A woman responded to critics who said she shouldn’t be waxing her three-year-old daughter’s “monobrow”.
Leah Garcia, 31, saw backlash after she posted a video to TikTok of her waxing her young daughter’s eyebrows.
“Idc [I don’t care]! Idc! I’d rather y’all call me a bad mum before I let my three year old walk around with a unibrow like my parents did,” overlaid text on the video read.
Garcia captioned the video, which has been viewed 28.6 million times and received 38,000 comments, with: “My fellow Mexicans, y’all understand!”
Some were quick to criticise Garcia, with one person writing: “As soon as a parent points out a flaw it will stick with them forever. Even if they are thankful, they’ll remember not being perfect for mum.”
Others praised the decision, commenting that their monobrow was their “biggest insecurity” and that Garcia’s daughter would “thank her later on”.
Responding to the criticism, Garcia said that her daughter Bliss had “asked her to do it” after Garcia waxed the eyebrows of her older daughter, Behautti, 11.
“When I was 10, I took my monobrow into my own hands because I was severely bullied over it from the age of five,” Garcia explained.
“I remember adults pointing it out and I will never forget in year four when a boy asked: ‘Why are your eyebrows so big?’”
Garcia added that she shaved her monobrow, but this left a “very large gap”. “My parents had no choice but to take me to the beauty salon to get it sorted.”
“I’m simply preventing Bliss from being the target of bullies until she’s old enough to stand up for who she is,” Garcia, a realtor from Texas, US, continued.
“I have all the best intentions for doing this - it is ridiculous to think it would be for my own personal vanity. Our job [as parents] is to stop them experiencing pain.”
Garcia added that she started waxing her elder daughter’s eyebrows when she was a toddler, but that Behautti asked her mum to stop when she was eight so she did. The following year Behautti asked for her eyebrows to be waxed again.
“I would never do something they didn’t want me to do - it’s not enforced,” Garcia explained, adding that she only waxes the centre of the eyebrows and not below or above.
“Very few people in this world want to grow out their monobrow,” Garcia continued.
“People have sent me photos of an international model with a unibrow, but the world is a very different place for supermodels.
“I’m waxing a quarter inch of hair and it’s a simple way of protecting her.”
Additional reporting by SWNS
