There are very few aspects of my appearance that I haven’t messed around with through the years. Blame vanity, insecurity, boredom or some toxic combination of all three. I’ve been bleaching my hair since I was 14; when I worked at a fashion magazine, I once had an obscure quinoa protein treatment sponged onto my scalp to make said hair softer and shinier (it worked, in case you’re wondering). I’ve over fake-tanned to the extent that it has probably seeped into my bloodstream. I’ve even faffed around fruitlessly with a gua sha, under the delusion that it might give me some semblance of a jawline. But there is one beauty rule I have never, ever broken: don’t mess with your natural eyebrows.
I can’t quite remember exactly when I learned this beauty adage – it’s not like my mum ever sat me down to pass on eyebrow-related warnings, and I probably wouldn’t have listened even if she did. There is, however, a reasonably high likelihood that I saw this precept in a teenage magazine and took it to heart thereafter (much like everything else I read in the likes of Mizz and Bliss – for me, these publications were like tablets bearing biblical scripture, but with posters of Gareth Gates as an added bonus). This would have been the early Noughties, so the beauty advice I devoured would probably have been put together by a woman who’d plucked their own brows into obscurity during the previous decade, and then lived to regret it.
