I was a kid in the 90s and 00s with thick eyebrows. Even my mum made fun of my “caterpillar eyebrows”. When I was 12, I began augmenting them with tweezers. I scraped what little pocket money I had to go to a hair salon to have them “professionally shaped”. If I could have afforded drastic and painful permanent hair removal I would have.
I was not told that plucking can and WILL cause permanent damage to the hair follicles. It wouldn’t have mattered, since I could not imagine a world where my classmates would not make fun of me for having “man brows”. To not have to endure sexual comments and innuendo about pubic hair from male teenagers and grown men.
If only I had met my great-aunts sooner, proud of their eyebrows that “survived the 70s”. If only someone told me “this is just a trend, just wait and they will be back on fashion”.
Fast forward to the 2010’s, and now I’m expected to spend thousands of dollars to fix thin eyebrows in the form of eyebrow pencils, pens and pomades, “microblading” ie mutilation with razors and ink, and “Hair follicle growth serums” that are snake oil ,or prescription strength ointments which carry the risk of side effects.
But I’m not buying into it. I know better. I’m not “born in the wrong era”. The beauty industry purposely cycles through trends to generate new profits, be it a style of shoe heals… or our inherited physical traits. It is not in their interests to celebrate diversity, it’s to promote fleeting ideals as “must have”, and the more maintenance and demand for products that is required, the better it is for them. We are expected to capitulate what little economic independence we have to these predators.
The latest one I’m seeing is augmented lips. Is it coincidence that lip injections are no longer stigmatized as “trout pouts” and botox botches? Now we have *safe*, *healthy*, *natural* hyaluronic acid “treatments” at hundreds of dollars a bi-yearly pop to have puffy, pillowy pouts that would have been called out as fake a decade or two ago.
Can we please address this before loads of women have deflated, damaged post-treatment lips that require expensive maintenance or corrective therapy just to look normal again?
gummygunk
dededos
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
titsay
