked my mom if I could have my eyebrows waxed at the salon, she said yes, no doubt looking at my eyebrow stubble. I realize that my views may be contrary to my own. Why, when we as parents have the power to protect our children from emotional pain, do we allow them to plunge into it?
Because if you’re a girl with a unibrow, the truth is, at some point, someone is going to let you know it and make you feel embarrassed and ashamed. I can’t imagine how bad that experience would have been if that person had been my mom. Of course, after I had my eyebrows done, she sent me to the salon to have them waxed—but cruciallyshe was not the one to start the conversation. When I have to deal with things, she’s there for me. Because no matter how loving and well-intentioned you are, when you initiate the topic, ultimately what you’re telling your child is: “There’s something weird about your face, and if you want to change it, I support you.”
This message that you send kindly and lovingly is no better than hearing it rudely from a bully: because at the end of the day, it’s the same message, and it’s the message we expect from bullies. Don’t teach her that she should expect this from her mother.
