What My Unibrow Taught Me About Self-Acceptance
In this op-ed Salomée Levy writes about her struggle with facial hair and how she came to embrace it.
Nowadays everyone envies my thick curly hair, and my thick bushy eyebrows, whose shape and texture are coveted by everyone, thanks to the Kardashians normalizing thick eyebrows. Some people see thick, dark hair as a blessing because you get the full eyebrow look without having to use fillers. It’s a part of the Hollywood glamour look that Cara Delevingne and Zendaya wear as they strut on the red carpet. But since the first grade, my thick, dark brows have felt like a curse to me; the first time I remember being teased for my unibrow was in my elementary school, when my classmates said they looked “dirty,” not clean and thin.
When I was growing up, my father would remind me that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and my mother was my primary example of what beauty looked like: being kind and having the best smelling perfume. She had thick eyebrows and strutted wherever she went with confidence; I wanted to be like her. But at school it was a different story. I was embarrassed by my thick eyebrows, which no other girl had in my first-grade class. Once I sat down with a group of classmates eating lunch, talking about what celebrities we looked like, and they told me that no female celebrity really looked like me. I went home and flipped through my mom’s fashion magazines and realized all the beautiful models had thin eyebrows. So, I guessed, the people in my class were right.
When I was six, I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed there was dark, irksome hair in the middle of my eyebrows. Immediately, I felt like I wasn’t pretty enough. A few girls in my class told me that I had a unibrow, and that unibrows weren’t feminine or pretty. Every day that I sat at the lunch table, more of my classmates said the same thing: “They look dirty in the middle. Go to the mall and fix it up.” I despised how I did not look like the other girls, with extremely thin eyebrows and straight blonde hair. I covered up my hair with foundation I found in my bathroom, and cut the hair with scissors in hopes that they would go away forever,
By the fourth grade I had heard about eyebrow threading, and I dragged my mother to the mall to get it done. I did not know the painful consequences ahead of me. I imagined my eyebrows would be thinner so I could finally fit in with the other girls in my class. But as the thread glided across my skin for the first time, I screamed so loud that the entire store heard me. My eyes closed, filled with tears. I tried counting to one hundred and solving math problems in my head, but all I felt was a burning pain. I kept asking, “Is it over yet? Are you almost done?” Then when I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror, I saw my new brows. I felt beautiful. I did not look like “the ugly troll” anymore; instead I felt normal, like I could finally fit in.
When I walked in to school on Monday morning, everyone was so surprised. My classmates treated me somewhat differently; they no longer taunted me or said I looked like a boy. But a few weeks later my eyebrows started growing back. They were no longer a thin masterpiece, soon back to their full thickness, with some hairs growing in the middle again. I dreaded getting them threaded again. I cried, thinking I had the unfortunate superpower of growing more hair than I was supposed to.
Thankfully, I discovered my own unibrow icon: Frida Kahlo. I discovered her work when I was a freshman in high school, visiting an art gallery in Los Angeles. Looking at her work closely, I was not only intrigued by her unibrow, I was truly amazed by her and her art. Frida Kahlo wore thick, beautiful, dark eyebrows without a care, in response to women overplucking and overarching their brows at the time, and empowering other women who had facial hair. She even darkened them using an eyebrow pencil.
When I was 14, she was a reminder that I could accept myself and my eyebrows as I entered high school. In one of her diary entries, released by Porter Magazine, she said that she “used to feel like the strangest person in the world.” I felt the same way. She overcame society’s expectations about what a woman is supposed to look like. What’s the point of looking like everyone else to fit in, when I was born in this world to be Salomée and not the person sitting next to me?
During my sophomore year, as I walked into the bathroom before my second-period chemistry class, a group of senior girls told me how they aspired to have brows like mine and asked what brow filler I used. “They are natural,” I said with a shy smile and walked away.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
